For five decades, Earth Day has helped humanity focus on our environment, on the need to reduce pollution and protect green spaces and enhance the interaction between people and the world we inhabit.
As we acknowledge today’s 52nd incarnation of Earth Day, we are reminded of the great progress that has been made — and the great amount of work that remains.
Earth Day, which has grown into a global call for action, has strong roots in Clark County. Denis Hayes, coordinator of the first event in 1970, grew up in Camas and graduated from Clark College before attending Stanford University. Since helping to launch Earth Day — the brainchild of Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson — Hayes has been a leader in the environmental movement. In 1999, Time magazine lauded him as “Hero of the Planet.”
Earth is in need of many heroes these days. Climate change is contributing to severe weather events around the globe; the need to reduce the burning of fossil fuels is evident; and our oceans are in peril.
Seemingly every day brings another story of how humans are degrading our planet. In the Northwest that is exemplified by wildfires that have increased in frequency and intensity, by the plight of our salmon and orca populations, by unhealthy forests and rivers that long have been the lifeblood of the region, and by increasing litter along roadsides.
After more than a century of fouling the air with carbon emissions, humans are reaping what we have sown in the form of climate change — global warming accompanied by droughts and threats to food supplies and habitats.
Earth Day was born at a time of a great environmental awakening in the United States. Major cities had experienced deadly fogs created by the burning of coal, the 1962 book “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson had highlighted the dangers of the indiscriminate use of pesticides, and in 1969 the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire. Each was a seminal event in raising public recognition of the fact that humans depend on our planet and, therefore, must care for it.
In 1970, President Richard Nixon signed an executive order creating the Environmental Protection Agency, establishing a “coordinated attack on the pollutants which debase the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land that grows our food.” William Ruckelshaus, who later lived in Washington state for decades, was the agency’s first administrator, and regulations have helped reduce pollution of air, water and land to improve human health.
It is not surprising that Washington has ties to the environmental movement. Blessed to live in a region with an abundance of natural beauty, the people of this area long have appreciated the power of nature and humanity’s reliance upon it. Because of that, local organizations are sponsoring several Earth Day events this weekend.
But the overriding message of Earth Day is to not limit our stewardship of the planet to a single moment. Earth Day is every day, because our actions have a lasting impact on the planet.
As Chief Seattle (also known as Chief Sealth) of the Suquamish and Duwamish people is credited with saying, “The Earth does not belong to us; we belong to the Earth … Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”
More than 150 years later, those words resonate as poignantly as ever.
