CELEBRATING AND REFLECTING
            Birthdays and anniversaries happen every year. We usually move on quickly to life as usual. Sometimes we might even want to stop counting. We have just past the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. As we go about our daily lives, our individual  efforts at conserving earth’s resources count EVERYDAY.
            Before the first Earth Day in 1970, no legal or regulatory mechanisms protected our environment. Clouds of toxics poured into the air and tons of waste were being dumped into our surface waters. In response to public demand, then President Richard Nixon and Congress created the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and charged it with the goal of repairing the damage already done to the environment and establishing guidelines to help Americans in making a cleaner – and safer – environment.
            In the last forty years, these are some ways that EPA has protected human health and the environment: setting standards for safe drinking water, banning or regulating the use of harmful substances, creating a fund to clean up hazardous waste sites, helping consumers identify energy-efficient products, setting air quality standards, proposing mercury emissions regulations on power-plants, developing a program to reduce chilren’s exposure to diesel emissions from school buses. (www.epa.gov) Our lives have been improved as the enviroment has been improved and protected by the EPA over the years.
            Prior to this, in response to the Dust Bowl days, the government had established the Soil Conservation Service, now the Natural Resosurces Conservation Service, and the Soil and Water Conservation Districts. Voluntary conservation practices combined with financial incentives have improved and protected soil and water quality and thereby improved our lives.
            An article in Newsweek, April 26, 2010, reports on progress (or lack of progress) we have made to create a cleaner and better world since the first Earth Day in 1970, such as the following:

• The acidity of rainfall has decreased.
• The ozone layer is slowly recovering.
• The atmospheric level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing rapidly.
• The number of animals on the U.S. endangered species list has increased fourfold; seven have gone extinct; at the same time fifteen have recovered.
• Regulators have no health and safety data on 85 percent of the tens of thousands of chemicals in widespread use.
• Emission of six major air pollutants have declined by 60 percent.
• Energy use per person in the U.S. is unchanged and remains twice that of France and Germany.
• In 2008, Americans generated about 38 percent more tons of trash than in 1970.

           
Recently, the sighting of the meteor that lit up the atmosphere in the midwestern U.S. made visible the fact that earth is a special place in an inhospitable universe. Celebrate our successes but stop and relflect. EARTH DAY IS EVERYDAY.

Della Moen, Earth Team Volunteer, NRCS/Stephenson Soil and Water Conservation District, an equal opportunity provider and employer, 04/21/10 (for publication on 04/24/10 in the Journal-Standard, Freeport, Illinois) Della can be reached at info@stephensonswcd.org