Respect The Earth In Honor Of Earth Day

Traditional celebrations to raise awareness in honor of Earth Day this year for Tennessee Higher Education students took the form of Zoom meetings instead, according to Professor Of Biology Mark Green.

Wile Covid-19 may have put a damper on festivities, “Maybe a positive aspect to this pandemic is it sort of made everyone a little more aware of the environment that surrounds them,” Green said, “I mean I know I’m out in the back yard gardening, and I’m outside more now just because I’m trapped at home, and I think more people, have sort of like, sorta stopped and smelled the flowers as they’re taking a walk in their neighborhood.”

Green said that the air pollution maps of the United States, since mandates for non-essential businesses to close and mandates for people to stay home during the pandemic, are very telling in showing what can be accomplished when people work together.

“It’s almost like that our planet stopped smoking cigarettes or something,” Green said, “I mean it’s still got a lot of recovery to go, but, you know, it’s nice seeing some of the positive stories.”

Green said change has to start somewhere, and an on-going theme for Earth Day and every day for each of us should be changing the world, one community at a time.

“It’s overwhelming. If I think about what’s happening in China or what’s happening in Australia, places here. I have such a limited amount of control as a human being,” Green said, “But realizing you can have an impact in your local community, and that can effect things and it can effect other people and grow larger, and so I think just realizing, that just trying to be part of a solution instead of being part of a problem is a first step.”

There are a multitude of factors that are slowly undermining the ecosystems that surround us, Green said. Awareness and being mindful in our actions are both important in protecting endangered species.

There are at least 107 endangered or threatened species. In Putnam County alone, Green said, we have around 20, mostly freshwater muscles and some fish like the Bluemask Darter. One endangered mammal species in the Upper Cumberland is the gray bat.

“It’s almost like our little poster child here,” Green said, “Because we live in such a karst, you know, cave environment, and the habitat’s right for the bat.”

Someone very well versed in cave environments is Director of Informatics for the UCDD, Chuck Sutherland. It isn’t his position with the UCDD that has drawn him in to more than 300 caves across the globe, but his love for their beauty.

One of the most pressing issues for the Upper Cumberland, Sutherland said, is liter. “That litter ends up on the landscape and it washes into the nearest creek, and it washes into a cave, and it aggregates in these places. And you have other kinds of things similar to litter. You have illegal dump sites, which don’t tend to be as active now as they once were, but there are still quite a few of these historic features around you know that probably stopped being used in the 1980s and they’re just massive dumps of trash and a lot of it’s just household waste but you’ll find construction waste and chemicals and potentially even hazardous waste in these areas and all of that does get into the ground water and goes out into the place where we get our drinking water from.”

Throwing trash out of your car window may seem small, but Sutherland says there’s a price to pay for it. “That cost may be in terms of tourism. Right? We all know that the Upper Cumberland is the most beautiful place in the whole state of Tennessee, maybe the world in it’s own right,” Sutherland said, “And we want to bring people here who spend money on tourism, and that money, you know it gets taxed, it gets used locally, it funds local businesses, and so we can make our area more prosperous in general if we can prevent and start cleaning up a lot of these illegal dump sites and if we can discourage littering the way that we see, it. If we make our area more beautiful, people will be more attracted to it.”

It’s up to each of us. “If I can’t convince the people who live here how beautiful this place is,” Sutherland said, “There’s no way I’m ever gonna be able to convince any one else, these tourists coming from the outside, that it’s this beautiful place we believe it to be.”

To Sutherland, nature deserves our respect and reverence. “You wouldn’t go into a church and spray paint it or leave trash behind and so when you go into nature, you shouldn’t do these things either, because in its own way, nature is also a chapel,” Sutherland said.

Our duty to nature and our earth? It’s simple, Sutherland said. “Leave it better than you found it. And that goes for everything.”