Conservatives. Conservation, and Curmie's Dad

Today, April 22, is Earth Day.  You wouldn’t know it from the media coverage, or rather the lack thereof, but here we are on the 56th anniversary of the first Earth Day.  Here’s a memory Curmie put on his Facebook page in 2017, describing a personal experience from 1970:

Curmie's father was a rock-ribbed Republican, an environmentalist, a scientist (PhD in Botany, taught everything from microbiology to genetics), and—on the first Earth Day—a college president. Curmie was in 9th grade, and somehow ended up talking to a group of college students who couldn't understand how anyone could be all those things at once. Today, Curmie couldn't, either. Today's GOP has become the party of anti-intellectualism not merely with respect to the arts and humanities but especially (especially!) towards science. That's what decades of pandering to the lunatic branch of pseudo-Christianity has wrought.

That was certainly true nine years ago, and even more so today.  Dad might have been more amenable than Curmie to some of the priorities of the current administration, but not only would he have railed against the outright corruption of the Exalted Poobahs of Trumpistan, he’d have had a lot to say about the areas he knew far better than the average American.

He graduated with honors with a biology major from Dartmouth, and then earned a Master’s degree from the University of New Hampshire.  Early on in World War II, he enlisted in the Army.  He was a volunteer, although of course he would have been drafted, anyway.  His unit was scheduled to head to the South Pacific.  Then, some idiot Lieutenant decided that loading that massive anti-aircraft gun onto a truck didn’t really need six men; it could be done with four.  Dad screwed up his back badly enough that he received a medical discharge.

That meant he was free to pursue his doctorate at Washington State.  One of the ways he supported himself and his young bride (Curmie’s Mom) was by teaching a course called Aviation Medicine to pilots and other flight personnel heading off to service with the Army Air Force or the Navy.  The course dealt with the effects of altitude, weather, g-forces, and the like.  Years later, he taught upper-level college courses in human anatomy and physiology.  He also worked closely with a local doctor, testing the effectiveness of specific drugs against individual patients’ cough plates.  So whereas he wasn’t an MD, he was pretty close.  Curmie was going to say he was light years more qualified to discuss matters of health than Baby Bobby is, but even suggesting a comparison would be demeaning to Dad.  A fly-swatter is more qualified than that idiot.

Dad was also very much an outdoorsman and an environmentalist.  He became an expert at grafting, an important skill in areas with a lot of fruit trees.  He led trips to the college camps (one in the Catskills, the other in the Adirondacks) of two different colleges.  He raised evergreens as part of a program initiated by the Interior Department.  He could handle an axe better than anyone else I’ve ever known, even after smashing up his shoulder in a skiing accident.  When he was still teaching and therefore had summers free, he’d cut much of the hay in the field with a hand scythe instead of a tractor just so he could be outside in the fresh air getting exercise.  Curmie got pretty good at identifying trees by their leaves; his Dad could do so by their bark.

Curmie could go on, but he suspects you get the point, Dear Reader.  The man was a scientist, and he had great regard for those who were researchers in any of those areas.  He certainly supported me in my career choices, but I think the fact that I always did well in the math and science courses I did take gave him a certain amount of pride.  It wasn’t that I couldn’t do science, or even that I didn’t like it.  I was just better at something else, and happier doing that other thing.  If my Dad was disappointed that I didn’t follow in his footsteps, he never showed it.  I’m forever grateful for that.

So, would Curmie’s Dad have approved of cuts to the CDC or NOAA or cancer research?  Of course not.  But what would really make his blood boil would be the evisceration of the National Park Service, and above all the recent overturning of the mining ban near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, all to benefit a Chilean (!) mining operation.  Only two GOP Senators voted against that bill, and one of them was Susan Collins, who occasionally pretends not be just another partisan hack, provided, of course, that her vote against the party line doesn’t actually affect the outcome.  Her feigned independence is almost worse than the garden-variety sycophants that make up the majority of the Republican Congresscritter alliance.

Once upon a time, back in the Dark Ages of the 1970s, the etymological link between conservative and conservationist wasn’t ironic.  Now, of course, it is.  Curmie’s Dad was both of those things.  He died in 1999.  Any pretense that the GOP cared about anyone but their campaign donors died about then, too.