Earth Day turns 40
http://www.pacificsun.com/story.php?story_id=3864
It's old enough to know the scorebut is it young enough to play in the game?
April 16, 2010
"Do you think it is really possible that the fathers of pollution can
be the fathers of the cure?" queried College of Marin sociologist
Charles Sizemore at the county's first-ever Earth Day gathering in 1970.
Here we are 40 years later, on the cusp of another big Earth Day
celebration at the College of Marin, and the answer remains as
dubious today as it did in 1970eight years after Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring launched the modern-day environmental movement.
In fact, if the answer to Sizemore's question back then was "not so
sure," the response today might be more like "seriously doubt it."
In the last decade, green has gone viral. It's hip, it's fashionable,
it's mainstream. Climate change, carbon footprint, "think global, act
local" have become common parlance. And yet glaciers continue to
melt, islands of plastic continue to grow and carbon footprints carve
larger and larger paths to calamity. Earth Day's message has never
been more importantbut after 40 of them, are we still listening?
Like a lot of folks who reach the Big Four-Uh-Oh, this celebration
could be asking itself the usual questions: What have I achieved? Are
my best years behind me? Can I still make a difference?
What we at the Pacific Sun want to know on this benchmark day: Is
Earth Day having a midlife crisis?
We raised that very question about Earth Day, as well as a few
others, to a trio of leading environmentalists:
Phyllis Faber has been active on the Marin County environmental scene
since the early 1970s. Her work in wetlands restoration and natural
history studies stands alongside what is arguably her crowning
achievementco-founding the Marin Agricultural Land Trust with Ellen
Straus, in the late 1970s.
Jared Huffman is Marin's state assemblyman, chairing both the Water,
Parks & Wildlife Committee and the Environmental Caucus. As a
legislator, Huffman received a 100 percent rating from the California
League of Conservation Voters in 2009 and an 87 percent from the
Sierra Club. He'll be the keynote speaker April 29 at the fourth
annual Marin Green Business Forum in Mill Valley.
Bill McKibben is one of the world's loudest voices in the call to
slow climate change. His 350.org named for scientist James Hansen's
theory that an atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide above 350
parts per million was unsafeis one of the fastest-growing
global-warming-awareness campaigns in the world. McKibben's byline
has appeared in dozens of major publications throughout the U.S.,
including the Pacific Sun. McKibben will present his latest book,
Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, at Dominican's Angelico
Hall on April 22.Jason Walsh
--
Interviews by Carol Inkellis and Samantha Campos
What were you doing on the first Earth Day?
Huffman: The first one was in 1970, wasn't it? I was only 6 years
old. And while I don't remember the first Earth Day, I do have early
childhood memories of the whole movement around it. What I remember
is suddenly there was this huge awareness on water pollution and on
endangered species like the osprey and the bald eagle [that] because
of DDT were on the verge of blinking outtheir eggshells were so thin
that they couldn't reproduce. I remember a huge campaign against
litter, as part of all that.
McKibben: I was 9 and living in Canada on the first one in 1970, so
it didn't make much of an impressionit was really the 20th
anniversary in 1990, I think, that really got me interested .
Faber: That first Earth Day was something else. I was teaching in a
school in Rowayton, Connecticut. And I organized this great big
event: I rented a huge tent and the whole school was organized. We
had speakers from all over and it was really a community event.
People still talk about it.
We were connected to the group in Washington that was starting it, so
there were constant phone calls back and forth. Gaylord Nelson
[Democratic senator from Wisconsin and founder of Earth Day] had come
out in support of environmental events and so this was a real
national effort. We had speakers...about population and population
issues...people who were grinding up bottles to make driveway
material. We had speakers on wetlands and preserving wetlands, which
was brand new in those days...previously wetlands had been thought of
as waste lands. So 1970 was really a momentous era.
