Dispatches: The March for Science
In the late-sixties, when I was ten, my family moved to Burbank, a suburb of Los Angeles with a population at the time between 90,000 and 100,000. While running around the new neighborhood like any normal kid, I often found myself out of breath, my lungs hurting after just a few minutes activity. As a budding scientist, I looked around, saw nothing but flat land and gray air around me, and concluded Burbank must be at the top of a mountain where the atmosphere was thin.
When the winds picked up some days later, I was stunned by what I saw. Burbank is actually at the bottom of the San Fernando Valley, ringed by foothills that would be called mountains anywhere else. The winds blew away the smog that had hidden them for weeks, and for the first time I saw folds of Earth rising high against the sky. That was my introduction to the air pollution that made Los Angeles notorious.
The first Earth Day was April 22, 1970, 47 years ago. My junior high school showed movies of bulldozers piling garbage, smoke stacks belching soot and tar balls floating on an ocean black with oil. The narrator in his flat Midwestern accent explained how the environment couldn’t absorb all the pollutants we spewed into the earth, air and water.
Barely into our teens, my fellow students and I became energized. Ecology was a new movement and it was everywhere in the news. You could see smog choking the air. The Cuyahoga River had caught fire just the year before and dead fish littered the shores of Lake Erie. I don’t recall great political disputes about pollution at the time, because who could deny something was wrong?
Now I am at a different place as a father living in the Boston area. I am again imagining the damage from pollution, but with a perspective very different from that first Earth Day. My older daughter, now about the same age as I was then, had just drawn a poster thanking plankton for producing oxygen and supporting the food chain. Last week at dinner she confessed friends tease her because I ask her to bring home the plastic sandwich bags from lunch. As I envision melting ice caps and mass extinctions, despair hits me because the President is a man who, by action and history, opposes the preservation of our environment.
To curtail the study of climate change, Trump seeks to cut funding for NOAA weather satellites, which would hobble the ability to forecast tornadoes and hurricanes, and endanger lives in the process. This action, however, is only one of many assaults by an administration that discounts evidence and scientific reasoning.
Earth Day 2017: I was on Boston Common with thousands of protesters for The March for Science. Rain had fallen earlier but had stopped by noon, leaving damp, gray skies and muddy grounds. Even so, spirits were high, for Boston is a hub of science and technology. The Massachusetts of Institute of Technology sits across the river in Cambridge and many companies in the area are involved in pharmaceuticals, biotech, electronics, computers and robotics.
At the March for Science I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in many years. We both studied at MIT, and are both engineers and writers. He from Vermont, I from California. As students, my friend and I worked diligently in our labs where success meant understanding the behavior of electrons and materials. Our subjects, inanimate objects, obeyed laws of nature, not laws of king or country.
One protester walked by us with a sign that read “Climate change will happen whether we believe it or not.” Shaking our heads, we wondered about the devolution of the world. Do facts and equations not lie? How is anyone so blind as to ignore evidence of global warming? Or were we blind to believe power would not exploit ignorance?
Eventually my friend and I parted with the unspoken agreement to stay in touch, for resistance continues in small ways as well as large, by showing our children how to shut off lights to save energy (and the polar bears) as well as shouting in protest. The list of what’s at stake is overwhelming but today I find the will to persist as I remember, driving past MIT the morning of Earth Day, seeing a line of students bearing signs and slogans, walking with determination to save the world.
