A Walker in the Suburbs

Surely we needed this, needed the collective holding of breath, the general release when the rocket rose from the launching pad, up into the Florida sky, away from this earth with its virus and lockdowns and riots. Surely we needed something to make us raise our eyes from the here and now, into the heavens.

The Falcon Rocket, along with its two human passengers, lifted off an hour ago, at 3:22 p.m. — the first launch in almost a decade and the first ever from a rocket built by a private company.  It plans to rendezvous with the International Space Station at 10:30 tomorrow, meaning that these astronauts, both veterans of other space flights, will not be hitching a ride on a Russian craft.

As I write these earthbound words I hear the roar of jets making their final approach to Dulles. The dreams of flight that were realized more than a hundred years ago are propelling us still — and, as today’s milestone makes clear — they will continue to do so.

It’s a good day for journalism. The Pulitzer Prizes were just announced (the Washington Post won, as did the Baltimore Sun, the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Anchorage Daily News and many others), and it’s also the birthday of Mollie Bly, a journalist who pretended to be mentally ill in order to spend 10 days undercover in the Blackwell’s Island Women’s Lunatic Asylum in New York and document the horrendous conditions she found there.

In 1889 Bly traveled around the world in 72 days, beating the fictional Phineas Fogg’s “Around the World in 80 Days” timetable and becoming famous in the process. She wrote both of these big stories for the New York World, owned by … Joseph Pulitzer.

At a time when the news is often decried and challenged, it’s good to remember all that it does for us, all that it continues to do.

If Earth Day was a person, it would need reading glasses by now. The holiday that once seemed the epitome of peace, love and kumbaya may look a little dated in these decidedly less than peace, love and kumbaya times. But although reduced travel and worldwide lockdowns are giving us a tiny reprieve from global warming, Earth Day is still more important than ever before.

Last night I watched a documentary about Norman Borlaug, a Nobel prize winning scientist who is credited with saving up to a billion lives by launching the Green Revolution. The film described his laser-like focus to solve the problem of world hunger — and the selfless way he went about it (for instance, he never patented one of his new hybrids).

But the documentary also pointed out the legacy of the hybrid wheat Borlaug created, the water and fertilizer it requires to grow, the damage it has done to our environment and to social structures as displaced farmers flocked to cities, swelling their populations to the breaking point.

The film made clear that the seeds of one generation’s problems are planted in the solutions of the previous generation. We all do the best we can with the time we have.

What will we do, now? That’s the question Earth Day asks of us.