Earth rise 1968

https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000010851813/in-1968-they-saw-earth-from-the-moon-for-the-first-time.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Happy chance

By happy chance, Earth Day coincides with the birthdays of four of America’s greatest nature writers: William Bartram, John Muir, John James Audubon, and Frederick Law Olmsted. Explore classics of the environmental imagination in the LOA series: http://loa.org/books/topics/20-nature-environmental-writing/

Earth Day, Kant’s bday

Today is Earth Day. It was first observed in 1970, but its roots go back to the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s landmark book exposing the effects of pesticides and other chemical pollution on the environment. Troubled by the lack of attention pollution was receiving on the national stage, Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson began going on speaking tours, trying to educate people and politicians about environmental issues, and while the public was concerned, the politicians didn’t pay much attention.

During the late 1960s, Senator Nelson had the idea to harness the energy and methods of the student protests against the Vietnam War to organize a grassroots conservation movement. At a press conference in 1969, he announced plans for a nationwide demonstration, to take place the following spring. It was a gamble that paid off, and the public’s response was enthusiastic. Gladwin Hill wrote in The New York Times, “Rising concern about the environmental crisis is sweeping the nation’s campuses with an intensity that may be on its way to eclipsing student discontent over the war in Vietnam.” Twenty million people nationwide participated in the first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, and the government finally took notice, forming the Environmental Protection Agency and passing the Clean Air, the Clean Water, and the Endangered Species Acts.

According to the Earth Day Network, Earth Day is celebrated by a billion people, making it the world’s largest secular holiday.

It’s the birthday of Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, born in Königsberg, Prussia in 1724. His father was a saddle maker. He studied theology, physics, mathematics, and philosophy at university, and worked for a time as a private tutor; he made very little money, but it gave him plenty of time for his own work. He lectured at the University of Königsberg for 15 years until he was eventually given a tenured position as professor of logic and metaphysics in 1770. Though he enjoyed hearing travel stories, he never ventured more than 50 miles from his hometown, believing that travel was not necessary to solve the problems of philosophy.

In his most influential work, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he argued against Empiricism, which held that the mind was a blank slate to be filled with observations of the physical world, and Rationalism, which held that it was possible to experience the world objectively without the interference of the mind; instead, he synthesized the two schools of thought, added that the conscious mind must process and organize our perceptions, and made a distinction between the natural world as we observe it and the natural world as it really is. He viewed morality as something that arises from human reason, and maintained that an action’s morality is determined not by the outcome of the action, but by the motive behind it. He is also famous for his single moral obligation, the “Categorical Imperative”: namely, that we should judge our actions by whether or not we would want everyone else to act the same way.

He wrote, “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe […] the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

…

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-wednesday-april-22-2026/

HENRY DAVID THOREAU TO AIR ON PBS MARCH 2026

HENRY DAVID THOREAU TO AIR ON PBS MARCH 2026

Source: About PBS - Main
https://share.google/1hsIbj4ladm6L9CHF

I Am An American Philosopher: Phil Oliver – Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-interview-series/i-am-an-american-philosopher-phil-oliver/

Censoring environmental history

Source: CBS News
https://share.google/OBCQA5ROrFojeo7Rd

How iNaturalist app users have fun while aiding science - CBS News

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-inaturalist-app-users-have-fun-while-aiding-science/

“choose a direction and keep on walking”

"…you do not have to picture the destination to reach it or at least draw closer to it, you just need to choose a direction and keep on walking—though that metaphor makes it sound as though it already exists, if at a distance, rather than that the process itself creates it and covers the distance between the idea and the actuality."

— The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Save the game

"I think the meaning of life is to keep the remarkable game of being human going forward. In the past this meant reproducing above all. But now it means, above all, preserving the board on which we play this game. And since we’re now setting that board on fire, it’s our job to put that fire out. In our time, that’s the most important task we can undertake, since all depends on it. The best thing about the human game is that it, potentially, can stretch far out into the future – but only if we act now."
Bill McKibben

"The Meaning of Life: Answers to Life's Biggest Questions from the World's Most Extraordinary People" by James Bailey: https://a.co/07B86YNb

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Read on the go for free – download Kindle for Android, iOS, PC, Mac and more
http://amzn.to/1r0LubW

Hell

"John Gray is an unreconstructed pessimist, particularly on environmental issues... He thinks that we are going to hell in a handcart and there is nothing that we can do about it."

