Earth Day, Forty Years Later

Earth Day is once again upon us, and it's the fortieth anniversary of the first Earth Day. Call me cynical, but I'm beginning to think of Earth Day as the one day we're all environmentalists much like St. Patrick's Day is the one day we're all Irish. We talk a good game of saving the environment, but when the rubber hits the road, it's supporting a gas-guzzling SUV. And even if some of us do drive sensible subcompacts, are we willing to spend a little more money for one of those newfangled light bulbs that look like soft ice cream in a cone? And breaking one of those things would be like breaking a thermometer - it's too dangerous.

What about all the plastic bags we take groceries and other necessities home in, likely from stores we can't walk to or bike to? What if we buy a single item at a store we could walk or bike to but still take the car, because it's convenient and it "saves time?" And even though we all want to live in suburbia and be close to nature - or a chemically fertilized version of it - city life is actually very environmentally friendly because we use or cars less, take public transportation, and take up less space. And by living in cities we free space outside the cities for local agriculture rather than for a development called "Coventry Estates" populated by people unconnected to English nobility or a condominium called "Forest Glade Village" where's their no forest or no glade because both were bulldozed to build condos. But that would require us to live next to people who look or think differently than we do - can't have that.

Are you content to dust with a feather duster, or do you use a cleaning solvent made out of those same poisonous chemicals that produce dump sites in New Jersey?

To be fair, the environmentalist movement has brought positive change. More people recycle newspapers, many of us who can walk when it's feasible to do so, organically grown fruits and vegetables are somewhat popular (but still pricey), farmers' markets are gaining favor, and we're using more paper bags, the better to have something to recycle newspapers in. Some of us use reusable shopping bags. And the great Lakes are cleaner than they've been in a long time. We're readier than we've ever been to do something about climate change and the depleted ozone layer.

Now if we could only figure out what to do.

For the record, Earth Day was started by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Wisconsin Democrat who chose April 22 as the first Earth Day in 1970 because it fell on a Wednesday that year, and it fell during a period when college students were likely to be available to help promote it when there was less competition from other mid-week events. April 22 was also the birthday of Julius Sterling Morton, a U.S. Secretary of Agriculture who had started Arbor Day (his son founded the Morton Salt Company in Chicago), and it was also the birthday of noted actor, humanitarian, and environmental activist Eddie Albert, for whom green acres was more than a TV show.

Unfortunately for Nelson, April 22, 1970 was also the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Lenin, which, despite being a coincidence, linked environmentalism to Communism. Nelson was swept out of office in the Reagan Revolution a decade later. Nelson remained active in environmentalism until his death in 2005.