Contributed by Sammy Taylor
While I was still in elementary school a scientist published a book describing the killing effects of air- and water- born chemicals on birds. Later in 1969, there was a huge oil spill off the coast of California. People started to consider the human impacts on our planet home. The bombs dropped in Vietnam did not improve their outlook.
The following year, Senator Gaylord Nelson (Wisconsin) and Representative Pete McCloskey (California) co-sponsored a bill to establish Earth Day teach ins across the country. As young Americans learned more, they demonstrated to protest the industrial pollution and the war in Vietnam, both of which wrecked the lives and homes of so many. They got results!
The Environmental Protection Agency, environmental education and Occupational Safety and Health Administration were established, and later Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed. The Endangered Species Act and a bill to investigate and mitigate the effects of agricultural poisons also made it through Congress.
Earth Day became a global event by 1990 and the first Earth Day summit was held in 1992. Once again, we humans are confronted with a future rife with disaster if we don’t change our attitudes and actions. We Americans can’t continue to accept pollution and poisons in someone else’s backyard so we can continue our lifestyle of the elite. We must face the facts that fossil fuels, feed lots and other planetary degradations will lead to an impoverished life for our grandchildren and their neighbors.
In 2021, can we cooperate to get things done as happened in the 1970s? Can we reduce of our use of fossil fuels (by supporting legislation like HR 2307) and curb our garbage-producing consumer habits? Can we recycle, repurpose or reuse materials that now to a hole in the ground or to some else’s back yard? Can we treat ALL our relatives and planetary neighbors with the respect and dignity which we want for ourselves? Earth Day.org folks think so. “The social and cultural environments we saw in the 1970s are rising up again - young people are refusing to settle for platitudes.” What can we do now to ensure that in another 50years a site like www.EarthDay.org can say the same for us?