For Earth Day

I was there at the beginning.

April 22, 1970.

It was a beauty of a day in Bethlehem, PA, where I was a senior in college. A great day to sit and enjoy the weather, friends, sun, and political rhetoric of a barely-born environmental movement. Looking back, it's amazing how much we didn't know, yet how intuitively we knew something was wrong.

Of course, in Bethlehem, PA, we didn't have to look much farther than the hoods of our cars to see what pollution was doing. Bethlehem Steel was about to begin its headlong movement into extinction, but not before it deposited soot and crud on our cars and into our lungs.

So maybe we were sitting at one of those environmental ground zeroes. Not as bad as Love Canal, but bad enough for us to know that snow was not as white as we wished it would be.

But enough of that. Such reminiscing only brings sadness. The future may be even darker. Climate change is real- caused by us and factors beyond our control. It isn't a pretty sight.

Today, Earth Day 2013, here are some pictures that remind me why we have to do this. They are of places filled with life. They are images of what we will lose. We must not waste our planet- our blue marble in the darkness of space.