Day 38 - Earth Day

April 22, 2020 is the 50th Anniversary of the first Earth Day.  Back in 1970, I was young, 7 months pregnant and teaching biology half time at a private girls’ school, Day-Prospect Hill, in New Haven, Connecticut.  A Yale graduate student had contacted me about participating in the local Earth Day events.  We, the students and I, took the walk on the warm sunny day, led by the Yalie, down at the New Haven Harbor.  We saw the terrible smelly pollution, greasy blobs on the water, decaying trash all around, dead birds and rats,  as we walked on the docks.  We came away having seen how mistreated our Earth was.  In those days, the by-word was “the solution to pollution is dilution.”  Pollutants from around the home were just dumped on the yard and they soaked away into the ground water.  Chemicals were dumped in the harbors and rivers of America.  Trash was just thrown into the water.  To be sure Rachel Carson, the The Silent Spring, had raised awareness of poisons in our world in the early 1960’s, but mostly no one thought a lot about pollution.  Twenty million people attended festivities on the first Earth Day.  It created mounting pressure to do something and on December 2, 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency was created by Congress.  For nearly 50 years, it has provided teeth in the Environmental Movement, that is until recently when Trump has defanged the Agency to help businesses.  Awareness led to a change in thinking about pollution.  We could do something about it and we did.  Air in Los Angeles got cleaner.  You could see the mountains once again there.  Water got cleaner.  No longer could poisons be dumped in public waterways and land.  Brown pelicans successfully bred once again.  Condors were seen.  And where are we today?  World population has more than doubled in the 50 years since 1970 from 3.7 billion then to 7.8 billion today.  With the population increase has come new dire threats to the Earth.  Yet few speak about that threat.  Instead we now face the threat of Climate Change.  We’re starting to see bigger, more powerful storms, terrible droughts, species extinctions and huge wildfires all attributed by scientists to climate change.  As most of the world population sits sequestered at home and the world economy has mostly shut down from the Coronavirus pandemic, I think about the Earth on this Earth Day.   The United States had begun to reduce our emissions under the Obama Administration.  But once Trump whooshed into office, he immediately began reversing everything Obama had done, including the rules and regulations to cut greenhouse gasses and pollution.  We aren’t working with other nations any more to do our part.  But this pandemic has stopped most everything.  I wonder if world leaders, scientists and the world population can find a way to lower our emissions.  Can we see on this Earth Day, we don’t need to travel as much?  Zoom meetings work.  Will changes come out of this time that will shift the curve for greenhouse gases ?  Big things are happening and even though we can’t see what will come, I hope that some good will come out of this pandemic.  Things will not go back the way they were.  Maybe it’s not all bad, especially for our Earth.