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Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Earth Day 2020


Earth Day in times of emergency….. If not for the pandemic and the quarantine currently in force we might be out in the country somewhere celebrating the arrival of spring. Well…. perhaps if not for the rains. 

Instead of an Easter season trip this year what comes is a series of memories of walking a patch of land that alternates areas of flowering clover with balding places giving over to dandelions, chickweeds and some other wilds I can’t even guess the name of.

Then notes I made from a trip we took to Viladrau jog my memory back to flowers seen—dandelions (again) in seed and flowering; nipplewort, violets, something like coltsfoot. Some tiny white flowers. 

And then that beautiful scrubland with Spanish broom and what I think is gorse. Of the trees in Viladrau—holm oak, cork oak, innumerable firs, pines, birch, hazel. Animals? Not so many, aside from different birds like magpies, sparrows, blackbirds there were the insects—3 bee types, ants, spider…

As people have been saying (including Greta Thunberg and earth systems scientist Johann Rockström in today’s The Guardian), after this emergency we are/will be in a changed world owing to such things as global warming, the related loss of Earth’s polar ice caps, the destruction of the Amazon and other rainforests.

This crisis is surmountable but it will take work and patience and far better decision making to learn from our past errors. Below, two links I believe to be of interest.


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