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/mark-lynas-on-the-environment/

“strange in-between creatures”

"Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do), combined with our inability to see very far into the future, makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth, hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost."
— Arundhati Roy, Listening to Grasshoppers; Field Notes on Democracy, 2009

Place

"Going back to the same place as it changes through the seasons and physically linking myself to the land in some sort of way could be more rewarding and I could gain a deeper understanding of the place, and myself."
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/amy-liptrot-nature-writing/

Wild

"Healthy food. Something to be enthusiastic about. Fresh air. A sense of belonging and aliveness. Good water. Purpose. Intimacy. A vital connection to life. The kind of things I did without for too many years."
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/wilderness-mark-boyle/

Bill Gates Has a Point

On Tuesday, after picking up strength in an abnormally warm ocean, Hurricane Melissa tore through Jamaica, wreaking havoc and eventually claiming at least 50 lives across the Caribbean. Hours before Melissa, a Category 5 hurricane, made landfall, Bill Gates, the billionaire philanthropist, released an audacious memo arguing that climate change "will not lead to humanity's demise."

For almost two decades, many environmentalists have argued that the burning of fossil fuels poses an existential threat to all of human civilization. As a result, much of the conversation about global warming has become steeped in the language of extinction and planetary catastrophe.

But these dark visions ignore a simple fact: Climate change is not a giant meteor crashing into Earth. We will not all suffer equally.

Those whose lives are threatened by climate disaster are not merely the victims of bad luck. When heat waves strike, the dead are predominantly people who are unhoused, older or living alone in substandard housing. Around the world, the neighborhoods that repeatedly flood are disproportionately home to poor families who lack the means to evacuate, fortify their homes against worsening storms or permanently move out of harm's way…

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/02/opinion/bill-gates-climate-change-apocalypse.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Good news

Why China Built 162 Square Miles of Solar Panels on the World’s Highest Plateau

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/business/china-solar-tibetan-plateau.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

“stimulate something interesting for nature”

"All we can hope to do is stimulate something interesting for nature with the tools we have left to us, in the environment in which we now find ourselves."

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/wilding-isabella-tree/

Jane’s last message of hope

And who she'd put on Elon's 🚀

https://www.threads.com/@ginnanekaren/post/DPbBOARjy96?xmt=AQF07zP0Bi1aSOOQQiM0f8xGYJ0Wty731CZb-9R9nZO_iw&slof=1

Stupid

https://substack.com/@billmckibben/note/p-174385635?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

A path forward

"If I have a literary reputation, it's for a kind of dark realism. When I was still in my way—20s back in the 1980s—I published what is sometimes called the first book on the climate crisis. It bore the cheerful title The End of Nature; in the decades since, with 20 books and countless essays and articles published, I have chronicled those early warnings as they came true. This moment would seem to be—indeed it is—the summation and the vindication of all that angst.

And yet, right now, really for the first time, I can see a path forward. A path lit by the sun. And it's a path not just out of the climate crisis—it's a path that opens into a very new world. As I type, I've got this book's titular song, George Harrison's gentle and optimistic anthem, pouring through the headphones, blotting out the sound of the rain on the roof. I think that even as we teeter on the brink of renewed fascism, we're also potentially on the edge of one of those rare and enormous transformations in human history—something akin to the moment a few hundred years ago when we learned to burn coal and gas and oil, triggering the Industrial Revolution and hence modernity. But now, quite suddenly, we're learning not to burn those fossil fuels, and to rely instead on the large ball of flaming gas that hangs 93 million miles distant in the sky. We're on the verge of realizing that the sun, which already provides us light and warmth and photosynthesis, is also willing to provide us the power we need to run our lives. We are on the verge of turning to the heavens for energy instead of to hell."

— Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization by Bill McKibben