Earth Day 1970

White tents and booths with information on compost piles and solar panels have sprung up in Boulder’s Civic Park for Earthfest on this partly sunny spring day. I remember the very first Earth Day, in 1970. I was a member (I might actually have been president, I can’t recall for sure) of the Edgewood High School Ecology Club. One of our main projects was to build a large brightly painted wooden box with a hinged lid which we placed just outside the entrance to the grocery store in Ellettsville, Indiana. Here, ecology-minded citizens could deposit their newspapers and cardboard for recycling (back then, this was pretty much the full range of our ability to recycle materials, at least in Ellettsville). Periodically when the box was overflowing and the grocery store manager’s annoyance had reached its peak, we would borrow a truck, load all the newspapers into the back, and drive to the west side of Bloomington where there was a place we could unload the papers for recycling.

Today in Boulder we have three separate containers right outside our house, one for paper, cardboard, glass and plastic, one for compost material (vegetables, egg shells, coffee grounds) and one for the irredeemably unrecyclable remaining crap, which we try through good buying habits to keep to a minimum. The contents of each of these are conveniently hauled off on a regular basis as part of our trash service. We have a little white ceramic compost collector by the sink lined with a pale green compostable bag and I always feel a tiny sense of accomplishment when I carry one of these full bags of vegetable discard out to the larger compost container. We are lightweights, however, as there are other people right in our neighborhood with their own compost piles and large vegetable gardens on which they spread the compost they generate. Even so, we continue to make small strides to better honor Mother Earth and hope that the larger initiatives for renewable energy will take hold.

Another thing my Ecology Club did back in 1970 was create and perform a short save-the-earth skit at various schools in the area, and at the end of the skit as the finale we paraded into the audience singing a song, me leading the way with my trusty guitar. Our teacher and sponsor was Mrs. Wilt, a tiny bespectacled woman with long black hair whose quietly radical teaching style somehow slipped under the radar of our rabidly conservative school administration back then. She selected and helped us learn a song for our traveling ecology road show; peculiarly enough in retrospect, the song was “Suicide is Painless,” the theme from Mash:

Through early morning fog I see
Visions of the things to be
The things that are withheld for me
I realize and I can see
That suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I could take or leave it if I please…

So, “WTF?” you might well ask, children (because only my children could possibly still be reading this, and I can’t be certain of that). I think the song was meant in this context to evoke the same concept as the image of the unaware frog in the bath being slowly brought to a boil. And thus ends another strange tale of long ago and far away in Ellettsville, Indiana, US of A.

Boulder has a special relationship with prairie dogs. One has only to peruse headlines from the Boulder Camera in recent months or do a search on prairie dogs at its website to get a clear sense of the place they hold in the hearts of the citizenry. Headlines like: “Prairie Dogs Tapping Toxins,” “Tests Show No Sign of Plague in Valmont Butte Prairie Dogs” and “Public Input on Prairie Dog Endangered Status Commenced,” not to mention “Activists Alarmed by Bulldozing of Prairie Dog Burrows.”

The Camera seems to be quite open to first-page placement for prairie dog stories and I have even seen two stories at once on the front page during particularly dire times. Even Boulder’s close neighbor Louisville gets into the act with a letter to the editor: "Louisville Should Act to Protect Prairie Dogs."

I have nothing against prairie dogs. I have walked on paths by their burrows, listening to their alert warning calls to each other. The sound has been likened to barking, which is why an animal that is clearly a rodent has the word “dog” in its name. I think it sounds more like a whiny little squeak.

When a field has become their habitat, it is riddled with these burrows, which alas make the field unusable by any other species and can produce a mean sprained ankle if one is not careful. Debates have been had on whether the prairie dog is really endangered in Colorado (conclusions varying depending on facts like whether the tail is black or white), and the place that the prairie dog should hold, relatively speaking, in the ecosystem. He’s a dear little creature as you can see here, and tasty for the raptors. We have many brilliant scientists in Boulder who surely can find ways for city parks and prairie dogs to coexist without cramping each other’s style.

In any case, I captured this picture of a prairie dog today on a walk in Valmont City Park, location of Colony #9. Against his better judgment, he let me come pretty close before ducking into his burrow, but sounded his alarm a couple of times to his compatriots nonetheless. I don’t blame him since at one point the city was thinking about killing him and his friends –clearly this plan was revisited.