Earth Day on April 22 is an annual celebration of the birth of the environmental movement. It’s not a Latin celebration, but the health of our home affects us all.
When environmentalists raised the alarm in 1970, nobody imagined we would be where we are now, with destructive climate change causing drought, floods, fire, and destroying the coral ecosystems that are the ocean’s nurseries.
The cover photograph was taken from the moon by astronaut William Anders in 1968. Do you see any other place you would like to live?
The first Earth Day celebration was in 1970. If you are old enough, you may remember how bad it was with air that hurt to breathe, massive ocean oil spills, rivers that spontaneously caught fire from chemical pollution, and on and on.
We began working for change then, but big polluters began working against change. 1970 was the beginning of laws to protect the environment including the Environmental Protection Act.
Exxon oil company scientists understood that their products would eventually destroy our world. The company’s response was a public relations campaign to sow confusion so they could keep on polluting. Visit any refinery town and see if you would want to live there. That public relations campaign is one of the primary sources for climate change denial.
Those who would roll back or prevent environmental regulations seem to have forgotten why people began to care about the environment in the first place. Things were bad. Lack of regulation led to outrageous situations like the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio which caught fire many times until a 1969 fire sparked a “Time” magazine story about it.
We passed Earth Day 50 without doing what we know we need to do. What do you think Earth Day 100 will look like? What do you want it to look like?
For more information, visit earthday.org