ALBUQUERQUE — A spade stabbed into a tuft of vegetation.
The weeds — nascent tumbleweeds — were scattered like green pompoms around an experimental field at Rio Grande Nature Center State Park. A small group of volunteers and park staff plucked and dug out invasive weeds at the Albuquerque facility on a recent day, replacing them with native grasses and other plants as part of an Earth Day-inspired cleanup.
It’s hard, tedious work, said Christine Small, a longtime volunteer and restoration coordinator at the center. The idea is to create a “windbreak” — a layered landscape of around 20 species of native plants that should better capture and distribute moisture onto the nearby Candelaria Open Space and hold down the soil to prevent erosion. It’s part of a plan to create an ecosystem that will hopefully be more resilient as the environment changes.
If nothing else, there’s job security, Small said; between the invasive species popping up and the work to establish native species, there’s always plenty to do.
As the 55th anniversary of the first Earth Day approached Tuesday, volunteers like Small continued the hard, tedious work. Reflections on the past 55 years of Earth Day celebrations were filled with both hope and dismay. While activists see more people interested in environmental improvements, there’s disappointment over a lack of progress on climate change and pollution reductions. On top of existing challenges, federal environmental protections are at risk of rollback.
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, an international compact that aims to limit greenhouse gas emissions and slow climate change. This signaled a turning of the ship; since Jan. 20, the Trump administration has indicated it would like to reevaluate bedrock environmental regulations like the National Environmental Protection Act and change public lands management to promote industries like logging and mining.
“You do what little you can,” Small said. “You don’t say, ‘Well, why should I do that? It isn’t going to make any difference in the scheme of things.’ This is our happy place, really. … We like what we’re doing, no matter what will happen.”
‘Heading in the wrong direction’
Earth Day was created 55 years ago by Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson following an oil spill near Santa Barbara, Calif. The “Conservation Governor” publicized the idea of a “teach in” on the environment April 22, 1970.
That same year, President Richard Nixon signed into law the National Environmental Protection Act, the country adopted the Clean Air Act and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was founded.
Now, some of those actions are being challenged: Changes to NEPA seem imminent, and the EPA is facing major budget cuts and announced it will be reconsidering a slew of regulations, including a greenhouse gas reporting program.
Sally Rodgers organized Santa Fe’s first Earth Day celebration in 1970, marking the occasion with a parade around the Plaza. Now 89, Rodgers said she had been inspired by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” and the works of Paul Ehrlich on overpopulation.
As she stared at Ehrlich’s titles on her bookshelf during a recent interview, the longtime environmental activist noted major environmental problems have gone largely unaddressed. Increasing carbon dioxide levels and rising oceans remain top of mind for her.
She sees gaps in education about climate change and conservation.
“There are pockets of optimism all across the country and even in the world,” Rodgers said. “But the projectile is heading in the wrong direction, and that is discouraging.”
Younger generations offer hope
Larry Rasmussen wrote a somber column in 2013. Earth Day’s promise to create a “conservation generation” had fallen short, the ethicist wrote.
“Because we have ignored the first law of economics — the preservation of Earth’s economy — and because we have forgotten that human well-being is always derivative of planetary health, [Earth Day founder Gaylord] Nelson’s conservation generation is history,” Rasmussen wrote.
More than a decade later, he feels there’s a greater awareness of environmental issues — however, while the problem has been identified by more people, he said, fewer have an idea of how to move forward.
Pope Francis, who died Monday morning, was heavy on Rasmussen’s mind. The late pope understood addressing climate change required a wholesale reevaluation of the relationship between humans and the environment, Rasmussen said.
In 2015, Francis wrote the encyclical Laudato Si’, which urged action on climate change.
“I’m more encouraged in the fact that it’s become so obvious to so many more people that something must be done,” Rasmussen said. “… But the pope, even when people said this is the single most important document on the environment to be written, they still didn’t catch, and we still haven’t caught, the scale of what needs to be changed.”
Rasmussen in 2022 published a collection of letters he had written to his two grandsons, titled The Planet You Inherit: Letters to My Grandchildren When Uncertainty’s a Sure Thing.
“I quit writing them in 2021,” Rasmussen said. “I had no idea how uncertain their future was at that time.”
Like Rasmussen, volunteers and staff at the Rio Grande Nature Center on Thursday often brought up the importance of educating younger generations.
“Dismal,” said seasonal interpretive ranger Sivan Gordon-Buxbaum about the current state of environmental affairs — but she quickly softened her assessment to “dismal off of first glance.”
She was preparing Friday for another Earth Day event. Weather permitting, the plan was for visiting kids to build animal homes, listen to stories under the cottonwood trees and take a nature walk through the Bosque. While she worked, two young boys pressed their faces against the glass of the observation room at the center, pointing out groups of turtles and ducks as the pond-water dimpled under the wind.
“They do give you a little bit of a sense of hope about the future,” Gordon-Buxbaum said. “Being able to guide them down the path of, like, science or naturalists, all of these professions that are so deeply needed, that are we’re losing right now, that we need for our planet to survive.”
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