Earth Day Again

The original Earth Day, April 22, 1970, when Time reset to zero, was the pivot point around which Wyrd shifted and we entered the Age of Ecology; 1970 in the Western reckoning became 0 A.E.: Year Zero, when mythic Dreamtime touched-down in chronologic time, and the events of the Shaggy Mythos occurred; and now they recur eternally, each passing year, especially so on the current Earth Day; and so the dominant Myth is rewrit anew, we reset to zero, and we are always coming home to the new reality, of Ecological Self, and of the newborn Menning, the ecological culture-civilization.

And so Wyrd has shifted, Time has been reset to zero-- mythically-- but the new Myth must be made to manifest in terms of Reality, or it is just a myth, a dream, a hope unfulfilled.

And now it is A.E. 45, and Earth Day 45 is about to happen, and we are in the Year of Ecology 45 and counting...  counting down to the fulfilment, the manifestation, of the Myth: the Menning-- or, as a species, we fail to rise to the occasion and the Searuvel achieves Dilgoth, the great Extinction event engineered by humans.

Forty-five and counting...

New Ruling Idea

"Ecological Self" is a new idea that creates difference and thus the possibility of form, of figure-against-ground, and of civilized order, then, rather than undifferentiated chaos.  It is a great simplification, a new ruling idea, value, mythic archetypal unifying symbol, the monism to the dualism of Man versus Nature, with the inherent power to regenerate/replace a culture locked in dystopian contradiction, to a new, coordinated culture-complex constellating around it: the Menning, hope for a future for Life.

Ecological Self= a Jungian-Naessian synthetic concept, a mystical religious idea.

Regenesis

O Man!  Go back to the African Dreamtime of the human animal, to our Genesis. Find the Ur-gods there who made us what we are.  Beard them in their den and exhort them.  Tell them they must rewrite the original instructions that made our human nature, that they must refit us to live with Nature and not against it; rather, to protect it, because the careless selfish ruthlessness which helped us to survive the threats of man and nature since our beginning is going to destroy everything.  Tell them that after all, they made us what we are, so they are responsible, and if they don't help us to correct our fatal flaw, well, then we must seek help in our own time.

Back to Earth: part II

For over a decade previous to the first Earth Day, bestselling books, first in German and then in English, had been warning the people of our world of the consequences of our fevered crusade, not just to humans, but to all of life.  At the same time the youth of the West, or at least the more sensitive, idealistic, inquiring, and vital of them, particularly those of the United States of America, the most advanced, wealthy, and powerful nation ever seen on Earth, this vanguard youth of the West, seeing these Earth-from-outer-space photographs as they had appeared, from ever higher orbits and then from the forays to the Moon, made the connection between these photographic revelations and those of the environmental prophets of doom.  Adults as well as youth were having the same experience, forming the same gestalt, which resulted in a plan to hold a national 'teach-in' about the plight of the earth, scheduled for the end of spring term, 1970, when as it happened, protest against the southeast Asian war threatened to swamp a mere environmental teach-in, but the eco-visionaries still managed to rally enough support, to enlist enough volunteers, and Earth Day events were mounted on many campuses across the nation and even beyond the campuses.  And it was a huge success, and media coverage of it got the essential message out to America, and even beyond it.  As a result, the new consciousness was strengthened and it was being called 'ecological' now, as well as 'environmental' (which to most people, it seemed, meant primarily pollution and resulting cancer).  'Ecology' was now extended from being the name of an obscure specialization of biology, to that of the new consciousness and its movement.  It is telling that the banner designed for Earth Day, the 'earth flag', was a whole-Earth-from-space image, though set against a dark blue background.  And the contemporaneous, wide-theta ecology symbol seems to represent the globe of Earth, likely inspired by the same photographs, both showing then the contribution of these views of our planet to the 'back to Earth' consciousness of the nascent ecology movement.

Back to Earth: part I

In the year before the first Earth Day, a team of American technicians had landed for the first time on the Moon.  And from that other world, Man saw Earth from afar: a starkly glowing jewel set against the spangled black velvet of outer space.  And this is what these lunar astronauts had come so far to discover: Earth.

In five centuries of fevered explorations, geographic and scientific, Western Man had sought to rise from the mucky earth to the splendid heavens.  And now he had left the Earth and touched down on the first way station to the planets and stars beyond.  But on the Moon there was nothing, but a sun-blasted, asteroid-pitted rock incapable of sustaining life in its hyper-frigid vacuum.

But looking back, they saw Earth, Only Home of Life.  It was lovely, precious, a living presence, God, all that mattered, all that is.  And so, 'back to Earth' they then came, having discovered that this latest crusade in Western Man's urge to explore everything, to uncover every secret of the Universe, to conquer Nature, to become God, and having made this impressive technological leap beyond our bounded world, which though a triumph, was also a futility-- except for those famous backward views which satellites and men had been taking from ever further vantages, culminating perhaps in the 'Earth-rise' photo. Around the planet, humans had been captivated by these amazing new photo-views, and some said-- and some knew-- that this would cause an inexorable change in our species' consciousness.