29 Apr Earth Day Reflections – Saving Planet Home
Spring slow-walks itself up the coast to our town. This week the peepers sang their mating songs with all the passion of spring lovers. When Earth Day arrived, the daffodils were in bloom and the garden plants were beginning their cautious resurrection towards light and warmth from their sleep in the dark earth.
The first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, following in the spirit of student protests against the Vietnam War, saw massive street demonstrations on behalf of the health of the environment. I was twenty-five and as I watched the sun rise from the rocks on the shore of Acadia National Park that morning, the knowledge that we could not take the health of this planet for granted was, like the dawn, just rising in my consciousness. 10% of America marched in the streets that day. It is the largest single protest in our history.
This Earth Day something else is dawning on many of us. Without government regulation, how soon before the earth warms to not 2, but 3 degrees Celsius? In a recent research report about the future of air-conditioning stocks, Morgan Stanley describes a 3 degrees Celsius rise in temperature by 2100.
Even Richard Nixon, who had little enthusiasm for government regulations, understood the need to protect our environment and that year signed a bill to establish the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA. But last week, this President, who thinks climate change is a hoax, signed an executive order that all agencies that regulate energy will expire by 2026. The list includes but is not limited to: the Department of Interior, the Department of Energy, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the EPA. What effect does this total collapse in federal funding, support and even belief in the threat we face from fossil fuel burning have on our home-grown climate organization, FreeportCAN?
Here at home, the USDA cancelled a $35 million climate grant to Freeport’s Wolfe Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment to support sustainable agriculture at 400 farms across the country.
At a steering committee meeting this week, we agreed that the circumstances of this moment have turned that sign into another kind of message: one of resistance to the cruelty of this administration towards our planet’s capacity to support life: ours and that of our feathered, leafed, and finned friends. For us, this isn’t about which candidate or which party. For us this is about love. Earth Day love for all life on the planet. Now it is time to take Saving Planet Home to the streets, to add planet home to the list of things we must fight for with all our might. Now is the time to SAVE PLANET HOME.
Find out how you can get a Saving Planet Home Sign. Show your support for climate action and a commitment to a lifestyle that supports a thriving planet.