From Silent Spring to a Green Spring?

A mere fifty years have passed since Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”.

As Al Gore says in his article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-gore/earth-day_b_1443266.html

it “ … came as a cry in the wilderness”.

Among the first signs of Rachel Carson’s landing must surely be the legendary song by Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock”.

See: http://www.greenit.org.za/woodstock.html

In the lines below, the song “Woodstock” manifests some of the early blossoms of the Rachel Carson seeds for a Green Spring rather than a Silent one:

“ I have come here to lose the smog
  And I feel just like a cog in something turning”.

Emerging during the Vietnam era, the song reaches out for a Greener Earth … but not just environmentally.

Its reach is Green in its totality:

“ By the time I got to Woodstock
  We were half a million strong
  Everywhere there were songs and celebration
  And I dreamed I saw the bombers
  Riding shotgun in the sky
  Turning into butterflies
  Above our nation”

Never before had such a large peaceful mass assembly of humans ever taken place – and even if it was officially declared a disaster area three days after, the grass has no doubt since recovered on Yasgur's farm and grown over the mud.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodstock

Earth Day then appeared on April 22, 1970. Not as a direct result of Woodstock but inspired by the grass roots mobilisation of young people:

http://earthday.envirolink.org/history.html

The events of Woodstock. August 15-18, 1969 must surely have given impetus to Gaylord Nelson's activism for an Earth Day eight months later.

(Coincidentally, Earth Day precedes Mother's Day by three weeks - there is synergistic symbolism in this).

Joni Mitchell’s poem (it is a poem inasmuch as it is a song) sees Green holistically.

Sustainability is a Total Game, involving a myriad of dimensions, a universe of inter-connected entities, from macro to micro to sub-Plankian.

The metaphorical flap of a butterfly’s wing can indeed tip the sustainability equations into an Apocalypse scenario.

Yes, it could be climate change, but it could also be one human right abuse too far, a war crime or crime against humanity too far … 

Today it is technically possible for Madmen to explode a nuclear device and blow up an entire metropolis for some misguided cause or other.

It could be via a sophisticated missile delivery system … or even via a ‘dirty’ nuclear bomb device.

The effects in many ways would not be too dissimilar to the meteor that wiped the dinosaurs off the face of the earth.

Humanity is on a knife-edge, our Green Spring nervously edging forward between the abysses on either side of a Nuclear Winter!

Perhaps by the 50th anniversary of Earth Day or Woodstock, Sanity will have prevailed and we will be free of the worst of these Madmen.

(PS other useful symbolic coincidences:

Arbor Day is celebrated in the USA in April as well, just after Earth Day

May Day of course is on 1st May - in essence a universal plea for freedom from exploitation.

).