How seriously do people take Earth Day? Is it a day of contemplation
about the environment? Or is it like President's Daywe know about
it, but it's not really making us think more deeply about Washington
and Lincoln.
Faber: Well, that's very true. I just heard this morning a little
thing on the radio about how people really weren't motivated to
change their own lifestyle until gasoline became so expensive, and
then they began to think of doing the right thing, not because it was
the right thing but because of their pocketbook.
Huffman: I think for a lot of people it's sort of a consciousness
event: Can I do something or can I reflect on this day to reconnect
myself to environmental principles? It also should be a reminder that
no matter how daunting the environmental challenge, we can rise to
the occasion. And it's easy to lose hope today when you think about
big issues, like global warming. But we've been there before, and
we've made changes that really did respond to those challenges and we
can do it again. That to me is the message of Earth Day.
McKibben: I think there's still a good spark of the original activist
sentimentbut too often it's diverted into purely local, small-scale things.
What's something meaningful that Marinites can do the other 364 days
of the year?
Huffman: I hope that what people in Marin would focus on is, that
notwithstanding the environmental beauty that is all around us, there
are some serious environmental impacts from our lifestyle and from
the choices that we makeeven in Marin County.
Faber: I think we really have to get in and support things that are
realistic. For example, I'm horrified that there was not more support
for the SMART train. It made sense for Marin County to really get
behind having a train [so there wouldn't] be so many cars on the
road. I think we really have to be serious about public transportation.
McKibben: Organizing politically. It's not enough to perfect Marinto
deal with climate change we need a real global movement of the type
we've built at 350.org .
Name a major environmental success that's been achieved since the
first Earth Day?
McKibben: Cleaner air and water in this country.
Huffman: I think Earth Day itself was a huge success. We have to go
back to its origins and remember that, before that first Earth Day,
[things were] really bad. We had a river in Cleveland, Ohio, that
caught on fire and they couldn't put it out. We had the Great Lakes
that were so polluted people literally considered them dead to
aquatic life. We had our national symbol, the bald eagle, on the
verge of extinction because of pesticides. Air quality in our major
cities was terrible. At that point in time, it was a pretty dark hour
for the environment. But Earth Day really did turn it around and very
quickly thereafter we saw the creation of the Environmental
Protection Agency, we saw the passage of these landmark federal
billsthe National Environmental Policy Act [NEPA], we saw the ESA,
the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water
Act. And you know what? The bald eagle is no longer an endangered
species. In Marin County we have something like 40 nested pair of
osprey in Kent Lake alone. You look around and see the huge
improvementsthe Great Lakes again have a fishery that could be
better but the Great Lakes are a live ecosystem again.
Name an issue of singular importance that people should be focusing
on at Earth Day 2010?
McKibben: Climate change is the issue that countswhich is too bad,
because it's also the hardest issue.
Faber: We have to be very serious about how we eat, what kind of food
we eat. I think we have gotten way, way off the page with our eating
habits. We've been sort of taken by the hand because it was the easy
route; and we eat far too much sugar, far too much salt, because it
was profitable for the cereal companies for example to make cereal
that tasted good to the kids 'cause it was sweet, and we haven't
really gotten down to the basics of what makes people healthy.
Agriculture in Marin is really struggling. And I don't think the
public really gets that. I don't think the stores really get it. I
think Whole Foods doesn't really really get behind buying locally...I
think Trader Joe's opts for getting the bottom price. Costco and
Trader Joe's I think are close to being scandalous because they
always opt for paying growers the least amount of money so they can
offer it to the public and undercut the price of everybody else. Well
that isn't the way healthy food supply is developed. You have to pay
people. I'm horrified by the fundamental environmentalists wanting to
put the oyster grower out of business who grows over 40 percent of
the state's oysters...people want to put him out of business because
they want wilderness. What is wilderness in an area that
has...roads...it has fences...[it] is a romantic, nonsensical concept...
Huffman: I think our carbon footprint is probably the largest issue.
