environment | Bob Schwartz

Tag: environment

Happy Earth Day 2026

Today is Earth Day.

Looking for comic book illustration for today, I found two options.

Everyone knows, or used to know, Smokey Bear.

Smokey Bear was created in 1944, in the face of wildfire threats during World War II. He was depicted pouring water on a campfire. The slogan “Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires” was introduced in 1947. Popular ever since as a conservation influencer, kids could at one time become Smokey Bear Junior Forest Rangers, receiving a membership kit that typically included a membership card, a Smokey Bear badge and a certificate. For city kids who lived far from any forest, this was exciting.

If you want to take a selfie with Smokey Bear, National Park Service bookstores sometimes display full size models.

If you are wondering why the theme song (below) is “Smokey THE Bear”, which is what he is often called now, it was to add an extra syllable for a musical beat. But “Smokey Bear” is his legal name.

Speaking of city kids learning about conservation, there is Mark Trail.

Mark Trail is a comic strip created in 1946 by Ed Dodd, an outdoorsman with a passion for nature and wildlife conservation. Mark Trail is a writer and photographer working for Woods and Wildlife magazine. The strip focused on environmental and wildlife conservation, with stories about poaching, habitat destruction, endangered species, and other ecological concerns woven into the plots. Mark Trail was known for punching out villains who were harming the environment. Reading the Sunday color comics, long before Earth Day, gave those same city kids their first introduction to conservation, just like Smokey did. The strip continues to run to this day.

Happy Earth Day from Smokey Bear, Mark Trail and me!

June 23, 2015

Pope Francis’ Encyclical Laudato Si’

Laudato Si'

The Pope’s new encyclical, Laudato Si’, has been much in the news. Whatever you’ve heard about it, if you haven’t seen it, you really don’t know the whole story.

You’ve heard it is about the environment and climate change, which is in small part true. You’ve heard Catholic presidential hopefuls such as Jeb Bush and Bobby Jindal admonish the Pope, their spiritual father, telling him to stick to religion and stay out of politics.

The encyclical is much bigger than climate change, the environment, and certainly bigger than Bush or Jindal or dozens of politicians. It is a big statement about the moral and religious shortcomings of this modern world and us modern people. You don’t have to be Catholic or Christian or faithful or religious to read and appreciate it. You just have to read it.

It is full of inconvenient and uncomfortable truths. Which is probably why the coverage has focused on the environmental exhortations, rather than on the broader cultural, media, technological and social ones. In essence, it is nothing less than a call for radical evolution, in the spirit of the radical evolutionary upon whom the church is built. There are plenty of established institutions and powerful interests and individuals, including the media, who could be forced to change if such radical evolution came to pass. And many of them don’t want to change, and don’t even want us to listen to the Pope talking about it.

The encyclical is a long and deep but very readable work. Download it, sample it. You don’t have to read it all, or all at once. It is naturally grounded in theology, and in some particular theology, but be assured that the observations and conclusions don’t require you to hold any sectarian beliefs. It only requires that we believe that things are far from perfect, and that after we take a close look at ourselves and others, we believe that we have the power and obligation to make things better.

It is filled with so much quotable inspired thought and inspiration. Here is just one brief excerpt:

114. All of this shows the urgent need for us to move forward in a bold cultural revolution. Science and technology are not neutral; from the beginning to the end of a process, various intentions and possibilities are in play and can take on distinct shapes. Nobody is suggesting a return to the Stone Age, but we do need to slow down and look at reality in a different way, to appropriate the positive and sustainable progress which has been made, but also to recover the values and the great goals swept away by our unrestrained delusions of grandeur.

Laudato Si’ PDF

Laudato Si’ epub and Kindle

2 Comments