I never needed Earth Day to respect nature

Earth Day, birthday.

Kinda’ rhymes doesn’t it?

Come to find out I was born on Earth Day, or since I first appeared in the world April 22, 1953 and Earth Day was hatched in 1970, it must be the other way around.

I’ll blame my confusion over the celebration of the environment on two things: 1960s “new math” and nuns with rulers.

I realized well after the first Earth Day — initially organized in 1968 by the U.S. Public Health Service as a conference for students to hear from scientists about the effects of environmental degradation on human health — that these two celebratory events share the calendar.

I did not, and never have needed a day to be reminded that, as the words that appeared on the outside wall of the U.S. Pavilion at Spokane’s Expo 74 reminded: “The Earth does not belong to Man, Man belongs to the Earth,” a saying attributed to Chief Seattle.

But I have always been, and still am, a steward of the environment.

That’s something those of my ideological ilk who, according to some of the hyperbole spouted from those of different thinking, insist we all cherish dirty air and water. And that’s why dialing down the Environmental Protection Agency and other similar agencies is akin to being some kind of heretic.

I’ve been a pack it in and a pack it out guy on many a backpacking, rafting and even car camping adventure for nearly 60 years.

Respect for the outdoors is in my DNA I suspect.

Old family photos will back that up. My grandfather, Bill Ehlers, was an avid fisherman and outdoors guy in Okanogan County. He introduced me to fishing as grandfathers often did at that time. I had to give it up, however, because I gagged at gutting the nice trout we’d snare at Bonapart Lake. Now sadly, my grandson will have to learn the pastime from others if he so chooses.

And there was uncle Gordon. “Cotton,” they called him I’m told, because of his bushy, curly head of bright blonde hair.

He paid for college at the University of Washington just before World War II by spending his summers in lonely fire lookouts across the North Central Washington Cascades.

And also in his 20s, he was a captain of fishing boats in the Inland Passage on the way to Alaska. That knowledge, unfortunately, likely led to his demise in 1943 as at age 23, while guiding a tug boat for the Merchant Marines, Captain Ehlers and his crew vanished in stormy seas.

The most startling, and funny, of the old family pics was that of my mother, Jeanette. She is seen sitting on the porch of one of those lookouts, knee-high boots with a shotgun over one knee, and a tobacco pipe in her lips.

Mom introduced me to the outdoors at age 5, staying in a canvas tent who knows where. The odor of the waterproofing is still embedding in my nostrils.

That led to decades and generations of sometimes massive gatherings of family and friends — rain or shine on an endless succession of Memorial Day weekends — along Deadman’s Creek in Ferry County.

We always left the place more neat and clean when we left it, bringing out the lawn rake to “vacuum” the ground.

So it was really distressing a couple of years ago on a backpacking trip to the Eagle Cap Wilderness in Oregon and see what some regulations can bring. In a designated wilderness, there are no permanent structures — like the self-composting toilets found on a hike into the Grand Canyon — allowed in such areas.

And that meant the supposedly pristine Lakes Basin area, at the foot of the sentinel Eagle Cap peak that gives the area its name, was littered with wads of unburied toilet paper.

I presume it was from the nomadic “Squat and Leave It” tribe, who obviously needed to learn what I had already known for decades about being a thoughtful lover of the outdoors.

Never needed Earth Day for that.

Paul Delaney can be reached at pdelaney@cheneyfreepress.com.