There are not a lot of transportation alternatives other than driving
a fossil-fuel-burning vehicle to get around Marin County. We hope to
improve on that in the years ahead with SMART. But right now, people
drive a lot more than they should. That's one thing that we should
all be mindful of.
What will we be talking about 40 years from nowat Earth Day 2050?
Is there an environmental issue not on a bumper sticker todaybut
will be in the decades to come?
McKibben: We'll be talking about whether or not we managed to deal
with the great transition away from fossil fuel to what comes
nextand whether we did it in time.
Huffman: I hope 40 years from now we'll talk about how we turned it
around and saved California salmon. I hope we'll talk about how, even
though we're beginning to see the effects of climate change and sea
level rise and other changes, that we bent the curve, that we stopped
the worst of the impacts. I hope we'll be able to say that we're
beginning to stabilize the loss of biodiversity, that we are making
society and our economy better in the way we respond to our
environmental challengesby promoting local food, by reducing our
reliance on imported water supplies and becoming much, much more
efficient in both our water and our energy use. And that we are
beginning to plan communities and to move people through
transportation strategies that are dramatically better for the environment.
Faber: Well [laughs], do you want my optimistic or my pessimistic view?
Give it us straight, Phyllis!
Faber: I think there has to be a very serious reawakening of the
American public. And I think the American public is now kind of
turned off; they're angry at Congress...That they even listen to Fox
News tells me that they aren't really thinking in a very constructive
way; it's a very negative way. Fox just brings out the negativity in
people, and so I think the public really needs to be re-educated or
re-awakened to the seriousness of the issues.
I think these issues are far more serious than people have any
understanding of, and how to get them from where they are now to a
recognition of the seriousnessI don't think our leaders even
understand how very serious some of the issues are.
I'm not optimistic because I see things that are not able to be
controlled...the quality of our water is being degradedjust things
like people dumping their medicine down the toilet, so we have all
these hormones that are in the water that are making some species
sterile, they're changing all of us. We have viruses that are
becoming uncontrollable...I see things ahead that we're not thinking
about. We are a monoculture that has never learned to control our
species. We've never had predators, so the only control we have over
our population is basically war and disease. We're killing a fair
number of people through wars throughout the world... so our
population is getting limited by war. And you really worry about disease.
Earth Day is 40it's middle-aged. Does it need a facelift?
Huffman: You know, I wouldn't give it a complete makeover. I think we
always need to improve our wardrobe and do things like that. But it's
a day that has stood the test of time and should only get better
going forward. It doesn't need to be reinvented. It just needs to be
better appreciated and I am confident that with every passing year
it's going to become more and more ingrained in our national consciousness.
Faber: Well, it's such a different population today than created the
first Earth Day. The dynamics are very different. There was a sudden
recognition of the seriousness of environmental issues. And that
provoked a first Earth Day that was really an effort to create rather
immediate educational results. And I don't see that happening today.
If you could say something to the Earth on this Earth Day, what would that be?
McKibben: 350 is the most important number on the planet.
Faber: I would wish every parent and every child and every teacher
would celebrate by going out and looking at birds... I'm the editor
of a series of UC Press natural history guides, and so I would like
to see every parent and every teacher with one of that series in
their hand, with either one or many children at hand going out in
nature and enjoying Earth Daylearning to respect the other species
that we share the Earth with.
Huffman: I'm sorry. And we will do better.
--
PLANET ROCK
Here are a few local ways to toast the third stone from the sun...
Earth Day Marin
An all-day, free event celebrating the 40th anniversary of Earth Day,
featuring live music from BCH & the Jaw Droppers (members of Hot
Buttered Rum, New Monsoon, Zero), Dr. Elmo & Wild Blue, Terry
Garthwaite and Oona Garthwaite, Three At Last, Let's Go Green and the
Donna Eagle Band; local chefs, tastings and delicious food by Good
Earth and Lydia's Lovin' Foods; environmental speakers, such as Sen.
