Earth Day is Coming Up This Month

Unfortunately I think our world is in a sad state and its going to take a miracle to make it right.
I try to do my part in protecting it.
While I was riding to my daughters home outside of DC this past Easter weekend I saw such trash along the highways. It made me sick.
There was a little ray of hope along the way though, people had taken the time to plant new trees and flowers in some areas. Such a small thing but it helps.
 

Our air is actually cleaner than it was 30 or 40 years ago, and it will continue to get cleaner as we transition to more electric vehicles and clean energy. So that's a good thing.

The plastic problem is something we desperately need to do something about. We probably need a new material that's biodegradable or more easily recycled. I'm sure somebody could come up with something if there was incentive.
 
It's interesting to me that it's always someone else's responsibility to clean up after others.

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Aunt Bea said:
It's interesting to me that it's always someone else's responsibility to clean up after others.

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This reminds me of the time I was checking the waves along a beautiful stretch of cliffs when some jerk tossed his trash out the his car window. I walked over to him and said, "My FRIENDS and I would appreciate it if you picked that up." He did.
Now, I stressed 'my friends' alluding to the hardcore localism that permeates the surf culture as a warning to these valley kooks.
Today . . . I would probably get shot....:oops:
 
Lewkat said:
Would be a great time for the cities with all the mess from the homeless got cleaned up.
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Plenty of mess being left around by corporations and governments too, espec. worrisome being the nuclear power plant waste which is stored all over on every continent on the planet except Antartica, waste which is deadly, not just dangerous mind you, but deadly for at least 10,000 years. So that bothers me a lot more than stuff left behind by homeless.
 
SetWave said:
I remember the first Earth Day in 1970 . . . and look how far we haven't come....
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So do I, Earth Day 1970 I was a senior in high school. A couple of friends and I went and collected water samples from the nearby river up and down stream of town (with a big stockyard on the river). We tried to get some analysis done, but could not figure out how. So we just lined the samples up for visual comparison, put them on a car along with some posters and occupied a parking spot on the busiest street we could find. Got a lot of attention, and it was fun. Also got to skip a day of school to do it.

Fast forward 52 years and a lot has changed, some for the better some not. We certainly are a lot more aware of our impacts on the environment, and have implemented lots of pollution control measures. That river is a lot cleaner downstream of town than it was in 1970, cleaning up the stockyard probably had the most effect. However there are a lot more of us, and we are a lot more prosperous so our net impact has increased. I think some things are better, and some not so much. I ended up making a career of trying to clean things up, mostly soil and groundwater remediation engineering. A profession that did not exist in 1970.

I think the impact of Earth Day and the whole environmental movement has been positive. Just not as positive as a lot of us would like.

Don't know what, if anything, I will do for Earth Day this year. Probably just remember the past...
 
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