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Monday was the 54th anniversary of Earth Day, organized in 1970 as a teach-in on college campuses to emphasize the harm out-of-control pollution has on human health as well as the environment. In typical homo sapiens fashion, giant inflatable earth balls got tossed around, guitars were played and laughter and music filled the air. So, for 50 years the seriousness of human-fueled devastation danced with the joy of opening our eyes to the beauty and wonders of the natural world.

“It is only a little planet / but how beautiful it is” the poet Robinson Jeffers wrote over 75 years ago. It is, and the wonderous miracle of life is slowly tipping into catastrophe around this globe.

Last week, on April 16, Washington’s state Department of Ecology declared the entire state in drought except for a small sliver of South Puget Sound. The entire state! In April. Remember when April showers brought May flowers? Now there are many fewer April showers as the climate changes dramatically (summary, page 8).

As the planet takes another loop around the sun, it is hard to get past the small individual hours of living. An existential threat exhausts the mind as well as the soul. The hottest-year-ever record keeps getting broken. We keep driving to the grocery store.

Too many American corporations and governments are giving lip service to sustainability while insanely pursuing the status quo, the policies and politics of yesterday, the 20th century. What, is their whistling in the dark an intention to wait the changing environment out, until we miraculously return to the good old days? Supposedly a famous baseball player said decades ago, “Let’s use it all up before we run out.”

The existential threat of climate change is one reality, parsed by facts, data, studies and science. Others in our nation are most heated up by the dangers they see in out-of-control immigration. They certainly have numbers on their side, as more and more people flee to find refuge in this, the greatest country in the world. Who wouldn’t come here? All of our ancestors did, unless we are indigenous.

But whatever drives this passion against immigrants, be it anger, fear, worry or patriotism, and whether the concern is at our southern border or our own neighborhoods – though not so much in Skagit County, where the foreign-born are mostly working hard in the fields, our yards or in or on our homes – immigrants will not bring about ecosystem collapse.

Between a dry, fiery or storm-swept countryside and a land swarming with people looking for paradise, many of us cannot find or measure the threats as being equal.

That is one reason to hold elections, so the majority of people casting their ballots can win that one day on deciding what is important.

What odd people live on this small, beautiful planet.