Mark Leno, Supervisor Charles McGlashan, Carrie Bachelder (The Away
Station), Bill Petrocelli (Book Passage, Huffington Post) and Annie
Spiegelman (the Dirt Diva); and activities for kids and adults,
including "bike your own smoothie," recycled art, free raffle and
more. 11am-6pm April 24 at College of Marin, Kentfield.
Info:www.earthdaymarin.org .
Marin Green Business Forum
Presented by the Mill Valley Chamber of Commerce and MarinLink.
Keynote speaker Jared Huffman, 6th District assemblyman, will address
"How State Legislative Policies Can Create Green Jobs," along with a
panel of Marin green business entrepreneurs moderated by county
Supervisor Charles McGlashan. 5:30-8:30pm April 29 at Mill Valley
Community Center.
Earth Day Park Cleanup
Help clean up the Tam Valley parks. Trash bags and gloves provided.
9am-2pm April 17 at Eastwood Park, Kay Park and The Cabin. Info:
388-6393 or www.tcsd.us .
Earth Day Celebration/Restoration Work Day
Sponsored by Tiburon's Richardson Bay Audubon Center & Sanctuary.
Celebrate the Earth by working on restoration projects, removing
trash, invasive plants and cleaning up the bay, as well as exploring
mudflats, identifying wildflowers and viewing birds. 9am-2pm April
17. Info: 388-2524.
Earth Day Cleanup
Hosted by Friends of Corte Madera Creek, this is the annual cleanup
at the Kentfield restoration project at the College of Marin's
Ecology Study Area, between McAllister Avenue and the multiuse path.
Participants are being asked to wear boots and gloves to weed and
harvest plants. 9:30am April 17. Info: 457-1147.
Earth Day Create with Nature
Professional artists and community members join together for this
free event. Bring a picnic. 11am-3pm April 17 at Stinson Beach, South
End. Info: 510/708-5528 or www.naturesculpture.com .
Conversations with Eco-Innovators
"Why Care About the Sixth Extinction?" with Dr. Thomas Brooks,
Conservation Priorities and Outreach, Center for Applied Biodiversity
Science and Conservation International. 6:30-7:30pm April 20 at
Cavallo Point, 601 Murray Circle, Fort Baker, Sausalito. Info:
561-3560 or www.instituteatgoldengate.org .
Bill McKibben
Environmental journalist/activist McKibben presents his latest book,
Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Part of the Voices of
Dominican Choices: Spring 2010 Leadership Lecture Series. 7pm April
22 at Angelico Hall, Dominican Campus, 50 Acacia Ave., San Rafael.
Info: www.dominican.edu or call 485-3202.
--------
The dawn of Earth Day
http://www.sfbg.com/2010/04/13/dawn-earth-day
GREEN ISSUE: The largest secular holiday in the world was born in
1970 and its chief organizer has lessons for the movement 40 years later
04.13.10
Tim Redmond
tredmond@sfbg.com
The heavens welcomed Earth Day to America. All over the country,
April 22, 1970 dawned clear and sunny; mild weather made it even
easier to bring people into the streets. The Capitol Mall was packed,
and so many members of Congress were making speeches and appearing at
events that both houses adjourned for the day.
Mayors, governors, aldermen, village trustees, elementary school
kids, Boy Scout troops, labor unions, college radicals, and even
business groups participated. In fact, the only organization in the
nation that actively opposed Earth Day was the Daughters of the
American Revolution, which warned ominously that "subversive elements
plan to make American children live in an environment that is good for them."
By nightfall, more than 20 million people had participated in the
First National Environmental Teach-In, as the event was formally
known. It established the environmental movement in the United States
and helped spur the passage of numerous laws and the creation of
hundreds of activist groups.
