By Julie Lalo

I celebrated Earth Week when it happened in April in the fashion to which I've become accustomed. I kept it at arm's length.

I've fallen into a certain stand-offishness. I don't generally engage in the one-day hype, because if I do, it feel like I'm diminishing my year-long commitment to the notions of environmentalism. My beliefs are, as the kids say, "24/7," referring, of course, to the number of hours in a day and the days in a week.

I suspect that to rabid enviros, Earth Day generates that same charitable look that regular church-goers may save for the two-visits-a-year types.

This year, my day started with a live interview with a radio talk-show host. The media blind-sider tried to bait me into bashing private property rights. I was serving as spokesperson for Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, so I kept my talking points in front of me, and repeated my mantra -- "Earth Day is for personal action."

That was at 7:30 a.m., and right then, it felt like this year would be no different than the past half-dozen. Yet, again, I'd be called on to validate my commitment to clean water and clean air, which I do on behalf of those who "just don't get it." It's a darn good thing no one makes anyone pass a justification test to determine if you deserve clean air to breathe, or clean water to drink. But, of course, that is exactly what I didn't say to the man with the microphone.

Western Pennsylvania Conservancy is known for many things, and not the least of them is our watch-dogging of a peregrine falcon aerie on the 37th floor of the Gulf Tower building, in Pittsburgh. It was coincidental to the holiday that that afternoon I went to a meeting with the director of development and one of the staff scientists in the tower. We stood mere yards from these endangered species specimens. My co-workers and I peeked through a peephole to discreetly watch the two adults and their four "ugly ducklings" perched on the ledge.

There the three of us were, each trying to accommodate our departmental interests. The scientist was working with others to determine the best day in the young ones' growth to band their legs with identifying tags. It's important to choose the time when leg girth is big enough to fit the band, but the birds are not so far along in their development that they will unwisely attempt to fly from the gloved hands reaching into the nest box. At 37 floors above street level, it's a dangerous way to discover their flight feathers aren't fully developed.

The development director was sizing the room to determine how to provide a comfortable climate for some of the Conservancy's supporters who would enjoy seeing the young peregrines up close. The banding is a sensory moment. The parents may attack the scientists who are borrowing the young birds, and there could be lots of swooping. Screeching by both young and adult is apparently standard. There is stress, and not the least of it from the professionals who don't want to do anything to disrupt the birds for longer than necessary.

I was there to talk about what would suit the media who would like to chronicle the hour.

We focused our discussion, standing in the empty office, but we kept interrupting ourselves to lift the flap of cardboard to peek out the window. We couldn't help it. The female stood near the four huddled young, and the male glided almost all the way in, with something in his talons. The female took off, and apparently overtook him. They flew out of our sight, and next thing we saw, she came back to resume her perch. He sailed through the canyon shaped by the city's sky-scrapers, his talons empty. We joked that someone below just wondered why a dead pigeon landed on his head.

We were on our way down to the street in the express elevator when we commented that we had just celebrated Earth Day in a proper fashion -- witnessing nature as it survives in a city.

I didn't think much more about this notion of "place" until I went to a lecture the next evening. The keynote speaker was Linda Lear, who has just written what some call the definitive biography of Rachel Carson, called Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature.

She announced that her talk was called "The Power of Place: From Springdale to Silent Spring." Carson grew up in the small Pittsburgh suburb of Springdale, and her home has been preserved by the Rachel Carson Homestead Association to protect this important woman's legacy. Lear is also an Allegheny County native.

So, there I sat, the evening after Earth Day, just outside Pittsburgh, pondering my conundrum: I had moved to a city to more effectively communicate the importance of conserving natural resources, and it continues to be a personal tug. My need to be in boots in the woods is often in resistance to my responsibilities to be in skirt and heels in a downtown office.

Personal continuing education is the reason I need to be in areas that are less than 90 percent paved. My knowledge of things natural is more a matter of repetition than an inherent sense. What I see or hear I ask myself to identify -- over and over until they become so familiar I can make the call without hesitation. For me, it takes a long time.

I can identify may apples because I look for them every year. I know the call of a red-winged blackbird because I have cataloged it often enough. I believe I'll know again the next time I see a streamside filled with trout lily in the spring of the year.

But I haven't seen the goldfinches color up this spring. It's been far more than a year since I've had to use the sheltering limbs of a hemlock for a natural umbrella. Not one bluebird has crossed my path. What if I never see even just one evening grosbeak? I remember one year when I was late repeatedly for meetings because a little flock of the big-beaked birds stayed in my yard for a few weeks, and practically barricaded the feeders outside my home office. I was so entranced, it took major effort to pick up the car keys and leave them.

I came to the city, and my sense of place got skewed. It took Linda Lear's talk to help me. "Rachel wasn't reflective," Lear said of Carson, "She didn't have time. She didn't reflect on family, on her illness or her career." But if she had, Lear contends, she would have to admit that she is a product of where she came from.

She watched the current and the time of the Allegheny River, the author said, and watched the devastation caused by careless degradation of her working-class town. At the same time, "Rachel took refuge in nature and its certain and soothing rhythms," Lear told us. Springdale was so much a part of her adult life, that Lear believes "the barbed remarks in Silent Spring had their origin in Springdale." So much so that the mythical town that opens Silent Spring -- where no birds sing -- was called Green Meadows in the initial draft. An editor removed it, but it doesn't take much to see the short lifeline between Springdale and Green Meadows.

So, as I drove home along the Allegheny River after Lear's talk on a wet spring night, I realized that I am, too, a product of "place." We all are. And place is, like time, sequential. For me, it starts with eastern Pennsylvania roots, and my first snakes, water spiders, crayfish, wetlands and long hikes. It moves through early adulthood up and down the east coast, where I really started to dog-ear my field guides. It was time in Harrisburg, where I found out that government arrogantly and routinely forgets that nature has the last say.

I actually laughed out loud in the car. I had disdainfully "placed" nature in only the most natural of spaces.

Maybe I won't see another grosbeak. Maybe I'll never see the secret steps of a woodcock dance again. But it took my coming to Pittsburgh for me to see one of the fastest birds on earth (those peregrines). And I heard this year's first spring peepers at a metro station outside Washington, D.C.

I'll think of a few other urban nature moments I've already had, and I'm about to have lots more. I'll keep asking, "What's that?," and I'll find some new elements to train myself to identify. At the end of my Earth Day and a half, I had fresh insight. Nature isn't something in a box. Nature is where you place it.