Today is Earth Day, and For the first time many in modern America decided to honor their home and make a personal commitment to protect it.  Some have kept that commitment. Most of the powers that be, Democratic and Republican, no longer pay it any mind beyond an occasional sneer or shrug.  Even so, symbolically it remains a significant event in the history of modern civilization.  To my mind the degree to which Earth Day is honored is a good indicator of the moral development of American society.

Western modernity has been dominated by a Faustian quest for power over the universe.  It is ending with power over human beings by others who themselves have become slaves to power as domination.  Earth Day symbolized a new outlook for a civilization long grown autistic towards the rest of the world, and a reminder that we are not the only beings that matter.  This was not a new discovery by Westerners.  It was long known by hunting and gathering peoples, and was often recognized by our greatest thinkers.   Leonardo daVinci wrote, “The virtues of grasses, stones, and trees do not exist because humans know them. . . . Grasses are noble in themselves without the aid of human languages or letters.” But this truth had been forgotten by nearly everyone in America.

Earth Day is a reminder of the emptiness of America’s dominant collective egoism, hence the feral hatred for those who protect the environment By so many who see themselves as would-be supermen and women, little budding John Galts.  Environmentalists, they argue, sell the human race short, preferring trees to hug and wolves to defend.

Their arguments share much in common both in tone and in moral and logical content with Southern racists of the 1960s who accused white supporters of civil rights as guilty of hating “their own kind.”

In fact Earth Day marks a significant step forward in many American’s fulfilling what is best in human nature and its critics trail far behind.

In 1947 Aldo Leopold, my favorite environmental thinker, once wrote “For one species to morn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.  The Cro-Magnon who slew the last mammoth thought only of steaks.  The sportsman who shot the last pigeon thought only of his prowess.  The sailor who clubbed the last auk thought of nothing at all.  But we, who have lost our pigeons, mourn the loss.  Had the funeral been ours, the pigeons would hardly have mourned us.  In this fact, rather than in Mr. Du Pont’s nylons or Mr. Vannevar Bush’s bombs, lies objective evidence of our superiority over the beasts.”

Leopold was profoundly right in a way that can never be challenged by anyone with a human heart, and Earth Day stands as perhaps the first time a modern culture established a day to celebrate its most human dimension: the capacity to care for what is unlike itself simply because of its own intrinsic value.

In my mind modern Paganism is helping still more of us discover, slowly and with an enormous push back by the forces of nihilism and power, the deep truth of this insight.