I seem to have lucked out and gotten all the cool holidays as my day to diary here. Forgive me for doing the Happy Dance...I bet next year I don't get a single holiday.
Today is/was Earth Day. I remember how Earth Day got started because I was one of the unmentioned people in the background helping to make it happen (my usual place). I was at meetings, wrote letters, and did my local bit by convincing fellow students and the city where I went to college to have an official ceremony to commemorate it.
April 22, 1970 was the first Earth Day.
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I was a hippie. A bit old (in 1970, I was 24, had my Master's and was working on my PhD) but I looked younger, so I hung out with the hippie crowds since they thought much like me. Being a hippie wasn't, in my mind, about being into drugs and abdicating personal responsibility for society. Rather it was the opposite - I was deeply into environmentalism, appalled at how people treated those who were different, angry at the wastefulness of society, and determined to make the world a place where we all lived together in prosperity and harmony (not peace, I have never actually been for peace, peace is what you have in the grave...) - animals and people of all ethnicities and ideologies.
I was horrified by the massive oil spill in 1969. Remember that? It happened in California. I wasn't the only one horrified. So much nasty stuff was going on then, environmentally.
Senator Gaylord Nelson (D), from Wisconsin, was horrified and had the position to do something about it. Even though he was half across the country (I was in CA then in college), I rallied to the cause in the early days. He convinced Pete McClosky (CA - R) to come on board as well. And he got this then-obscure but dedicated man, Denis Hayes, to be the national coordinator.
Mr. Hayes was attending Harvard at the time, but even back then, you could tell Mr. Hayes was what we call a "Mad Scientist" - obsessed with environmentalism and solar power. He knew of all the little individual environmental groups and convinced them that they were all working on different aspects of the same thing - all the people working individually and in small, dedicated groups against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, the abuses of farm animals, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife - all working for the health and well-being of the planet. (He's in the news today for having built a living building - his activism is on-going and hands-on.)
As a result, more than 20 million Americans came together on April 22, 1970 to rally for a healthier environment.
It was a gamble, a huge political gamble for Nelson and McClosky, but it worked. It paid off in some rather remarkable legislation, and it created the US EPA.
I was part of the college rally organizing group - we made posters, set a time and place to rally, educated people before hand with lectures and soap box speeches in the greens and common areas of the university and city parks, handed out flyers, and conducted an massive phone campaign. We went to Pagan meetings and food co-ops, talking about the damage people were doing to the world and how to make it better. Mostly I was in the background, drawing posters, mimeographing flyers, blowing up balloons...just as I do now.
We got people to commit to coming to that first Earth Day to give speeches and play songs and we had "stations" where people could learn about specific issues - run by the smaller groups for recycling, and toxic waste spills, and oil spills, and farm animal abuses, and the extinction of wildlife. They had a place among the larger umbrella of Earth Day. And we had the posters and rally signs, and we marched to the park we'd selected and periodically, people would gather and march around the perimeter of the park to encourage passersby to come join us.
It's been 43 years since that first Earth Day.
How far have we come since then?
Pretty far, but not far enough, that's for sure.
Here, locally, to celebrate Earth Day, we had a bike tour, classes on recycling, composting, xeriscaping, and disposal of hazardous household wastes. The city is offering free bus rides and holding a special hazardous waste collection. The utility departments are scheduling free home energy audits. The waste management company for each local city in the area is offering a "Free Shred Day" and setting up huge recycling bins.
The farmer's market is offering live music to the people who shop there, with face painting and children's games.
This is all well and good, but we need to be doing more. More recycling, adjusting our lifestyles to be less wasteful - and corporations could trim costs by reducing packaging. Corporations could be the leaders in industrial conservationism and yet - they often aren't. They are still doing things with the old mindset that we have infinite resources and infinite disposable income.
As far as I can tell, there won't be any politicians at our local events - plenty of state and city employees, because they have to work at these events. I think it's a shame politicians won't be at our Earth Day events because it was politicians who started Earth Day. Politicians should be at the forefront of these events, modeling the behaviors we constituents say we want and listening to us in our need to have the earth continue to be fruitful for generations to come.
First Earth Days News Report
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April 21, 2013
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