Earth Day

John Muir 

Naturalist and Preservationist

A 45-year Memory: I Was There

A beautiful April day, as I remember it. (I just checked- I was right.) It was sunny Wednesday and almost 70 degrees F. as students sat on the lawn and heard speakers tell us about the environmental dangers facing us. I was a senior and it was the first Earth Day!

The first Earth Day family had participants and celebrants in two thousand colleges and universities, roughly ten thousand primary and secondary schools, and hundreds of communities across the United States. More importantly, it "brought 20 million Americans out into the spring sunshine for peaceful demonstrations in favor of environmental reform." It now is observed in 192 countries, and coordinated by the nonprofit Earth Day Network, chaired by the first Earth Day 1970 organizer Denis Hayes, according to whom Earth Day is now "the largest secular holiday in the world, celebrated by more than a billion people every year." Environmental groups have sought to make Earth Day into a day of action which changes human behavior and provokes policy changes.
--Link

Images from Lehigh's first Earth Day celebration, from the Epitome, 1970.

I wish we had come farther than we have. Yes, many advances have occurred, but the past years of extreme push-back against climate change is amazingly short-sighted. Everything has become an even greater point of divisiveness and in many places just the mention of "climate change" gets people more divided and hostile than the mention of marriage equality. We have not yet truly accepted that this is the only home we have. And we better take care of it.

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.