Tokyo Skies Over Boulder

TOKYO SKIES OVER COLORADO

by Doug Lee

THE SKY IS BLUE above Boulder, Colorado today, with some pretty, fair-weather clouds wisping over the mountains that rise up at the edge of this city where the Rockies meet the Great Plains. But it has been far from a clear blue for most days of recent weeks of this summer. They’ve ranged in hues from whiteish light gray to, more often, a kind of washed-out tangerine or dim, cheerless pink. One afternoon the sky darkened as if it were suddenly early evening, and everything beneath the heavens glowed a bizarre, alarming, sickly orange. It’s all because of the smoke in the atmosphere from monstrous wildfires burning here in the West, both near to us and far.

I’ve felt a certain sense of recognition as I’ve gazed at these flat, uninspiring skies, because I saw many such when I was an American kid living with my expatriate family in Tokyo in the early1960s. Japan was just beginning to take measures to control its heavy smog, produced mainly by industrial facilities within the city, many pouring out smoke, and traffic fumes. As I rode the school bus in the morning, it was a rare event to see Mount Fuji lying beyond the end of the road we drove, magnificently sharp and clear on the skyline in miniature silhouette. Since then, the nation’s measures against air pollution have progressed enormously. Today, one has a much better chance of seeing the sacred mountain’s breathtaking symmetry from afar.

My mother took painting classes over the three years we lived there. One of her canvasses depicted our Lee family’s farmhouse on my uncle’s dairy in coastal Mississippi, the cheery white-and-green home shaded and surrounded by the vibrant, reaching branches of pecan trees and the deeper shadows of over-spreading live oaks. The sky above them was a rich, cloudless azure.

The painting was good, her Sensei (Japanese for Honorable Teacher) told my mother, but no skies were ever that bright and unblemished a blue.

He believed that because he lived under Tokyo skies.

Life would one day half a century later bring me to call Colorado home. The powerful blue panoplies of flawless mountain skies that I’ve always taken for granted here are one of many parts of what brought me to choose this state to be my home for the later decades of a life lived mostly on the US Mid-Atlantic and Gulf Coasts and in southern Africa, based in Botswana’s Kalahari Desert. Between them all, I’ve seen every sort of clear blue or terrifyingly stormy sky—tornado or sandstorm, take your pick—that I care to. But it’s only in the past two summers, of 2020 and ’21, that I’ve lived beneath something it would never have occurred to me to be possible, and yet could become the norm, not an exception:

Tokyo skies over Colorado.

Japanese authorities were able to identify the principle pollution points and address them. But the causes of the fires that lie at the source of our pink and orange Colorado skies go infinitely deeper than that—right to our abundant numbers on the face of the planet, and ravenous use of its resources, most particularly fossil fuels. Our weird-tinted heavens are just one of myriad signs and results of the largest changes in Earth’s atmosphere since humans invented or discovered agriculture and started settling into fixed abodes roughly 11,000 years ago, and the cascade of additional changes that they bring, to life forms and planetary geology, to our lives, to the workings of the planet’s streaming rivers of air and currents pumping through the World Ocean. All of these and other key elements, too, are changing, and we can’t stop them.

But we can mitigate them—if and only if we take the enormous steps required to give the Good Ship Earth a chance to begin to right herself. I met not long ago with a leading conservationist based here in Boulder asking how I could contribute to her efforts and the NGO for which she works. At the end of our conversation, she made two points with me. The first was that I should be engaging with the movement ‘Nature Needs Half’.

Founded by the conservation NGO the ‘Wild Foundation’ headquartered in Boulder, the new organization’s purpose is to promote the goal of seeing half of Earth’s surface in a natural state by the year 2050. Within its framework, it also calls for a third of the planet to have gotten there by 2030. These may seem unrealistic to many a critical eye, but it has just received one heck of a boost from the passage last Friday at a congress of the IUCN’s (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) most recent World Conservation Congress of Motion 101 by a near-unanimous affirmative vote from its members, who represent influential organizations from most of the countries of the world.

What’s Motion 101? It’s a protocol initiated by the Wild Foundation that sets exactly the same aspirations as ‘Nature Needs Half’. What leverage does it provide? Wikipedia sums it up nicely in an entry on the IUCN:

“IUCN does not itself aim to mobilize the public in support of nature conservation. It tries to influence the actions of governments, business and other stakeholders by providing information and advice, and through building partnerships.”

And that’s good, because it jibes with the second point my NGO friend made to me.

“The critical decisions on the future of climate change and humanity’s survival,” she practically hissed at me, “are being made in boardrooms and cabinet meetings.”

So Motion 101 gives cause for hope through both international unity and influence in high places, as we face the planetary disaster head-on—the only hope we have for ensuring the future survival of our species, along with the millions of others we all ride along with in the circles Earth makes around the sun.

While keeping Boulder skies ringing blue.

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