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It's Earth Day. I've nodded to Earth Day before in this blog, but most ways you slice it it's a weird holiday. Not really a holiday at all, actually. I was reading this breakdown of the American environmental movement, which also includes a brief history of Earth Day. The explanation there serves to demonstrate that Earth Day really isn't a holiday at all--it was initiated as a teach-in.

I don't have much to teach here. If you read the article, my views probably align with Aaron Sachs's, and, as Nicholas Lemann, the article's author, writes: "Sachs’s ruminative, associative style...isn’t well suited to forcing a main argument out into the open." I think Lemann might mean that Sachs isn't well suited to presenting a policy solution to our environmental problems. Here's something that shouldn't surprise you: neither am I. If I peel back my mixed feelings, the only thing I'll say with any certainty is that I think if you can convince people the environment is worth something, is important for itself, conservation, environmentalism, or whatever it is will come more easily.

For the past few days I've been in the mountains on a ski trip with a group from the university. It was nice to slip away from the things I should be doing (coughthesiscough), though on the bus ride back to the city they all came rushing back. And yet--today, the shadow of my pack is still on my shoulders (I'm sore, I'm saying that I'm sore), my computer in my lap, I still know that the woods and the mountains are there.

It's difficult to balance, though, because I come back to civilization and immediately flip open my laptop. I go to the grocery store and buy chocolate and orange juice (and some other stuff, because that's not a balanced diet). I don't stay in the woods or the mountains. The little backcountry huts that pepper Norway's mountains are cushier than what you'll find in much of the world's backcountry, but they still aren't wired for electricity, for internet, for amenities that have become expected. And we have the privilege to return to these things, and are comfortable in the knowledge that we're roughing it, but this isn't permanent. Would I be as comfortable with the mountains, as pleased to know them, if I was trying to carve my life from them, if I wasn't going to catch a bus back to town at the end of the weekend?

I don't know. I don't know if I want to plumb those depths--the ones about the environmental movement and class, about how we use the land, about the myths of wilderness--right now. I'm not sure I can end this cleanly or easily, myself, so I'll leave you with a quote from Aaron Sachs by way of Nicholas Lemann and be done with it:

My hope, for all future generations, is that they will have (in addition to sunshine, fresh air, clean water, and fertile soil) a somewhat slower pace of life, with plenty of time to pause, in quiet places... haunted places—everyday, accessible places, open to the public—places that are not too radically transformed over time—places susceptible of cultivation, where people can express their caring, and nature can respond—places with tough, gnarled roots and tangled stalks, with digging mammals and noisy birds—places of common remembrance and hopeful guidance—places of unexpected encounters—places that breed solidarity across difference—places where children can walk in the footsteps of those who have gone before—places that are perpetually up for adoption—places that have been humanized but not conquered or commodified—places that foster a kind of connectedness both mournful and celebratory.