It was, by almost all accounts, a phenomenal success, an event that
dwarfed the largest single-day civil rights and antiwar
demonstrations of the era and the person who ran it, 25-year-old
Denis Hayes, wasn't happy.
His concern with the nascent movement back then says a lot about
where environmentalism is 40 years later.
Gaylord Nelson, a mild-mannered U.S. senator from Wisconsin, came up
with the idea of Earth Day on a flight from Santa Barbara to Oakland.
Nelson was the kind of guy who doesn't get elected to the Senate
these days a polite, friendly small-town guy who was anything but a
firebrand.
A balding, 52-year-old World War II veteran who survived Okinawa,
Nelson was a Democrat and generally a liberal vote, but he got along
fine with the die-hard conservatives. He kept a fairly low profile,
and did a lot of his work behind the scenes.
But long before it was popular, Nelson was an ardent environmentalist
and he was always looking for ways to bring the future of the
planet into the popular consciousness.
In August 1969, Nelson was on a West Coast speaking tour and one of
his mandatory stops was the small coastal city that seven months
earlier had become ground zero for the environmental movement.
Indeed, a lot of historians say that Earth Day 1970 was the coming
out party for modern environmentalism but the spark that made it
possible, the event that turned observers into activists, took place
Jan. 28, 1969 in Santa Barbara.
About 3:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, a photographer from the Santa
Barbara News Press got the word that something had gone wrong on one
of the Union Oil drilling platforms in the channel just offshore. The
platforms were fairly new the federal government had sold drilling
rights in the area in February 1968 for $603 million, and Union was
in the process of drilling its fourth offshore well. The company had
convinced the U.S. Geological Survey to relax the safety rules for
underwater rigs, saying there was no threat of a spill.
But shortly after the drill bit struck oil 3,478 feet beneath the
surface, the rig hit a snag and when the workers got the equipment
free, oil began exploding out. Within two weeks, more than 3 million
gallons of California crude was on the surface of the Pacific Ocean,
and a lot of it had washed ashore, fouling the pristine beaches of
Santa Barbara and fueling an angry popular backlash nationwide.
Nelson received an overwhelming reception at his Santa Barbara talk
and horrified as he was by the spill, he was glad that an
environmental concern was suddenly big news.
But, as he told me in an interview years ago, he still wasn't sure
what the next steps ought to be until, bored on an hour-long flight
to his next speech in Berkeley, he picked up a copy of Ramparts magazine.
The radical left publication, once described as having "a bomb in
every issue," wasn't Nelson's typical reading material. But this
particular issue was devoted to a new trend on college campuses
day-long "teach-ins" on the Vietnam War.
Huh, Nelson thought. A teach-in. That's an intriguing idea.
Hayes was a student in the prestigious joint program in law and
public policy at Harvard. He'd been something of a campus activist,
protesting against the war, but hadn't paid much attention to
environmental issues. He needed a public-interest job of some sort
for a class project, though, so when he read a newspaper article
about the senator who was planning a national environmental teach-in,
he called and offered to organize the effort in Boston. Nelson
invited him to Washington, was impressed by his Harvard education and
enthusiasm, and hired him to run the whole show.
The senator was very clear from the start: the National Environmental
Teach-In would not be a radical Vietnam-style protest. The event
would be nonpartisan, polite, and entirely legal. Hayes and his
staffers chafed a bit at the rules (and the two Senate staffers
Nelson placed in the Earth Day office to keep an eye on things), and
they ultimately set up a separate nonprofit called the Environmental
Action Foundation to take more aggressive stands on issues.
Meanwhile, Hayes did the job he was hired to do and did it well.
Everywhere he turned, from small towns to big corporations, people
wanted to plug in, to be a part of the first Earth Day. Many wanted
to do nice, noncontroversial projects: In Knoxville, Tenn., students
decided to scour rivers and streams for trash to see if they could
each clean up the five pounds of garbage the average American threw
away each day. In dozens of communities, people organized
tree-plantings. In New York, Mayor John Lindsay led a parade down
Fifth Avenue.
