It’s the 41st Earth Day and Good Friday to boot, which brings mixed feelings. It was Earth Day a year ago that the Deepwater Horizon oil platform sank after exploding earlier, unleashing the nation’s biggest oil spill. And Good Friday in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska, a disaster I covered as a Seattle Times reporter.
Hopefully, no spills this time! The sun is shining and the tulips are up in the Skagit Valley.
Long before my fiction writing career I had an interest in the environment, and this spring I’m wrapping up a five-year-long stint teaching environmental journalism at Huxley College at Western Washington University. Huxley was arguably the nation’s first dedicated environmental college, when it opened the same year as the first Earth Day, in 1970.
One of my duties at Huxley has been to advise a student magazine called The Planet; its website is http://planet.wwu.edu/. It’s entirely produced by undergraduates and right now we’re in the middle of reporting the spring issue, with the theme of “animals.” It’s inspiring and rejuvenating to work with creative young people.
Another project I’ve been involved in is writing and producing a book on the history of Huxley College called “Green Fire.” While the book is not printed yet, I’m going to give people a peek at some of the pages at a campus presentation today. This has really been a collaborative effort, with student writers, designers, and photographers, and profiles of 40 Huxley alumni who represent a remarkable span of careers.
The book, which I hope will be in hand by June graduation, is not just an institutional vanity publication. It looks seriously at issues that have bedeviled the college from the beginning. Is the best role to study the environment or act to save it? How do you combine environmental science with classes on human values? What curriculum produces the best environmental problem solvers?
I’ll post more on the book when it comes out.
Finally, congratulations to friend and fellow writer Evelyn Adams of Anacortes, WA, for being recognized last night for her long-term and tireless environmental work. Evelyn wrote a nature column for 11 years and has authored several books, including “At Home on Fidalgo” (Island), a 1999 beauty of a book I was able to contribute to. I’ve written essays for four local environment books now that have been community collaborations. I believe they really help give a sense of place.
Saving a place starts with caring, and caring starts with learning about it. My Earth Day congratulations to all the writers out there who write about the world and our proper role in it. There has been a tremendous change in attitude for the better in my lifetime.
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Belated Happy Earth Day to you, Bill! It’s great how active you and so many folks are in the great cause of the environment. I’m humbled-and determined to do more myself. My son recently learned, in the second grade, that there are more stars and planets in the universe than grains of sands on all the beaches of the world combined. Yet only our Earth, so far as we yet know, has all this amazing life. It’s something to cherish.