Common Ground: Hoping and Coping

May 2006 | Editor’s Note

Hoping and Coping

This note is being written four days before Earth Day and one day before the 100th anniversary of the earthquake and fire that devastated San Francisco. The anniversary of the Great Quake is a somber reminder that our new offices are (1) less than 100 years old and (2) built on bay fill. When the next Big One shakes our plates, it will take more than “suspension of disbelief” to keep this ten-story brick building in the air if gravity rules otherwise.

And now, climate modelers have presented us with computer simulations that depict the local effects of sea-level rise on our City by the Bay. According to one of these projections, well before the end of this century, much of the downtown that was razed by fire will be erased by floodwaters and we’ll be commuting to work in kayaks.

In a world of shifting constants and accelerating uncertainties, there seems to be little to hold onto. Climate change is systemic. It will effect how we live, where we live and even, in some cases, if we live.

When the earth shook beneath SF in 1906, it shook people’s faith in certainty. You tend to take the ground you walk on as a given — something solid, defined and eternal. When the ground suddenly bucks like a trampoline and breaks open, your bedrock assumptions about life’s certainties are forever fractured.

Similarly, we depend on the climate — the seasons, the rivers, the rainfall, the wind — for our survival. Each year, spring is arriving earlier, winter storms are more frequent and fierce, plant and animal species are in the throes of what biologists are calling “The Sixth Extinction.” With the world’s weather regime increasingly unstable (another “regime change” we could do without), is there anything on Earth that remains fixed and unchanging?

We can take comfort in a few constants. There is, for example, humankind’s capacity to hope and cope — to foresee a looming threat and to orgazine to meet it. That’s what Earth Day represents — a coming together to prevent things from coming apart.

And, in a world where even the Earth’s axis meanders (the “precession” that renders traditional astrology an anachronism), there are two moments on Earth that define Common Ground for all. Twice a year, the Equinox gives every place on Earth an equal amount of night and day, a magic and immutable constant celebrated by the ancients long before the creation of Earth Day.

International Earth Day also pre-dates the April Earth Day, having been proposed by UNESCO in 1969. The first Earth Day was decreed by SF Mayor Joseph Alioto on March 21, 1970. Under UN sponsorship, International Earth Day is now celebrated around the world. This year, Common Ground helped honor the event in Berkeley, joining Mayor Tome Bates in ringing the City’s Peace Bell (fashioned from the iron of melted pistols) in honor of “Nature’s true Earth Day.”

May you find what is constant and good and may it bring you comfort and strength.
— Gar Smith

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