Every Earth Day the figures get repeated: more than a billion people, in over 175 countries, marking the date the United Nations calls International Mother Earth Day. The numbers are true and they are also easy to tune out. What is harder to ignore is a single, stubborn, physical example of the planet being given a second chance — and for that, you could do worse than stand on the High Line.
A garden built on a ruin
The High Line is a park laid along a derelict elevated freight line on Manhattan’s West Side — steel that was scheduled for demolition, replanted instead by James Corner Field Operations and the planting designer Piet Oudolf into a mile-and-a-half garden in the sky. It is landscape architecture as resurrection: the self-seeded weeds that colonised the abandoned tracks were studied, then echoed in a cultivated wildness that changes with the seasons. To walk it is to be reminded that “nature” and “the city” were never really opposites.
Make a Salad
One Earth Day the park hosted something gloriously low-tech. The Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, with Jessica Higgins and Joshua Selman, restaged Make a Salad — an event she first performed in 1962. The artist chops lettuce and other vegetables to the beat of live music and then, in one grand gesture, tosses the ingredients together into a giant salad to be shared. It is a happening, a meal and a small ecological parable at once: food as performance, abundance as something you make in public and give away.
The planet won't wait
More than a decade later the High Line has been copied in dozens of cities, sometimes well, sometimes as mere real-estate garnish. The original still teaches the better lesson. Mobilising the planet from the ground up does not always look like a march; sometimes it looks like replanting a ruin, or chopping a salad to music thirty feet above the traffic. The message is the same either way: the Earth won’t wait, so we may as well start where we are standing.