Sustainable Living – Celebrate Earth Day
By Shawn Dell Joyce
“May there only be peaceful and cheerful Earth Days to come for our beautiful Spaceship Earth as it continues to spin and circle in frigid space with its warm and fragile cargo of animate life.” — United Nations Secretary-General U Thant, 1971
April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day, came on the heels of the Vietnam peace movement. This was a volatile era of monumental social change fueled by sit-ins and teach-ins, demonstrations, rallies, and a changing political consciousness. Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson modeled the first U.S. Earth Day as an environmental “teach-in.” Over two thousand colleges and universities, roughly 10,000 primary and secondary schools and hundreds of communities across the United States participated.
It was also the first time we saw the famous picture of the Earth from the moon taken by the Apollo astronauts. It was then that many of us first saw the earth in its entirety, and likened it as Secretary General U Thant did to a spaceship. Or even more eloquently by astronomer Carl Sagan who remarked:
“… every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived (here) — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
“Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level,” Nelson said. “That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organized itself. Earth Day has become the largest secular holiday in the world, celebrated in 175 countries by more than 5 million people.
Earth Day is a day for envisioning how we humans want to interact with our mother planet. Imagine what our world would look like if all of us 5 million people put our minds together; we could afford to live and work in the same community, our groceries would be local farm products, our buildings would be ultra-energy efficient and even generate their own power, cars would be traded in for bicycles as local economies thrive, Asthma would be a disease from the past as air quality improves.
Want to celebrate Earth Day locally? Grab some gloves and join “Operation Clean Sweep” sponsored by the Walden Rotary on April 24. Meet at 8 a.m. at the Firefighter’s Museum, Maybrook Village Hall, Walden Village Hall, or Town Hall on Bracken Road to get road assignments and orange litter bags. Bring your children and teach them that we are all stewards of the land. If Montgomery is out of the way, stop along any roadside and pitch in and keep our spaceship clean.
Shawn Dell Joyce is an award-winning columnist and founder of the Wallkill River School in Montgomery. shawn@zestoforange.com
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