Happy Earth Month! Picnics in the Park + Wildflower Walks + RIP Pope Francis

Channel Islands NP VC has wildflowers galore — and places to picnic too

Happy Earth Month! Happy National Park Week! Happy Earth Day! On this day thirty years ago in 1985, I woke up on the Pacific Crest Trail not far from the Mexican border near Campo, California. As we backpacked 1400 miles from Mexico to Oregon on the Pacific Crest Trail, we passed through fields of flowers—”splashes of cactus blossoms and walls of blue ceanothus, acres of lavender iris, meadows of pink shooting stars and streamside nods from tiger lilies and red columbine brought tableaus of beauty at our trailside “tables” for breakfast, lunch and dinner” as I describe it in my most recent article for the VC Reporter “Al Fresco with Flowers: Local spots for a wildflower picnic.” 

picnic in the park

Spring is sprung, and wildflowers are everywhere— at least in my neck of the woods! In fact, there’s so many wildflowers that my latest article for the VC Reporter published April 17 in the “Great Outdoors” issue   is all about three easy accessible wildflower walks with picnics in the parks! The three parks are in Ventura– Channel Islands National Park, Ventura Botanical Garden, and Arroyo Verde Park—and we put together a picnic from Paradise Pantry paired with a rose from Clos des Amis Ventura County Estate Vineyard and a Pinot Noir from The Ojai Vineyard’s Fe Ciega Vineyard in the Sta. Rita Hills.

For more details, tasting notes, and more wildflower photos, head over to Wine Predator!

Pope Francis — who died on Easter Monday 2025–was an advocate for the downtrodden — people, plants, planet. He advocated climate action and service. He told us to give up a cold indifferent heart.

Ventura County wines for a picnic with a fremontia backdrop

Do you know the history behind Earth Day? According to historian Heather Cox Richardson, “The spark for the first Earth Day was the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. A marine biologist and best-selling author, Carson showed the devastating effects of people on nature by documenting the effect of modern pesticides on the natural world. She focused on the popular pesticide DDT, which had been developed in 1939 and used to clear islands in the South Pacific of malaria-carrying mosquitoes during World War II. Deployed as an insect killer in the U.S. after the war, DDT was poisoning the natural food chain in American waters.”

She struggled to find a publisher: “When The New Yorker began to serialize Carson’s book in June 1962, chemical company leaders were scathing. “If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson,” an executive of the American Cyanamid Company said, “we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.” Officers of Monsanto questioned Carson’s sanity,” continues Dr Richardson. “But her portrait of the dangerous overuse of chemicals and their effect on living organisms caught readers’ attention. They were willing to listen. Carson’s book sold more than half a million copies in 24 countries.”

Love earth

Carson also caught the attention of Democratic president John F. Kennedy who “asked the President’s Science Advisory Committee to look into Carson’s argument, and the committee vindicated her. Before she died of breast cancer in 1964, Carson noted: “Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”

After she died, “scientists followed up on Carson’s argument and in 1967 organized the Environmental Defense Fund to protect the environment by lobbying for a ban on DDT. As they worked, Americans began to pay closer attention to human effects on the environment, especially after three crucial moments: First, on December 24, 1968, astronaut William Anders took a color picture of the Earth rising over the horizon of the moon from outer space during the Apollo 8 mission, powerfully illustrating the beauty and isolation of the globe on which we all live.”

Another factor that impacted the public and created a wave of change occurred from January–February 1969 when  “a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals. Public outrage ran so high that President Nixon himself, a Republican, went to Santa Barbara in March to see the cleanup efforts, telling the American public that “the Santa Barbara incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people.”

I remember this oil spill. The beach town where I grew up and live today is within that 35 miles.

Dr Richardson also points out that “in June 1969, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire. A dumping ground for local heavy industry, the river had actually burned more than ten times in the previous century, but with increased focus on environmental damage, this time the burning river garnered national attention.”

These factors inflamed the public enough that change happened: “In February 1970, President Richard M. Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.”

Nixon recognized that to address the potential environmental calamity on the horizon, we need “fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”

But what and who actually made Earth Day Earth Day? “Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, visited the Santa Barbara oil spill and hoped to turn the same sort of enthusiasm people were bringing to protests against the Vietnam War to efforts to protect the environment,” writes Dr. Richardson. “He announced a teach-in on college campuses, which soon grew into a wider movement across the country.

Their “Earth Day,” held on April 22, 1970, brought more than 20 million Americans—10% of the total population of the country at the time—to call for the nation to address the damage caused by 150 years of unregulated industrial development.

And that’s what it takes — 3.5% or more of a given population to make a sea change like what happened on Earth Day in 1970. That’s what we need today to fight the demolition of democracy engaged by the Trump administration. It’s useful to note other possible pararells: “The movement included members of all political parties, rich Americans and their poorer neighbors, people who lived in the city and those in the country, labor leaders and their employers. Fifty-five years later, it is still one of the largest protests in American history.”

Contrast this approach of unity and action with Trump who “celebrated Earth Day by announcing that “we finally have a president who follows science,” with policies “rooted in the belief that Americans are the best stewards of our vast natural resources—no ‘Green New Scam’ required.” One of the policies the White House champions is “opening more federal lands and waters for oil, gas, and critical mineral extraction.”

Right now it seems like the Trump administration is selling out our land to the highest bidder.

Dr Richardson cites Siler who “explains that “[t]he person currently serving as AS-PMB (which in normal times would require Senate confirmation) is DOGE operative Tyler Hassen, the CEO of a Houston-based energy company.” Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Western Priorities, said in a statement: “Elon Musk is now effectively in charge of America’s public lands.”

Siler notes that Burgum has handed power over the Department of the Interior to “a hitherto unknown political operative” who is holding his position in violation of the appointments clause of the Constitution. He also notes that the Department of the Interior “manages the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Indian Education, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, Bureau of Trust Funds Administration, Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey,” in addition to the National Park Service. “As such,” Siler writes, “Hassen is now responsible for 70,000 employees, the administration of numerous international treaties, the welfare of 574 Native American Tribes, 433 national park sites, over 500 million acres of public lands, 700 million acres of subsurface minerals, and 3.2 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf.”

earth love

Instead of “government efficiency”, these cuts impact a positive place on the ledger: “the public lands already make billions of dollars a year for the United States through tourism, but since the 1970s, the right wing has come to see the public ownership of lands as an affront to the idea that individuals should be able to use the resources they believe God has put there for them to use. Developers have encouraged that ideology, for privatization of America’s western lands has always meant that they ended up in the hands of a few wealthy individuals.”

As Dr Richardson points out, “Melinda Taylor, senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin Law School, told Bloomberg Law in November: “Project 2025 is a ‘wish list’ for the oil and gas and mining industries and private developers. It promotes opening up more of our federal land to energy development, rolling back protections on federal lands, and selling off more land to private developers.”

Burgum sees selling the public lands as a source of revenue: “[W]e’ve got $36 trillion in debt,” he said, but “[w]e never talk about the assets, and the assets are the land and minerals.” The Interior Department, he said, “has got close to 500 million acres of surface. It’s 700 million acres of subsurface and over 2 billion acres of offshore…. That’s the balance sheet of America…. I believe we ought to have a deep inventory of all the assets in America. We ought to understand…what is our assets, 100 trillion, 200 trillion? We could be in great shape as a country.”

We can’t let this happen. Show up. Stand up. Protest. The next big action is May 1. Be there: for  your family. Your friends. Your planet.

More from Dr Richardson here.

So take the advice of Pope Francis and give up your cold indifferent heart. We need you.