CATALYST was conceived in the Spring of 1981. It hit the newsstands in April of ’82. You are holding in your hands the 33rd April edition of CATALYST. You’ll see some of those 33 covers in this issue. Perusing all these Aprils, we see some perennial stories: This is the month when we ramp up the garden coverage. (Actually, this is the first April where we’ve not.) We’ve published enough garden info through the years that we could easily do a whole book called The CATALYST Guide to High Desert Gardening. April is also the month of the annual legislative roundup.
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CATALYST was conceived in the Spring of 1981. It hit the newsstands in April of ’82. You are holding in your hands the 33rd April edition of CATALYST.
You’ll see some of those 33 covers in this issue.
Perusing all these Aprils, we see some perennial stories: This is the month when we ramp up the garden coverage. (Actually, this is the first April where we’ve not.) We’ve published enough garden info through the years that we could easily do a whole book called The CATALYST Guide to High Desert Gardening. April is also the month of the annual legislative roundup.
In the 1980s, our Earth Day coverage focused on deep ecology and the role of the spiritual activist in the environmental movement. One 1986 story that makes me shake my head is “Salt Lake Food Co-op Comes of Age;” and a 1988 piece on the rise of commuter bicycling. Everything old is new again; we are still coming of age.
It seems like only yesterday we published Fred Montague’s “Earth Day Manifesto: For the Children, the Whales and the Wildflowers.” It was 1995. Fred was a biology professor at the University of Utah at the time. We could reprint it today. “Every atom in your body is billions of years old!” he reminds us.
More Earth Day thoughts, from our beloved Donella Meadows, whose syndicated column “The Global Citizen” appeared in every issue of CATALYST until her untimely death in 2001: “If a red light blinks on in a cockpit, should the pilot ignore it until it gets a peer review and speaks in an unexcited tone?” In April 2008, we published a history of SLC Earth Day activities.
The internet makes communication more instant; people don’t seem to plan ahead as much as they used to. A mere four years ago, we published an entire page of Earth Day events (which means we knew it in March). Now, we’ll probably get the word mid-April.
I’ll admit I most enjoyed my own column. It was like rereading one journal entry a year for the past 33 years. I announced my marriage to John in the April 1986 issue; in ’04 I reminisced on a ’91 escapade to Telluride with Polly, our art director and my niece; shared photos of our India trip in April 2011; wrote a birthday letter to my big bro in ’12….
CATALYST traditionally has the work of Utah artists on its covers. This month is an exception. A friend from Wisconsin posted this image on a Utah friend’s Facebook page. We liked it, and traced it back to United Kingdom. The artist, a woman named Cat, was astounded. She’d been perusing the dictionary for a “Cat”-related name for her website, and had just been considering “catalyst.” Serendipty is our middle name.
We may not have our typically practical gardening info in this issue, but there’s one story to make you want to garden if you don’t already: Diane Olson’s story on the M. vaccae, a soil bacteria that, no kidding, makes you happy. And all that time we thought it was the fresh air and sunshine.
Enjoy this, our 33rd April edition. And have a great month