When I was a kid, before junior high school, I can remember going with my family on a long road trip into Virginia. We were led there by friends of my parents from the Deaf club in Baltimore. They were outdoors people and knew of beautiful, isolated places in which we could picnic and swim in the Potomac River. I remember the deep green of the seeming forest and the quiet, except for singing birds and rustling unseen little animals. The water was clear, cool, and refreshing. It was clean. I fell in love with it, and so did my family. When my aunt, uncle, and cousins came down for a visit from Long Island, we remembered our way back and took them there.
I have no idea what it looks like now, over 50 years later. I’m pretty sure the water isn’t clean anymore, and that people shouldn’t swim in it.
I remember the first commercial I saw about pollution and the environment, and it made a big impact on me. I noticed litter along the sides of roads and highways from drivers carelessly tossing their trash out an open window. I noticed litter dropped wherever a person might be walking, and in parking lots where they’d just dump their car ashtrays.
Nowadays, I see masks littering the parking lots of stores along with the usual drink containers and snack bags. Even on our rural roads, there’s always trash poking up from the grass along the sides. People don’t seem to care at all.
I have seen
people dump their drink cups and snack bags when there is a trash receptacle
just a few steps away. I wonder what is
wrong with people that should be so careless with the only home we have?My husband and I will pick up trash we see lying around and dispose of them.It's so easy to put trash in its proper place.
There was a difference on our first Earth Day, this day in 1970. There was more of a spirit of cooperation and concern for the Earth. I was 15 years old on that first Earth Day, and I felt hopeful. I hoped that the waterways would be cleaned up from the poisons polluting them from companies dumping their wastes. I hoped drivers would stop throwing their trash out the window and wait until they came to a place to safely dispose of it. I hoped pedestrians and picnic goers wouldn’t litter as they walked or ate. So much for the hopes of a teenager.
I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring some time in the late 1980s-early 1990s. I wish everyone would read it. I didn’t understand all the chemistry she wrote about, but I did understand one thing she wrote that gave me a kick in the stomach: anyone born after 1954 (year I was born) carried DDT in their livers. DDT. That’s a poison freely used until it was banned years later. But many of our parents and we small children were sprayed with it as the dust croppers flew overhead.
Now we have forever chemicals and tiny bits of plastic this’n’that that we’re breathing in or ingesting. Forever. They don’t go away. They become part of us.
Last August, the Inflation Reduction Act was passed. Tucked into it were funds to help the environment and combat climate change. It was the first piece of legislation to address environmental issues in years. This year, the Rethuglicans would like to gut it and roll back other measures President Biden put into place to fight climate change and help poor beleaguered Mother Nature.
Where do these Rethuglicans think, people are supposed to live after planet Earth has been destroyed? Maybe they think Elon Musk will have built enough spaceships to take all the rich people to … where?
I miss the 1970s.
For more on Earth Day and the background leading up to it:
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