Earth Day in the Park, April 17th in Modesto and California State University, Stanislaus' celebration on April 22 in Turlock are two local events planned to commemorated the 19th annual Earth Day. Celebrate our beautiful home and keep it safe and clean!!

By MYRTLE OSNER with KAREN RODRIGUEZ

This is the tenth year for Modesto's Earth Day in the Park, the local expression of Earth Day proposed nearly 20 years ago by Denis Hayes and other environmentalists.

This year you can expect more entertainment, food, and arts and crafts at this free event in Graceada Park from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. The aim is to attract more people to the event while also drawing them in to learn something about earth-friendly industry, recycling, and organizations dedicated to preserving the fragile planet.

The park will be divided into four "sections:" Environmental Row, Kids Row, Arts and Crafts Row, and Food Row. Lots of information on preserving the environment will be contained in the booths, as well as information about the natural resources we hold dear.

It looks like Kids Row will be a big draw, with magic shows, hands-on crafts, pony rides and face painting. Child I.D. tags can be obtained also.

The Food section has existed in other years but may be a little larger this year, so you can have your picnic there without bringing your own food.

The entertainment schedule begins at 11:00 a.m. and features speeches, recycling awards, mural contest awards, the Modesto Police K-9 demonstration, and plenty of music.

The event is presented by the City of Modesto Solid Waste Management office and Citizen's Advisory Committee on Recycling. Graceada Park in Modesto is the place, admission is free and so is parking if you can find a place on the street. It runs from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, April 17th.

By JUNE HANSEN

Earthlink Ecology Club is proud to announce our first annual Earth Day celebration at California State University, Stanislaus, April 22nd, held at the CSUS quad near the middle of campus, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. We invite you to join us in a day of giving thanks to our Mother Earth.

The CSUS faculty is also designating this as "bring your child to work day," so there will be many activities for children.

Six local bands will play, including Built Like Alaska, Bascom Avenue, Bluesberries, and the Ramblin' Phuds. From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Turlock High School's S.A.V.E. club will be performing "The Lorax," a 15-minute play at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. We will have many informational booths, environmentally friendly vendors, and an organic farmers market.

We hope to inspire the community to be more aware and appreciative of this awesome planet. By learning about the Earth, we can all gather a better understanding of its complexity and vital life producing functions. Come join us as we all grow and prosper together in the balance of life.

ACTION: To help in planning this and other Earthlink Ecology Club events, attend meetings, April 13, 20, 27 and May 7 in the CSUS Library, Room 160 (GIS lab) or call June, 523-7487.

By SAMUEL R. TYSON

Last President of Ecology Action

Ecology Action pioneered residential curbside recycling making Modesto the first city in the nation to have such a program..  Denny Jackman is pictured here at EA's 9th Street facility circa 1972.  Photo: Craig Currier

Ecology Action Educational Institute ceased to exist on December 31, 1998.

In the early 1990's, EA had floundered. Checks were not cashed, post office box rent went unpaid, and EA was no longer legal with the State of California. It took two years to cope with past sloppiness.

As part of the clearing-up process, EA sold its building -- netting over $80,000. What next to do? EA had found no niche since recycling became moot as the City of Modesto took it over, the garbage collectors that is.

A well attended EA meeting in 1992 decided that the Tuolumne River Regional Park (TRRP) should be the focus of attention. Easier said than done. The Parks Department was not all that much interested in a natural park. Ecology Action commissioned Dennis Dahlin to do a broad look at TRRP. An attractive document resulted; cost $5,000. How to use the material well was not easily solved. A new factor was the purchase of the missing link in the Mitchell to Carpenter Road corridor, mainly the north side of the river park. A sometimes-flooded walnut orchard beneath the Ninth Street bridge completed the several miles long stretch. Now, the Citizen Advisory Committee for TRRP needed to decide exactly how the park would be developed. Most of the committee, composed of appointees from Ceres, Modesto and Stanislaus County, are not trained park people, much less so in plant management. The now on-going discussion centers on exactly how the public will use such a unique treasure -- a live river.

