Earth Day - Fifty Years

After fifty years of Earth Day and trying to take care of the planet for that long, we seem to have mixed results.  Rivers don't catch fire anymore and air is easier to breathe, but a lot of the progress we've made since 1970 has been undermined by our carbon footprint, which has resulted in riding sea levels, snowless winters, monster hurricanes, and Paris being hotter than Kinshasa in June.  Efforts to curb pollution have been stymied by business leaders and government leaders around the world who have great difficulty admitting that we have a problem - and for American leaders, that goes double. 

We have so much disrespect for our leaders that those of us who actually care about doing anything to save the planet try to do what we can ourselves, like walking a mile to the store instead of driving (many of us don't live close enough to stores to that, of course) and taking part in cleanup activities in early spring that, alas, have been canceled this year because of COVID-19, which could last into '22.  We so distrust the politicians that we forget that it was a politician who started Earth Day in the first place - Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin.  (Underscoring our disdain for politicians is that the new U.S. Earth Day postage stamp issue this month neither pictures nor mentions Nelson, who died in 2005.  Back in the fifties, commemorative stamps for U.S. senators were quire common.) 

Ironically, the pandemic has done more for the environment than we humans could have ever done by keeping us from going out in our cars and powering our places of business, thus dramatically lowering our carbon footprint.  (It won't be enough to mitigate the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, alas, which is till expected to be fierce.  And severe storms in America are already wreaking havoc on the South and the Northeast.)  To those of you who hoped that 2020 would be your year - myself included - sorry, this year belongs only to Mother Nature, and God's bratty kid sister is getting her sweet revenge. Earth Day now seems sadly quaint.

And in that spirit, here's a song from the year of the first Earth Day that still fits the times, fifty years later.