Spring Drinkquinox

Yesterday was Earth Day. I was not going out to pick up any trash on the Clark Fork or plant trees up in the Rattlesnake. I didn’t ride my bike to work, I didn’t go to a rally or craft fair and I damn sure didn’t send any money to a big national environmental group.

No, I spent the afternoon at Charlie’s.

The reason is because something more special than Earth Day happens in Charlie’s this time of year. The sun shines directly through the front door as it sets over the Bitteroots and bathes the entire room in an eerie heavenly light. This causes all the beer glasses on the bar to light up like railroad lanterns and when someone walks through the front door it looks like they are entering the place from another dimension. Meredith was tending bar and playing outlaw country music and the regulars were all in their appointed positions, only holding glowing glasses of a brightly shinning honey colored nectar. Surely if the gods or goddesses had designed the universe this was no mere accident. It was the long awaited spring Drinkquinox at Charlie’s and a Friday afternoon to boot so I left the office and went downstairs to the bar and ordered an IPA.

I was supposed to meet Lance Olsen for a beer and try to pick his brain on how to get Montanans to give a shit about all the evil fossil-fuel development going on in this state. Lance and I go back a number of years and I have always considered him a mentor. Lance has spent much of his life fighting for Grizzly Bears and protecting the Rocky Mountain Front from energy development in the bear’s critical habitat. Given the sacredness of the day, and the sheer joy of watching the college girls come in the front door we tried to keep the conversation up beat. But even on such a beautiful and holy day it was hard not to talk about extinction. And why not?  It is hard to look down the bar at the whiskered grizzled faces of the regulars and across the bar into the mirror and not get a terrible sinking feeling that our species is in big trouble.

I see very little hope down at the east end of the bar either.

It is times like these that I indulge my sense of evolutionary bio-paranoia. The certain fate of every species is either evolution or extinction. Human evolution appears to be unique in nature, we are supposed to be capable of reason, but our survival seems ever more doubtful these days. We all have a brain yet the people of this world behave in a most irrational manner. This insanity is the dark matter in our human universe. Criminal minds engaged in the destruction of the only planet that can support life.

Contrary to popular belief, though, we are not a threat to nature. We are merely a threat to ourselves, and most of the plants and animals alive today, and if we continue screwing up we will end one of the best parties in the history of time.

No one will miss us except the mosquitoes. Nature will not even suffer a scratch. Nature needs very little material to start life all over again, and if it wants to, it can start all over and leave out the brains.

I have often heard that we stopped evolving as a species perhaps thousands of years ago and we are now going through a process of devolution. New research seems to argue otherwise. Evolution cannot be shut down in any organism and besides it happens to be our one hope for survival. We will not be evolving larger brains or stronger bodies in the near future but the evolution of our species will be very profound nonetheless. To put it in postmodern terms, we have evolved the hardware for survival on Earth and now we need to develop the software. Human consciousness is moving forward at light speed, even as it veers in the wrong direction. Changing the direction of this evolution is more important than changing its velocity. Climate change will be the engine for this transformation, as it affects everyone on the planet and requires immediate urgent attention. If the human species cannot rise to this challenge we will likely experience a massive die off and that unhappy event will propel us forward in a new evolutionary direction. Or we could all go extinct. Have another beer!

It is hard to imagine that the word’s ecology and ecosystem were known only to a handful of scientists before the first Earth Day in 1970. And while Earth Day today has been stripped of all passion and meaning it was a truly momentous event in the evolution of world consciousness, much like the first photo of Earth from Space, and the ripples reached every corner of the world and are still being felt today.

But Earth Day has been co-opted. 

The large wealthy environmental organizations have been co-opted. 

The big national groups are becoming indistinguishable from the giant drug companies, taking our money and giving us worthless or dangerous pills to swallow, telling us it will all get better if we just keep buying their medicine. Rather than being a rallying cry for saving the planet from ecological destruction, Earth Day has become an opiate, a marketplace where hucksters pedal snake oil to the unsuspecting masses, where well-heeled consumers suffer through Earth Day traffic jams in hybrid cars to get frozen, organic TV dinners to serve in their solar heated Great Room.

But look beyond the obvious profaning of what should be a somber holiday and you will see some startling developments since 1970. Eighty-five percent of people in a recent poll now believe climate change is occurring and that the reasons are human caused. Few people in the world today truly believe that earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural phenomenon are caused by direct acts of god. Whether we know it or not, the human species has been forever changed by this knowledge. We look up in the sky and we know that there are black holes up there, because they have to be there, and we know the universe was born and is growing and will eventually die out. There does not have to be a god or goddess involved in this process, and religion, despite the rise in ethnic violence and extremism in many regions, is increasingly seen around the world as a personal choice and not a duty.

There is a lag between this new knowledge and behaving like a species that truly understands all of this. Old ways die hard, but they are dying. A void is opening in the human psyche just as all of this new knowledge rushes in to fill it. For a campaign organizer like myself who knows from experience how dire the circumstances are, this gives me hope. At this time we have to hope, even pray, for rapid change. But that change is upon us, and you can’t read a newspaper or watch television without having you mind blown everyday and all of this is having a cumulative affect even in the minds of the most fiendishly conservative religious fanatics. Even the Pope believes in evolution and the big bang theory, suggesting that if Jesus were alive today he would too, although I don’t think he would drive a Prius.

We are in the midst of a great extinction event that has been anticipated by scientists and activists since the first Earth Day. Only now everyone knows it. It has been said that the best bilge pump is a scared sailor. Old sailors like Lance have labored long below decks trying to heave buckets of water overboard even while it seeps through the hull, and even as the waves come crashing through the hatch. But I predict we will soon have more company down there in the bilge and that is just what is needed. Thirty years of conservation work has not diminished my optimism that we can affect a major shift in consciousness. We already have. Have another beer!

If Jesus was living in Missoula, and still a carpenter, I am sure he would enjoy having a beer in Charlie’s on a day like today. I am also quite sure he would be concerned about climate change and the extinction crisis. He would know how ridiculous it was to send money to Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Fund and expect anything to happen. He might even want to drive his beat-up Toyota to West Virginia and give those folks a hand fighting the coal companies.

And if he did Hillary would put his skinny ass to work.

Mike Roselle planted a tree for Earth Day.