The river itself came into play with the need to relicense Don Pedro Dam. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) held a long series of meetings with the stakeholders: MID, TID, City of San Francisco (water users), Friends of the Tuolumne, Tuolumne River Preservation Trust, and various agencies. The agreement reached included an increased river flow and $500,000 for riparian restoration. The irrigation districts, San Francisco, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, and California Fish and Game will also spend $4,385,000 for restoration and studies. The underlying reason for the changes was river fish rehabilitation, salmon in particular.

In the meantime, there arose the specter of Diablo Grande development: 29,500 acres, 6 golf courses, resort, and thousands of costly homes. The locale was the oak/grassland area west of Patterson. Ironically, such was EA founder Cliff Humphrey's vision to keep the Valley floor for farming, not housing. Twenty to thirty years ago a diminished water supply was not uppermost in peoples' minds since the great population surge was yet to come.

No one else was ready to take on the ongoing work of the monster Diablo development. Stanislaus Natural Heritage filed the lawsuit against Diablo Grande, then backed out. So it fell in the lap of EA, the only local group with disposable funds. My reservation against involvement arose because EA had not been a full scale party to the early public hearings, being weighted down by its own reorganization. The local Sierra Club raised $3,000+ to help finance the Diablo suit. Suing cost well over $10,000.

At the time EA became committed to the Diablo Grande suit, it was asked to help fund the appeal on the Grayson housing court case. EA put up $5,000 which was refunded later when the appeals court reversed the local court.

With time, the Diablo Grande case lost in the lower court but won on appeals 3-0. An attempt to get a California Supreme Court hearing by Diablo Grande was refused. Diablo Grande had to pay for a supplemental environmental impact statement. The court said that all the water for the whole project was subject to review before the project could proceed. All of this litigation was related to the provisions of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

During the Diablo Grande Court years, EA put up $2,000 for Rudy Platzcek's planning group to digitize proposed urban development in the three county area: San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Merced. Such a visualization has been useful in showing urban pressure on farm land. It was money well spent.

Involvement of $2-3,000 in a suit against the City of Modesto proved a flop.

As was true years earlier, the new water plan for Diablo Grande sailed through the planning commission and Board of Supervisors though not without some testiness on the part of public officials. They thought the public should leave it to the experts.

On August 26, 1998 the state and local Farm Bureau sued over the water supply, an issue which, for them, had not been properly resolved. Normally it would be some years before the case could get through the courts unless some compromise is reached. A second suit was filed by a citizens group.

Whatever EA's original intention, the years of the suit were, in their own way, a wake-up call. Things in 1998 were not as they were five years earlier. The heavy influx of home buyers working in the Bay Area became a continuing and threatening cloud over agriculture. Is California really ready to write off agriculture in the state to be replaced by imports from Mexico, Chile, New Zealand, Australia with their cheaper labor and lesser pesticide regulations?

EA's holding action has allowed a larger look into the water future. All these happenings gave the Nature Conservancy the opportunity to purchase two large foothill ranches costing $19 million. One ranch abuts Diablo Grande to the south; the other is also oak/grassland, but all in Merced County.

It is curious. EA seems to have found its place in its closing. Aside from EA's refusal to promote a second Diablo Grande suit, there are other opportunities. The TRRP has an advisory committee where park development actions are being worked over. As a result of exploring where to disburse assets, the East Stanislaus Resource Conservation District (ESRCD) seems a useful outlet with its new concern for obtaining perpetual easements along the Tuolumne River for wetlands restoration. The ESRCD is fresh to the land preservation option, so the "how to do" is open to a natural learning curve. The RCD is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture; it is the old Soil Conservation Service in a new guise.

EA started in the early 1990's with $80,000+ from its property sale. In 1998, approximately $60,000 remained. It lost its Federal charitable status in 1997 since cash flow was dominated by interest, with contributions being very low.

