On Progression of the Species: Some Earth Day Notes

• DateApril 24, 2014
• AuthorMary Heather
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It’s the Saturday before Earth Day in downtown Bend, and it looks like I’ve missed the Procession of the Species parade.  The butterfly-winged woman and the horse-headed man have long since left, but the ladybug girl remains.  She holds onto her mother’s hand.  The wind blows her hair into her painted face and spins the wind chimes and dream catchers hanging from the Earth Fair vendor tents.  Young families plant seedlings in the learning garden next to the parking lot.  Older children practice gymnastics in sunny patches of the grassy field, while their parents stroll the fair to learn about treading lightly on this earth. 

I linger on the edge with my camera around my neck.  I had intended to take pictures of the parade, but instead I lean against the chain-link fence around Troy Field —where the fair is held— noticing the line of dead grass around the entire fenced perimeter.  It appears they must have sprayed.

Later, I will learn that Troy Field is named after Troy Laundry, a former dry-cleaning facility that used to sit adjacent to the field, where the city’s parking lot now resides, next to the learning garden beds.  Later, I will learn that the business burned to the ground after 60 years of operation, and that when the city purchased the land nearly 20 years ago, they discovered perchloroethylene in the soils beneath the site.  I will read about how they had to excavate and remove 41,000 pounds of contaminated soils, and I will resurrect my technical training and wonder if what they did was really enough.  I’ll wonder what happened to the ground water, or if they even bothered to look.

But I won’t know about that until later.  Now I just watch, with a feeling of unease, the bright green grass fluttering against the blanched color of straw.

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Original artwork by Irene Hardwicke Olivieri, image courtesy of The Nature of Words

On Earth Day, I attend a presentation by artist Irene Hardwicke Olivieri about turning emotions into art.  Her work reminds me of Frida Kahlo’s paintings: vibrant and twinged with pain, but gentler in its form.  The characters in Irene’s paintings are deeply rooted and intertwined with all manner of plants and animals — sometimes even painted as animal-human hybrids, and always rising up from the burden of emotional despair.

She flips through the slides, telling us the stories that inspired each painting.  Family secrets, animal cruelty, environmental harm.  The stories are interconnected.  And yet, her work is steadfast in its transcendence above the suffering.  In seeking a natural and spiritual oasis.  I think her message is this:  Save Nature — Nature Saves.  Or maybe the other way around.

I understand this, as someone who retreats to the trails whenever the demons start to show.  And I understand the healing power of natural immersion.  There is nothing quite as grounding as locking eyes with a bird of prey, or mixing tracks with a herd of elk.  There is solace in the company of animals.

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When I was a kid, Earth Day was a day when you paused to remember the plight of the spotted owl, a day when you expressed your hope that the wilderness you’d taken for granted would still be there after you passed on.  Earth Day was like a prayer that the animal pacing the cage at the zoo or slumped in the corner on the other side of the glass wasn’t the only animal left of its kind — a prayer that the artist’s rendering of their habitat wasn’t all that remained.

But that was just my childhood view, uninformed in the permeable membranes between earth and plant and animal and human and animal and plant and earth.  I am reminded of this now, looking at my research about chemicals in water and soil, chemicals in us.  I am thinking about Irene’s painting of a woman in the belly of a cat, lapping water from the edge of a lake.  We are the animals, too.  And every year that passes, it seems that Earth Day becomes more about saving us.

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Procession:  The act of moving along or forward; progression.  This procession should yield progression.  Consider: Wouldn’t it be nice if we celebrated Earth Day with the Progression of the Species from the field of our past mistakes?

Photo Credit:  Original photography by Carol Sternkopf Photography

About Mary Heather

I am an East-coaster and a West-coaster. I am an academic and a creative spirit. I am an environmental scientist who always wanted to write, and a writer with a nagging nostalgia for the complexities of environmental science. Above all, I am a mother — so whether I’m writing about the natural world, family, or place, I like to consider my work as environmental advocacy in the broadest sense.