I could not have missed today's observance if I wanted to. The 40th Earth Day has been a media event for a month now. And now that it's finally arrived, the piece of news that has stuck with me was that the Earth Day organizers said the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere warranted immediate action. The problem is, they said it already back in the 1970s.
Then, instead of horror and indignation, a weird association took me by surprise: I thought about Battlestar Galactica. If the show had a chorus, as the ragtag heroes searched for the Earth, it must have been, “All this has happened before, and all this will happen again”. Fatalistic as it may sound, Earth Day feels the same way. Similar to Valentine's Day or Mother's Day, Earth Day is a holiday that arrived to Czechoslovakia, the country where I was born and that no longer exists, in 1990 together with capitalism. Though I care about what it (and all the other holidays) stands for, it never grew on me. Earth Day was something that came from the West dressed in a bright-colored sports coat and driving a fancy car. Ironically, a major source of dissent against the communist regime had been the underground environmental movement. What emerged as a concern for natural habitats destroyed by heavily subsidized heavy industries, ended up as the opposition to the regime itself. Earth was the starting point. Today, someone said to me, “Every day is Earth Day”. Portlanders can be like that. Everywhere is Earth, I thought: it isn't something out there, to be saved, it's all around us. Earth is us, we just don't realize it. All this has happened before, and all this will happen again. The fictional characters of Battlestar Galactica's colonial fleet eventually found the Earth they were looking for. We're stillsearching. ___________________About the author: Peter Korchnak is a Slovak man in Portland, Oregon, exploring the intersection of marketing and sustainability. He loves good reads, guerrilla yard work, trail running, mountains, and hockey.
