Earth Day Fifty 🌎

Today was Earth Day’s fiftieth anniversary, coming a half century after the first Earth Day. We’ve both made amazing progress and also stumbled upon other issues as mankind’s needs and desires sometimes vary in relationship to the planet’s own well being.

Many of the worse fears and predictions of a half century ago did not come true, while others seem just pushed further off to the day of reckoning. Humans are generally bad at understanding their impacts at a macro-level, what often seems bad isn’t so bad while what seems minor can add up to being quite bad in reality.

I often think too much emphasis is made on the April 22, 1970 date when much of the environmental improvements we saw over the past six decades were a series of inter-related technological, economic, education and political changes. Environmental laws grew in strength throughout the sixties, thanks to countless community advocates, their elected officials and general public awareness.

Act local, think global isn’t a bad slogan. Fight for what you know and understand best – the land you know and care about, the species that mean the most to you. People should be asking questions and not be surprised when you are lectured by people in the know claim what you are asking is impossible.

I am not convinced that protecting the earth is a liberal or conservative thing, or that it’s greedy people undermining our future. The problem isn’t greed, it’s not asking the right questions or advocating the right policies for our communities. Protecting the environment doesn’t necessarily mean more big government – but it might mean more regulations requiring better controls and better mitigations on the biggest polluters.

Earth Day Fifty kind of is playing second string during the Coronavirus PAUSE but it’s still moving forward. But few environmental problems were solved from the top down, so instead we should stop thinking so big and look how can we make the things we care about so deeply a little better.