EA closed its books in 1998, December 31. The bulk of the remaining money was allocated for wildlife refuge purposes. For perpetual easement work, $3,000 went to ESRCD. The Diablo Grande citizen suit received $2,500, and the Great Valley Center $500. The residue, after paying expenses, went to Friends of the Tuolumne for riparian conservation and restoration.

By MARA FAGIN

After an English class excursion to the Modesto Junior College farm on Beckwith Avenue, a student writes,

"Though it can't be seen taking a breath,
Everything around us is alive. . . . Tiny ants endlessly march,
Empty almond shells fall,
And a black bird silently perches.
Even though it can't be seen taking a breath,
Everything around us is alive. . . . From the still blue sky,
A soft cool breeze blows,
And breathes the life unseen into everything around us."

About four years ago, while living in the countryside around Lake Don Pedro and commuting daily to Modesto, the idea came to me one summer night as I feasted on the riotous Milky Way from a hammock slung between two blue oaks, that many students at Modesto Junior College lack contact with the natural world. Primarily trained by the culture to be consumers, their attention captured by the colorful wrappers surrounding their Whopper from Burger King or their (so-called) quesadilla from Taco Bell, they rarely use their imaginations to follow the trail of production back to the steer eating the alfalfa or the cow's milk fermenting into the cheese, let alone to consider the soil, with its micro and macroscopic life forms.

A few days later, I read a review of Victor Davis Hanson's Fields Without Dreams in The New Yorker. Hanson, a professor of classical Greek and Latin at Fresno State University, wrote a diatribe against the (partially self-induced) destruction of the agrarian way of life, a way that goes back to the yeoman farmers of the ancient world, and which has cradled and nurtured the stability of monogamous marriage, rootedness and the protection and conservation of the land. It came to me that I wanted to offer to MJC students some understanding of their own connections to the natural world and to the cultivated world. "Here we are," I said to a colleague, "in the richest agricultural region in the world, and most of our students are oblivious to the land around them. They are not really in this place at all; they're in a fast-food, mall-store, video-skateboard nowhere-land!" The Greek word for place, topoi, as in topographical map, is also a word in rhetoric, meaning topic or area of knowledge under discussion. I decided that I would center my English writing classes on the topic of topoi: we would study our place in the world.

I began by using Hanson's book as the text in freshman composition classes the following fall. During that semester we made field trips to Glen Anderson's organic almond orchard and to the Modesto Farmers Market. We read the agriculture section of the Modesto Bee and discussed the interdependency of the students, the land of the Central Valley, and the agriculture industry. Some of the students were farm laborers, factory workers in the food industry or sons and daughter of such workers. A few had grown up on farms or had spent time on grandparents' farms. But for most, the central idea of the course, that we are the inhabitants of a particular place, a natural world which we have partially transformed in order to provide food and fiber for ourselves, our state, our country, and the great world beyond, was a novel one. Any novel and profound idea, properly and deeply explored, opens up the world.

From that beginning I began to include an "agrarian component" in my other courses as well. The next spring I took three classes to Ron Alves' farm where they participated in worming and immunizing sheep. I assigned an independent trip to a local farm by each student. We read David Mas Masumoto's Epitaph for a Peach. David Baggett of our ag department came into the classroom to critique (and largely affirm) Hanson's book.

Although I have since moved on to other topics in my English classes, we have continued to visit the Farmers Market once a semester. During those visits, I have students interview the people behind the stands about their products and their way of life. Oftentimes, when they bite into a tree-ripened varietal peach, it is the first time they have tasted a good piece of fruit, and the first time they have given much thought to where the peach comes from. Last semester, I took my English 50 (remedial level) students to the MJC farm on Beckwith Avenue. I set them loose in the November orchard to make observational notes about everything they heard, smelled, tasted, saw and felt. Back in the classroom the next day, they made poems based on their observations. (A portion of one of those poems appears at the beginning of this essay.)

The experience of being still and standing on the earth is one I will continue to offer my students. Although it is unlikely that they can become agrarians, perhaps they can help our culture retain at least some of the virtues that come more easily to people who have some appreciation for the source of food and fiber.