Wednesday was Earth Day, the 50th anniversary of the post-Aquarian, environmental happening in 1970.
By rights, the environment for acknowledging that day shouldn’t have been very harmonious at Eastwood Elementary — even if it is the only green school in Monongalia County.
Mon, after all, is still basically under quarantine from the coronavirus.
Eastwood and every school here was closed for Earth Day, and will remain closed every day for the rest of the academic year, courtesy of the report card for COVID-19.
So, how does one mark the occasion under such circumstances?
If you’re teacher Leslie Cox, you put out a video of you planting flowers and herbs on your back deck.
If you’re teacher Nicole Watson, you wax eloquent on the simple joys of a nature walk in your video.
If you’re teacher Ashley Sayre, you stare unflinchingly into the camera lens for your video — to declare your family’s newly found love of leftovers and Tupperware.
(So as not to waste food or put a strain on landfills with aluminum foil and throwaway containers.)
And, if you’re teacher David Scott, you liberate your acoustic guitar from its case for a gentle, finger-picked ode to West Virginia that isn’t “Country Roads.”
More on that.
Principal DeeAnn Hartshorn, meanwhile, likes singing her own mantra about her school on the Mileground.
“For us,” she said, “every day is Earth Day.”
Even when the kids can’t be there.
Especially when the kids can’t be there.
That’s why every Eastwood teacher, including the quartet featured above, incorporated an environmental take on their distance-lessons Wednesday, as part of the corona-curricula.
That’s why everyone offered those video vignettes as to how they were noting Earth Day.
Much like those empty school hallways in Mon County, no one was home, environmentally speaking, when Earth Day began flowering in the early 1960s.
In West Virginia then, rivers and creeks were stained a lethal orange by acid mine drainage.
In Pittburgh, it was often dusk at 2 p.m., as smoke from the steel mill stacks came over downtown like a mourning shroud.
In Cleveland, the Cuyahoga River actually caught fire in 1969, the year before Earth Day, it was so choked with pollution.
Another waterborne calamity that same year rippled the movement.
That was when a drilling accident off the southern California coast sent more than 3 million tons of crude oil glugging into the Santa Barbara Channel.
Eastwood Elementary didn’t get a clean pass either — not initially.
The $17.6 million school was fronted in 2011 to replace the aging Woodburn and Easton elementary schools, and while most liked the idea of a green school, not everyone was enamored of its Mileground address.
Too much traffic congestion and densely packed businesses in the bustling commercial strip, they said.
Not conducive to walking or bicycling to school, they said.
Today, the school and its 625 or so students persevere, as does its environmental mission.
“We love and respect our planet,” Hartshorn said.
Which was likely Scott’s musical motivation when he performed “The Green, Rolling Hills of West Virginia,” by Mountain State folk legend Hazel Dickens for his video.
“ … Oh, the green, rolling hills of West Virginia
Are the nearest thing to heaven that I know …”
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Morgantown Area News
'Tuesday, November 5, 2024'
