On the day celebrants around the world marked Earth Day’s 32nd birthday, a band of South Whidbey women who tread lightly on Earth rode buses and sang odes to the environment.
Clinton resident Margaret Moore — who lives in a straw bale house, composts waste and shares her fuel-efficient car with another family — called her friends to join a singalong on the Bayview-Clinton-Langley Island Transit bus route. Having recently read a book called “Divorce Your Car,” Moore said she wanted to do something on Earth Day to promote community and riding the bus.
The Earth Day troupe met at Bayview’s Smilin’ Dog Cafe at about 11 a.m. Gathered around the cafe’s propane stove, seven women sang familiar tunes with unfamiliar but fitting words. Take the Earth version of “Amazing Grace,” for instance:
Amazing Grace how sweet the Earth
The dirt between my toes
The sun pours down upon my crown,
The mighty river flows…
Now we’ve been here four million years,
Sustained by her sweet breast
Let’s sing her praise for all our days,
Then in her womb we’ll rest.
After singing indoors for about 15 minutes, Moore, dressed in a jungle print-pantsuit and wearing red boots, led her band of Earth women and a baby boy along for the ride toward the Bayview bus stop. The band members — Gaea Van Breda, Debra Nichols and son Connor, Claudia Walker, Jeanie McElwain, Norma Jean Young and Margaret Moore — were in elementary school, high school, college or raising children when the first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970 .
Once aboard the bus and singing, the women got more than a few looks from other riders. Ray House, 17, said he’d never heard ladies singing on a bus before. A carless traveler himself, House said he prefers to take the free bus service and ride his mountain bike to get around.
Not everybody seemed to be paying attention — which seems to be par for the course on Earth Day. One teen kept his headphones on during his ride to Freeland.
When three other teens came aboard at a later stop, they said they did not know it was Earth Day. Ethan Worthington, a sophomore at South Whidbey High School, said he has hippie parents who are environmentally inclined. He said riding the bus was the way many teens got around town.
The group traveled to Freeland, Langley and Clinton during the morning and afternoon, singing other Earth-friendly hits, such as “Simple Gifts,” “Hymns for the Global Family,” “The Recycle Song” (to the tune of “Mulberry Bush”) and, of course, “The Wheels of the Bus Go Round and Round.”
Earth Day was the inspiration of Denis Hayes. Now the president of the Seattle-based Bullitt Foundation, which awards millions of dollars in grants for Northwest environmental causes, Hayes’ first Earth Day was fueled by the activist energy of the Vietnam War protests.
In 1970, the day brought out 20 million people. It also introduced an environmental movement that linked protection of wild places and wildlife with air and water pollution concerns.
In 2000, 184 countries, including China, celebrated Earth and looked for ways to care for it.
