Fun with GIS 344: Earth Day 2024
On the first Earth Day in 1970, I was a high school junior. I remember the day, plus images and ideas of the era:
from NASA Apollo 17, Dec.7,1972the first good photo of a small blue planet in space;
- fossil fuels, speed limits, and "drive 55;"
- major cities choking with air too thick to breathe;
- a river on fire;
- planes spraying DDT over our local pond;
- Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring;"
- the word "ecology" entering daily use, along with talk of ecosystems, rain forests, and systems in general;
- "carrying capacity," and some unpleasant discussions about "lifeboats;"
- Alvin Toffler's book "Future Shock;"
- the phrase "spaceship Earth," and the analogy of species as rivets holding our ship together.
My world in 1970 was shifting … from permanence, stasis, and my obsession about fish and fishing, toward change, evolution, time, cycles, systems of systems, patterns, relationships … toward geography. I spent the summer of 1975 on the Juneau Icefield, studying climate change. That autumn, the chart of greenhouse gases plus the accumulation of patterns and relationships drove me to become a geography teacher.
In one of my college papers, I borrowed this excerpt from the Francis Thompson's poem "The Mistress of Vision":
All things by immortal power,
Near or far,
Hiddenly,
To each other link-ed are,
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star…
Today, people of all ages can build key knowledge with basic GIS tools. On this Earth Day #55, I hope we as a species will explore these patterns and relationships, study the trajectories, and act with knowledge. Our remarkable planet is a complex system of systems, and we need to care for all things, near or far.