Happy Earth Day! I will not pen too long a post about Earth Day 2021. Other things will occupy my time on this 52nd Earth Day - such as promoting our upcoming 'adaptation academy' - see below.
I do remember the first Earth Day in 1970. I was 21, about to graduate with a BS in Geology from the College of William and Mary, get married, and head to the wild west - Tucson, Arizona, and the University of Arizona where I would study a new field - hydrology. It was a great excuse for many (but not moi) to skip classes but I actually helped do something useful: build a dam.
Build a dam? On Earth Day? Did we not get the message down there in the Colonial Capital of the Old Dominion?
Runoff (I knew some hydrologic terms even then) from a construction site was dumping (I knew enviro-lingo even then - 'dumping', not 'transporting' or 'depositing') sediment into our beloved Lake Matoaka, hallowed site of many ancient and sacred rituals (annual 3.2 beer can regatta, etc.). Thomas Jefferson, he who founded The University but attended W&M, reputedly lost his virginity there every week or so. These epochal events were celebrated nightly by many reverent, tradition-conscious undergraduates and wayward faculty.
W&M didn't have an engineering program, so dam construction was left to geologists (not a bad idea - think Oroville Dam spillway). What, we were going to ask the physics majors? We'd still be arguing about strength of materials, charge density, and moments of inertia.
So build we did.My sed-strat classmates (I had none who would admit to being geomorphologists) protested our plans because they wanted to witness an event that normally took millennia to complete: formation of a delta. But led by paleontologist Dr. Gerry Johnson, we won the day, constructed the dam (a replica of which is shown here), and saved our beloved waterway from premature infilling.
There was much celebrating that evening at the lake. And much contamination the next day - something I trust Earth Day 1971 addressed.
And that's the truth (at least the part about building the dam).
Since 1970 I learned that the date for Earth Day was set for 22 April because it is about midway between spring break and the end of the term in American universities. It was envisioned as a holiday on which students could partake in environmental activities.
How's this for an interesting Earth Day factoid? Richard M. Nixon (R) - during whose presidency the EPA, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act were all created - died on this day in 1994. Who would have imagined that?
Here is our 'adaptation academy' flyer: Download CASTT Adaptation Academy flyer v2
We at OSU are collaborating with IHE-Delft,AIT, UNFCCC, AGWA and the Korean Adaptation Center for Climate Change.
“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world." -- John Muir
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