A few of the actions were more dramatic. A few protesters smashed a
car to bits, and in Boston, 200 people carried coffins into Logan
International Airport in a symbolic "die-in" against airport
expansion. In Omaha, Neb., so many college students walked around in
gas masks that the stores ran out. But it was, Hayes realized, an
awful lot of talk and not a lot of action. The participants were also
overwhelmingly white and middle-class.
Hayes wasn't the only one feeling that way. In New York, author Kurt
Vonnegut, speaking from a platform decorated with a giant paper
sunflower, added a note of cynicism.
"Here we are again, the peaceful demonstrators," he said, "mostly
young and mostly white. Good luck to us, for I don't know what
sporting event the president [Richard Nixon] may be watching at the
moment. He should help us make a fit place for human beings to live.
Will he do it? No. So the war will go on. Meanwhile, we go up and
down Fifth Avenue, picking up trash."
Hayes finally broke with the politics of his mentor early on Earth
Day morning when it was too late to fire him. The next day, the
National Environmental Teach-In office would close and the
organization would shut down. From that moment on, he could say what
he liked and not worry who he offended.
"I suspect," he told a crowd gathered at the Capitol Mall, "that the
politicians and businessmen who are jumping on the environmental
bandwagon don't have the slightest idea what they are getting into.
They are talking about filters on smokestacks while we are
challenging corporate irresponsibility. They are bursting with pride
about plans for totally inadequate municipal sewage plants.
We are challenging the ethics of a society that, with only 6 percent
of the world's population, accounts for more than half the world's
annual consumption of raw materials.
"We are building a movement," he continued, "a movement with a broad
base, a movement that transcends traditional political boundaries. It
is a movement that values people more than technology and political
ideologies, people more than profit.
"It will be a difficult fight. Earth Day is the beginning."
I first met Hayes in 1990, near the office in Palo Alto where he was
planning the 20th anniversary of Earth Day. He'd continued his
environmental work inside and outside government, at one point
running the National Energy Laboratory under President Jimmy Carter.
Earth Day 20 was shaping up as a gigantic event, one that would
ultimately involve 200 million people around the globe. Earth Day was
becoming the largest secular holiday on the planet.
Hayes was excited about the event, which he was running this time
without the moderating influence of a U.S. senator. And he was aiming
for a much more activist message in fact, at that point, he was
pretty clear that the U.S. environmental movement was running out of time.
"Twenty years ago, Earth Day was a protest movement," he told a crowd
of more than 300,000 in Washington, D.C. "We no longer have time to
protest. The most important problems facing our generation will be
won or lost in the next 10 years. We cannot protest our losses. We
have to win."
And now another 20 years have passed and by many accounts, we are
not winning. Climate change continues, and even accelerates; an
attempt at a global accord just failed; and Congress can't even pass
a mild, watered-down bill to limit carbon emissions.
And Hayes, now president of the Bullitt Foundation, a sustainability
organization in Seattle, thinks the movement has a serious problem.
"Earth Day has succeeded in being the ultimate big tent," he told me
by phone recently. "To some rather great extent, is had some measure
of success."
But he noted that "in American politics these days, it's not the
breadth of support, it's the intensity that matters.
Environmentalists tend to be broadly progressive people who care
about war and the economy and health care. They aren't single-issue
voters. And somehow, the political intensity is missing."
Hayes isn't advocating that environmentalists forget about everything
else and ignore all the other issues or that the movement lose its
broad-based appeal but he said it's time to bring political leaders
and policies under much, much sharper scrutiny and to "stop accepting
a voting record of 80 percent."
It's hard today to be bipartisan, and compromise is unacceptable,
Hayes told me. "I was probably right [in 1990]," he said. "If what
you're aspiring to do is stop the greenhouse gases before they do
significant damage to the environment, it's too late." At this point,
he said, it's all about keeping the damage from turning into a
widespread ecological disaster.
