Earth Day, Communes, & the Fear of Failure
NOB
HILL--Whatever the calendar says, Earth Day in Nob Hill means one
thing: the big street fair on Silver Ave. just behind La Montanita
Co-op. This year the "real" Earth Day was a week late. The
party occurred the week before. And if you missed it, be assured
all the regulars were there, Fig Man, bedding plant growers, various
dancers and bands, bicycle groups, advocates for humanitarian causes,
batik tee-shirt vendors. etc.
But the buzz was all about
bees. Hey, I always thought there were two kinds of bees:
honey bees and bumble bees. It turns out my thinking was a little
bit off the mark. There are actually about 20,000 different
species of bees. And from listening to the people at the bee
table, I got the impression that there are maybe 100 varieties of bees
right here in ABQ, some of them no bigger than flies.
Stumps
Now I have been worried about the health of bees for several years, even counting the bees hanging out
on my fruit trees. I'm pretty sure I had not recognized some of
the smaller varieties as bees at all. This is to say nothing about
the other pollinators such as moths. I guess I feel a little bit
better knowing all our bees aren't coming out of one hive.
They
were giving away bee hatching stumps. These slices of logs have
lots of different size holes in them where different size bees can lay
their eggs. I was told to lay the log on its side with the holes
facing east. It should get some afternoon shade and be about half a
foot off the ground. Well I can do that, I thought. I'm not
sure I understand the whole stump story, but I can follow directions.
Job Killers
I
think a lot of people are sort of leery of being part of anything
called "Earth Day." For one thing, any project involving saving
the earth seems just a little too big for the average person. For
another, you might get called names...like tree-hugger or hippie.
And people throw out phrases with derision such as "save-the-minnow"
just to make you feel stupid. Gas, oil, and coal companies want to
make you feel like a "job killer" and are spending lots of money on TV
ads to make sure you know you will be laughed at, or worse.
Even
the Governor of the State of New Mexico thinks you are misinformed or
stupid...as she tried to undo pollution restrictions for power plants
and pit rules for the oil & gas industry. Meanwhile, fool that
I am, I put my bee hatching stump in the back yard. I guess I'm
convinced that many people doing small things can make a big difference.
Vietnam
Earth
Day started in 1970, largely as a result of Senator Gaylord Nelson of
Wisconsin. But you really can't talk about that period without
mentioning the Vietnam War. It is a large part of everything in
the late 60's and early 70's. And it speaks to whether the goals
of Earth Day are ultimately just a little too big for any kind of
rational commitment. I say just look at the generation who were
under 30 years of age during the Vietnam War. They had a
goal: to stop a large land war in Asia involving half a million
troops and tens of thousands of deaths.
Before our involvement over there America didn't even know where Vietnam was. Most people still remembered
it as part of French Indo-China. During WWII it was occupied by
the Japanese. The French had tried to reclaim that part of their
empire after the war and the Vietnamese people resisted the
reoccupation. I was in grade school when the French forces at Dien Bien Phu
fell, ending the French attempt to take back southeast Asia. But
by the time of American involvement, a decade had passed. As a
nation we knew nothing about Vietnam.
Earth Day
"Teach-ins"
had to be instituted on college campuses across America. They
were usually lectures and Q&A done by university professors in
auditoriums. They lasted well into the night. Nobody knew
anything. Everything had to be explained: French
colonialism, nationalism, the nature of a jungle war, guerrilla warfare,
revolution, the "domino theory," the draft, the Buddhist monk
immolations, the corruption, the lies, wars of attrition, the
willingness of the enemy to die. Nobody knew...and most did not
want to know.
But teach-ins also gave birth to another idea: Earth Day! Here's Senator Gaylord Nelson's talking about the summer of 1969: "I
still hoped for some idea that would thrust the environment into the
political mainstream. Six years would pass before the idea that became
Earth Day occurred to me while on a conservation speaking tour out West
in the summer of 1969. At the time, anti-Vietnam War
demonstrations,
called "teach-ins," had spread to college campuses all across the
nation. Suddenly, the idea occurred to me - why not organize a huge
grassroots protest over what was happening to our environment?"
