WIN COLWELL

This week’s writer is Winslow Colwell of Ripton.

Tossed and distracted by ever-exchanging news cycles, it seems like a long time since last April, when many of us shared a profound, earthy moment as the path of a total solar eclipse passed over our state. My wife and I traveled up to Burlington, thus stretching the length of totality from the seconds we would experience at our home in Ripton to more than three minutes there by the waterfront. For days beforehand we watched the forecast, afraid that clouds would rain on (or at least obscure) our parade. Then we became worried we might be trapped in a Woodstock-like traffic jam along Route 7, which led us to our 7 a.m. departure that morning of April 8.

But, amazingly, everything worked out. Along with my sister, who journeyed from out-of-the-path Minnesota, we joined thousands of others by the lake and had what I can only describe as a mind-blowing experience. As the last bit of the sun was covered and a bright corona appeared around our newly blackened star there was a group gasp that I’ll never forget. The familiar sky was suddenly, radically, un-familiar, most of us experiencing a black sun for the first time in our lives. Like an earthquake that makes you question a reality we seldom question (“as solid as the earth beneath my feet! Oh… wait…!”) we, as a group, were thrust into a moment when all we thought we knew was up for grabs. And for me, also a moment when I was profoundly aware of living on a planet, a spinning orb with an orbiting moon, and both circling a sun that was suddenly not so warm, and casting an oddly blue-ish light.

Many years ago I got a job as a graphic designer at the Whole Earth Catalog, a counter-cultural publisher in California that was founded in the late ’60s by a man named Stewart Brand. In 1966, while tripping on some of the pure LSD of that era, he had had a revelation that our society might just experience a profound shift when the day arrives that we can see a photograph of the whole planet as taken from space. At that moment none existed, but he didn’t have to wait long.

His hope was that we would then recognize that we occupy a beautiful and ultimately limited marble in the void, a “spaceship earth” that doesn’t have borders, but does have swirling fragile clouds and vast blue oceans that are our responsibility to protect. Remember, this was an era before the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, when polluted rivers were catching on fire and Los Angeles was synonymous with smog.

He put together a team of writers and artists who published the first Whole Earth Catalog, a collection of simple-living tools and, more importantly, a collection of aspirations and ideas. Their statement of purpose, featured on the first page, was “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.” By 1972 the third edition had become a million-seller and won a National Book Award. Rather than enriching himself, he gave the profits to hundreds of worthwhile organizations, seed money for startups that are still with us as well as providing a few years’ worth of peanut butter sandwiches to hungry artists we may not remember.

The modern environmental movement was created by Stewart and many others, and, as we all know, this environmental movement was derailed by fossil fuel industries and other corporations who denied their part in global warming (despite the fact that internal documents prove they were well aware of it. But profit before planet!) And we who have stood by and allowed this to happen — the frequent flooding, the scorching temperatures, and all the freaky and destructive weather events that have become a regular part of our lives — seem to have forgotten about our stewardship of this planetary spaceship.

So every time something like the eclipse happens, and we feel a tap on our shoulder to remind us of our planetary citizenship, and therefore our responsibility, I retain a hope that a new movement can be born. To again quote the Whole Earth Catalog, “What it is is up to us” — how we live, how we spend, how we invest, how we vote, who we boycott. This shift has happened before, and even in a TikTok era it can happen again.