Brady Ciel Marks and Mark Timmings
Wetland Project
all day, Earth Day (April 22, 2024)

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In celebration and protest, on the 54th annual Earth Day, the 8th annual Slow Radio Broadcast of Wetland Project was shared at ECHO-ECHO as a listen-in.

Photo: OHCE-ECHO

Brady Ciel Marks and Mark Timmings's Wetland Project, a twenty-four-hour field recording of the ṮEḴTEḴSEN marsh in unceded W̱SÁNEĆ territory, streams online year-round, and has been presented as a Slow Radio Broadcast with participating radio stations worldwide, on Earth Day, since 2017.

Photo: OHCE-ECHO

Thanks to everyone who stopped by for sidewalk listening from midnight to 9am, and quiet-with-masks-indoor/convivial-with-tea-covered-outdoor gathering/s from 9am to midnight.

Photo: Rachel Topham Photography

The First e/Earth d/Day was written from the unceded territory of the xwməθkwəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations for the listen-in, and can be downloaded as a PDF, or read below.

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The First e/Earth d/Day

The first Earth Day wasn’t called Earth Day, and it was the vernal equinox in 1970, and every year since, on that earth day, a bell is rung for peace.

The first Earth Day that was called Earth Day was April 22, 1970, and it was meant to be a teach-in.

Conservation is what’s called a “crisis discipline,” which is to say that it is an act of separation.

The Oregon Treaty was signed on June 15, 1846, and the 49th Parallel became an international boundary, an active separation, it continues to this day.

The term international was adapted from ius gentium, or “the law observed by all mankind,” which is to say that in the same year that the last Amazona violacea and the last Amazona martinicana are hypothesized to have been killed, separation became the language of peace.

Eighty-one years before the first Earth Day, “at noon, thousands rush[ed] to claim [the [so-called] Unassigned Lands] in the Land Rush of 1889,” and the same year claims the last of the Ara tricolor, the Columba versicolor, the Fundulus albolineatus, the Lagorchestes leporides, the Nycticorax caledonicus crassirostris, the Pipistrellus sturdeei, and possibly, Canis lupus hattai.

The first earth day was old beyond memory, and some call it time immemorial.

The first earth day was 4.543 billion years ago, plus or minus about 50 million years, and earth’s water is older than the sun.

My first earth day was October 2, 1985, a day already past the point of no return for the Colpocephalum californici, as the last of the Gymnogyps californianus were being de-loused by pesticides, in what we now call “conservation-induced extinction.”

My first earth day was eight years before my grandmother Hirundinidae’s last earth day, and a year later, at the San Diego Zoo, I saw the California condors through my tears, and today I wonder if they were grieving, too.

The first earth day was a “disturbance in [a] dust cloud,” and earth to earth, our last earth days are our first earth days.

“The first Earth Day remains the largest single-day protest in human history.”

The 54th Earth Day is this one, and I’m calling it a listen-in.

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