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Sunday is the 42nd anniversary of Earth Day, which first took place on April 22, 1970 and helped to prompt an awakening of American citizens to the importance of the environment.
A year before, Unocal’s oil well suffered a blow-out in the Santa Barbara channel, and the Cuyahoga River caught fire in Cleveland. I was a sophomore at Dartmouth College and coordinated my campus’s Earth Day activities.
Forty-two years later, we have much to celebrate. We removed lead from gasoline, banned the use of DDT, and replaced most uses of chloroflurocarbons. Children living in urban areas have lower levels of lead in their blood, eagles and ospreys are breeding successfully in the lower 48, and the ozone hole is on the mend.
But much remains to be done, and as the human population soars and our resource stock dwindles, many see increasing compromise and conflict with the environment in the next few decades. Already, globalization has rendered economic impacts on the United States, and a conservative backlash recommends rolling back environmental regulations to improve our competitive position. Sympathy for polar bears dwindles when Mom or Dad is out of work.
But, I hope this year’s Earth Day brings recognition of what nature does for us, every day. Natural ecosystems clean our planet’s air and water, and provide food, fuel, and shelter for each of us.
We don’t pay for these services, and I hope we don’t come to expect them. We cannot expect a healthy economy and happy citizens, in an unhealthy environment.
So, celebrate the Earth and salute the need to regulate stewardship of nature for our own good.
Photo, taken in July 1976 in Jefferson County, Oregon, US, courtesy of Alan Grinberg via Flickr.