July 15, 2025
About Bellingham: Earth Day
So how did it come to pass that less than two years after I lost my deferment and got drafted into the army because I was flunking out of college that I was going back into it again, but this time with a sense of purpose: I was off to be a founding student in Huxley College, planning to help save the world by doing my part in the environmental movement. For this was really the time when the movement started, and the first Earth Day occurred just a half year earlier. So part of the explanation is that maybe it was just the time of year, or maybe it's the time of man. but for the first time in a while I knew who I was and where I was going to.
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CJ and I were primed for this though, because we were also dedicated environmentalists, no doubt heavily influenced by our context, students at a major state university and living in the heart of one of the most progressive corners of the country: the U District, in Seattle. I had been an avid reader of environmental and biological nonfiction since probably high school. Some of the works that influenced my view of the world back then included:
- Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
- The Population Bomb, by Paul Erlich
- The Herring Gull's World, by Nico Tinbergen
- The Limits to Growth, a report commissioned by the Club of Rome
- A Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopoldo
- The Immense journey, by Loren Eiseley
- The Life of the Bee, by Maurice Maeterlink
And those are just the titles that quickly come to mind; because back in those days I always had a book with me (as did dad, another trait I learned from him), and most places I walked I had one eye tracking the sidewalk while the other held open the paperback book I read as I walked.
In any case, by the time Earth Day rolled around CJ and I were primed for it, to the extent that we were members of ZPG. It was one of the two reasons we elected to adopt rather than have a child of our own. We both firmly believed there were far too many of us crowding nature out of the planet already. And nothing I've heard, read or observed in the half century since then has changed my mind about that.
To complete the story though we have to go back to my childhood in West Virginia, learning the sights and sounds of the hardwood forests and my love for the natural world from my new step-dad. Because from as far back I can remember, the future I envisioned for myself was as a natural scientist. In fact the single figure that reminds me the most of my childhood is young Gerald Durrell, author of My Family and Other Animals, growing up on the Isle of Corfu. The wildlife in the Appalachians wasn't as exotic as Corfu offers, but it was plenty exotic to me.
I was lucky to have been raised in what was then such a rich environment, and even more than that I was lucky to have done so in an age when children were left free to explore it on their own. As I look back on it now, I spent many unsupervised hours just wandering around exploring things, classifying things, and collecting things.
I collected ants, and nearly always had an ant farm going - initially one of the commercially available ones with two parallel glass windows separated by a bed of soil that the ants could tunnel in. Later I replaced this with empty peanut butter jars, periodically inverting them to scramble the poor ants in the hope that they'd tunnel next to the glass where I could see them.
And I collected garter snakes, kept indoors in a lidded crate indoor, where they nearly always stayed contained.
And I collected insects, spending countless hours with a homemade butterfly net fashioned from a bent clothes hanger and gauze, sweeping butterflies and other insects up with it and pinning the poor things to a styrofoam or cardboard backing.
And I collected cicada husks (I was lucky enough to be there when one of the 7 or 13 year cycles came due and everywhere we looked there were either the hatched cicadas buzzing around and creating a racket, or the husks they emerged from. I collected these husks and created a dead cicada ranch, with husks tucked into the nitches of the brick foundation of our home.
And I collected leaves, and brought them home to seal with paraffin or wax paper and preserve in scrapbooks.
And I collected memories, vivid photographic images that feel as sharp and clear today as the moment they were snapped in place seventy years earlier: the day I opened our front door and saw a Luna moth spread out on the opposite side of our screen door; or the day we drove up to the northern panhandle to visit Uncle Bowen and Aunt Gladys and I saw my first blue-tailed skink exploring the cemetery next door.
So yes, the youth I remember feels not all that different from young Gerald's. And with all that, it felt like the most natural thing in the world, like I'd found my calling, when Earth Day and the environmental movement coincided with my release from the army. Of course I would enroll in Huxley College.
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Anyway, the reason for my comment wasn't to call you names. It was to tell you about what might have been the most amazing wildlife experience of my life. In 1998, I just happened to be camping and canoeing in Missouri during a rare convergence of the 17-year and 13-year cicadas. I can't describe how loud the screaming in the trees was, other than to say that, for three days, my friends and I had to shout at each other just to converse--especially in the late afternoons.
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