I am writing this on Earth Day. Twenty years ago my wife and I were vacationing on Sanibel Island on Earth Day and it was a pretty big deal. Outside on Bailey’s they were selling Earth Day T-shirts and giving away Earth Day bags. We bought a couple of the T-shirts and we still have the Earth Day bag. Today I was on Sanibel and my wife and I went for coffee at Bailey’s. There was nothing about Earth Day. It seemed like it was just another day. I was disappointed. I would have bought another T-shirt. Is Earth Day just another idea that has been put to rest? If it has, that is a mistake because we need it more now than ever.

Earth Day was the brain child of Gaylord Nelson the Democratic Senator from Wisconsin. He asked Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey to co-chair the board to ensure it was bipartisan. The first Earth Day was held in 1970 and, if you were alive back then like I was, you would know that the political climate was a lot different back then as it is now and cooperation between the parties on issues like these were common. There were some back then that though that the Government was corrupt and that they would corrupt the cause. There were people that knew without government action nothing was going to be solved. I remember the environmental issues of the 60s and the 70s. Environmental issues have always affected the poor more than the middle class but there were some issues that affected everyone. Two of those issues were water pollution and air pollution. In Wisconsin where I grew up there was a thing called acid rain. Yup, there was so much pollution in the air that when it rained the water was polluted before it even hit the ground. The rain would run into our streams and lake and kill the fish. Like Florida tourism was big in Wisconsin and pollution was harming the tourism industry. Our beaches had to be tested daily to see if it was safe to swim because of all the crap that we were dumping into Lake Michigan. One of the biggest offenders back then was the burning of fossil fuels. Yes we have known for over 50 years the damage that fossil fuels were doing to our environment. You would have thought that after all this time we would have moved away from fossils fuels and found better and cleaner sources of energy. What did Trump campaign on?  Bringing back fossil fuels. The very thing that we have known all this time to be killing our environment. People voted to kill our environment.

January 28^th 1969 an oil well off of Santa Barbara blew out and more than three million gallons of oil spewed out killing more than 10,000 seabirds, dolphins, seals and sea lions. This disaster showed the importance how fragile our environment was. Some say that upon seeing this disaster Senator Nelson was inspired to create Earth Day. Industries were running amuck all over the World let alone the United States. They were using our water and waters ways as their personal dumping grounds. The same year as the oil well spill off on Santa Barbara the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland was so polluted that is caught fire by a spark from a train wheel. The River flowed into Lake Erie and it was considered dead as was Lake Erie at the time. All this was because of manmade pollution. Legislation like the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act set the wheels in motion to start a clean up the mess that man and industry has caused. Was there resistance? Yes, there was resistance. The same excuse has been used for 50 years. It is too expensive. It will harm jobs. You hear those same arguments today. Luckily for us there was a lot of political pressure applied and we have done a much better job with the environment. With Climate Change we need to continue with the political pressure or my entire state will be under water.

There are still huge problems like the water quality for the city of Flint Michigan and would you believe that there were members of Congress that voted against helping Flint. I moved to Florida in 2019 and we were in the middle of the Red Tide and Green Algae problem on the gulf side of Florida. There was a lot of finger pointing on what was causing the Green Algae though they knew it was pollution and people were arguing that the Red Tide was a natural phenomenon. It think it was like the perfect pollution storm of our pollution combining with nature to kill millions of fish, and also manatee, dolphins, sea turtle of other marine life. They even had a Whale Shark come up onto the shore of Sanibel Island. People with respiratory problems had to wear masks. Instead of arguing about it and pointing fingers we should be looking to science to identify the problems and then help come up with solutions.

Our environment is way too important to ignore. Climate change has made it so we need to start reacting at a faster pace. The polar ice caps are melting. Our rising waters will be too much for seawalls to hold off. What are we doing? Less than what we were doing 50 years ago. Industry, our government and pretty much everyone else in the industrialized world knows that we are in trouble but we still have people lying to us so they can make more money. They are sacrificing our future for the big bucks now.

We need to be looking for solutions. Regulations can only do so much. We need commitments from our government and industry to start doing the right thing and get us off the things that would destroy our environment. A green technology is the technology is the future. A green economy is the economy of the future and if you are not a leader you will just be following someone else. We used to be leaders. We hear people talk about how we are destroying the planet. They are wrong. The planet will go on and on until there is no more sun. What we are destroying is our place on this planet. Whether we are here or not will not matter to the planet.

 

 

Earth Day - Wikipedia