Earth on Mother’s Day

Astronaut Edgar Mitchell of Apollo 14 waxed poetic:

Suddenly, from behind the rim of the moon, in long, slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth…home.

The earthrise photo became the central mythological symbol of promise and hope surrounding my early adulthood. Apollo 8 took the picture and shared it with a world at the time enmeshed in the Vietnam War, but the Earth (photo enhanced by Apollo II) becoming my mother widened my lines of allegiances!

On this Mother’s Day (across the International dateline), I am a few decades late in recognizing the damage we have inflicted on Mama Gaia. Feeling sorry for the neglect will not restore her health, regardless of how resilient we consider her to be, but realizing that our humanity is tied to a breathing organism treated heretofore as “lifeless,” it matters; it makes us realize that we can decide to fend for our survival as humans in the context of an organism kept alive and healthy.

We are children of evolution. My head has gotten bigger as we focus existence more on the complexity of the cerebrum and its cortex more than we do on the cerebellum and the medulla oblongata; on thoughts more than feelings and senses, on cognition with words, pictures and numbers more than impulse and intuition with gestures and explosions, nor do we even pay heed to what we experience in sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. Ours has been a culture that perennially asks: How does that make you feel?

Big Bird on Sesame Street went before the Bird Supreme Court to test a bird law on “losers’ weepers, finders’ keepers” when in his absence his abode was taken over and claimed by another bird. The court, adhering to the cold letter of the law, decided on the letter of the law but was asked by Big Bird how they “felt” if they were in his shoes, shifting the discourse from cognition to intuition.

I brook no ill against reason and logic as operational principles until they become masters of societal behavior rather than servants to decision-making processes. For example, many deny the reality of climate change, even in high government offices.

I traveled in the last five years across plains, rivers, landscapes and mountains, of Inner Mongolia and Dong Bei, Sichuan and Chiang Jiang, Canada’s Banff, CA’s Bay Area and Chicago’s windy city, Honolulu’s skyline and Manila’s smog, and the lagoon shores of Saipan, and I know of the erratic nature of weather being the rule more than the exception. Friends in the U.S. northeast to Texas’ Southwest attest that Mother Gaia is showing symptoms of a midlife crisis.

The awareness of climate change is really not the issue but the impingement of the reality on our behavior and our active acknowledgment of it. As simple as discarding plastic wrappers that take 10,000 years to decompose alerts us to our propensity worldwide to throw away as if someone is assigned to pick up after our droppings and make it evaporate. I picked up a discarded milk carton at the flagpole of the American Memorial Park the other day.

In China, someone is assigned to tidy up every square foot of public space. On the way to the airport one snowy early morning this March, a lady swept her assigned 100 meters on an elevated highway in the winter cold with the white stuff still on the ground.

We are a throwaway society. My mother did the reverse. She recycled. The only problem was that her neighbors thought she was the designated recycler of their discards. So her room in Honolulu was always full of “junk.”

Saving Planet Earth is a favored shibboleth. The earthrise photo is a favored image; saving it is an outlook accompanying prints in various languages. Whether we are doing something to keep it healthy and clean is another matter. That is more than just keeping the country club lawn mowed, and the golf course putting greens trimmed. Beautify CNMI goes beyond just picking up people’s trash along the lagoon shores.

Systemic degradation of the planet abounds in private and public practice for the sake of the quick green buck. World investments just hit gold in Pinoy mines! Mercury in the riverbeds will increase. Effluents feed the algae in our lagoon. The indigene community is sidestepped in the burial grounds’ sanctity at the proposed casino site currently under construction in Garapan.

We’ve harped on the short-term preoccupation of Keystone XL pipes for Alberta tar sands. We frack shale, burn coal, dam waters upsetting ecological balance, and desperate souls of a slowly dying fossil fuel trade funds lobbies, written up in the press where the media practices journalism.

A Korean tourist on Saipan wore a T-shirt: “it’s the only one we’re got; love it”. I hasten to add: the Mother and her children!