Environmental Crisis
And on November 30th of that year the New York Times ran the following: "Rising
concern about the environmental crisis is sweeping the nation's
campuses with an intensity that may be on its way to eclipsing student
discontent over the war in Vietnam...a national day of observance of
environmental problems...is being planned for next spring...when a
nationwide environmental 'teach-in'...coordinated from the office of
Senator Gaylord Nelson is planned...."
Peaceniks
The
war in Vietnam got passed from Kennedy to Johnson to Nixon. And
trying to stop it sounded like a Quixotic task. You can imagine
(or remember) what people thought. "It's hopeless. It's too
big. It can't be done. You will be an outcast if you speak
out." Families were torn apart. Kids left home.
President
Richard Nixon called a whole generation of college kids, "Punks."
The word "peacenik" was also used quite regularly. It followed a
path from the Soviet sputnik to beatnik to peacenik...highlighting the
"spaced-out" similarities of all three. In college back in
Illinois I myself was once assaulted with a tire iron and on another
occasion kicked down three flights of stairs. This was not
particularly unusual. The police were sometimes even worse.
Even my apartment building in Chicago was "raided" several times by the
police looking for anything they could find. And then there was
the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. I know some of what
happened. I was there.
Communes
It is
no wonder so many urban young people pulled up stakes and left for the
countryside. Sometimes they found a way to live together away from
it all. They formed communes. It must be remembered that
this didn't happen very often. For one thing, somebody had to have
a boatload of money to use for a land purchase. I never found
anybody like that, but I know they existed. Once started, communes
usually emphasized self-sufficiency
through farming. They built their own buildings. They
worked hard, made music, fell in love, raised children.
Eventually, over the course of several years, most people drifted away
and started new projects or jobs or families.
I heard a guy on TV
last week calling the idea of communes "naive" and that they were
failures because they had a limited life span. That would be like
calling going to college a failure because you left before you turned
50. You live, you learn, you grow, and you move on.
Block by Block
The
idea of starting a new society from scratch with basic beliefs
involving love, kindness, sharing, respect of the earth, sustainability,
creative expression, brotherhood, and sisterhood seems just too
enormous a task to be undertaken. Yet it was done over and over
again.
One of the results of this self-reliant mood among young
people was the spurt of owner-built homes, especially in New
Mexico. The Rio Grande valley is full of these houses, mostly
built in the 70's and mostly built of adobe. Talk about taking on a
big project! Where do you even start? But we did. My
wife and I built one. My brother-in-law and his wife built
one. Our friend Sal and his wife built one. Our next door
neighbor built one. They are all over the valley.
Fear of Failure
Deep
inside we fear this job of saving the earth is too big and we are so
small. The enemies are too powerful. We are just a few
peaceful people in a land seemingly full of armed idiots. But
sometimes small individual actions can make a difference: like
with the Vietnam War...like in starting a new way of living
together. But let me give you a bigger and better example.
Dunkirk
In
late May of 1940 Germany was about to wipe out the entire British
expeditionary force in France. The only hope the British had was
to evacuate their army of 340,000 troops by sea. But their
destroyers were too big to get close to the beaches and at the end of
the first day just 7000 soldiers had been ferried or waded out to where
the ships were and boarded up the gangplanks. The "Little Ships of Dunkirk" came to their rescue. Even while being attacked by
German airplanes, a flotilla of around 700 merchant marine boats,
fishing boats, pleasure craft, and lifeboats (the smallest of which was
15 feet!) crossed the English Channel with their civilian crews and
helped evacuate the 340,000 British troops. Little
people...peaceful people in small boats went up against the German war
machine and came away with the lives of over 300,000 men.
The Bees in my Backyard
So
far I have no tenants in my log condo. I'm not sure if I'm even
supposed to. I have to imagine that laying bee eggs in that stump
would be something of an "any port in a storm" situation. Still,
what harm does it do to put it out there--facing east, with shade in the
afternoon, six inches off the ground. I've done things that were a
lot more of a long shot than this. Sometimes it works out.