"I would like to see Earth Day 50 be a celebration," he said. "I
would like to see by then a real price on carbon, nuclear power not
proliferating, and a profound, stable investment in cost-effective,
distributed renewable energy." But for that to happen, "we need to
have a very intense core of environmental voters who realize that
these threats to life on the planet are more important than a lot of
other things."
--------
As Earth Day turns 40, activists take stock of accomplishments and work ahead
http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2010/04/as_earth_day_turns_40_activist.html
By Stan Freeman
April 20, 2010
Part street carnival, part ecological protest, part classroom
lecture, the first Earth Day 40 years ago was not so much the start
of the environmental movement as the symbol of that start.
In fact, the movement was well underway but largely unnoticed until
April 22, 1970, when nearly 20 million Americans demonstrated that
they cared deeply about the condition of the planet.
It was an exuberant grassroots celebration. Fifth Avenue in New York
City was closed to traffic between 14th and 59th streets as tens of
thousands filled a temporary mall, bringing midtown Manhattan to a
virtual halt.
In Washington D.C., thousands gathered at the Washington Monument to
hear speeches by people like U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie, D-Maine, and
songs by folk music icon Pete Seeger.
There was also Earth Day street theater. In Omaha, Neb., so many
students wore gas masks that the local supply ran out. In San
Francisco, "environmental vigilantes" poured oil into a reflecting
pool at the offices of Standard Oil to protest oil spills.
"All the great movements in America began with ordinary citizens, not
with Washington or Beacon Hill, whether it is civil rights or the
anti-war movement or women's rights," said George A. Bachrach, who is
today president of the Environmental League of Massachusetts.
"At their outset, they were all considered to be movements of the
young or the radical or the fringe elements, which our society, over
time, embraced," he said.
Janet S. Domenitz, executive director of the Massachusetts Public
Interest Research Group, called the environmental movement "one of
the most important and vibrant citizen movements in our country's history."
"That said, 40 years later, we still have more problems than we
should tolerate and more solutions than we use," Domenitz said. "Much
has been achieved, but the cliché 'every day is Earth Day' is true,
because the powerful interests still have too much influence over
decisions made that affect the quality of our air, our water, our health."
Earth Day was actually the brainchild in 1969 of U.S. Sen. Gaylord
Nelson, D-Wis., who saw the effectiveness of citizen movements around
the Vietnam War and civil rights. He had also been impressed by
student and citizen volunteers who were trying to solve pollution
problems in their communities.
Nelson envisioned a day of "teach-ins" on college campuses focused on
environmental issues, but the day took on a life of its own, spilling
into urban streets across the country.
Since its inception, Earth Day has truly became a planet-wide
celebration. This year, more than 500 million people in 175 countries
are expected to mark the anniversary.
For environmentalists especially, it is a meaningful milestone.
This year's Earth Day "is a chance for us all to take stock of what
we have accomplished and what we still need to do," said Mary
Shanley-Koeber, director of the Connecticut River Valley wildlife
sanctuaries for the Massachusetts Audubon Society.
"Our rivers are cleaner. Some species that were once in danger have
been restored. Look how far we have come. I would say the same sense
of the enormity of the task faces us today with climate change," she said.
Peter Shelley, director of the Massachusetts Advocacy Center for the
Conservation Law Foundation, said, "As it turns out, pointing out the
problems was the easy part. Developing solutions that people believe
enough in to alter their life styles has been much harder."
Seth Kaplan, vice president for policy and climate advocacy for the
foundation, added, "We have had to learn that in addition to a great
many bad ideas that we needed to say 'no' to, like burning coal for
electricity or polluting our waters, there are a great many good
ideas that we need to say 'yes' to, like energy efficiency."
"The most difficult part is addressing potential solutions, like
renewable energy, and figuring out how to do it right," he said.
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