Earth Day
I sort of remember the first Earth Day back in 1970; seems to me that my 6th grade class spent a few hours in the afternoon picking up trash in the neighborhood. That was enough to save the planet back in those days; now a kid’s got to invent a hybrid automobile that runs on plastic gimcracks and pet feces to make any kind of dent against environmental destruction.
Back then, the idea of saving the planet seemed sort of quaint, at least in retrospect; in Pittsburgh, where I grew up, efforts to clean up the air, polluted by the effluvia from the dying days of the Pennsylvania steel industry’s golden age, actually worked: by the time I was in high school, you could no longer really smell the rotten-egg stench of burnt sulfur in the spring breeze. You still got amazing sunsets from the magnesium and other chemicals in the air, but the days of really awful air pollution were over.
Problems like that seemed solvable, though; all they had to do was put scrubbers on the smokestacks of the steel mills; that, combined with the closing of all the biggest factories in the region as they headed off to China or wherever, led to huge improvements in the quality of air and water in my old hometown. Nowadays, though, there’s nowhere for the polluters to go; the whole planet is Pittsburgh, if you will, and those sulfur-laden sunsets are all but unavoidable.
It’s ironic, of course, and I’m sure many others have noted this, that there’s just one day a year for the Earth; these days, even Halloween gets the whole weekend and Black History, which everyone realizes is horribly marginalized, has to make due with a mere month.
We used to complain to our parents that there was a Mother’s Day and a Father’s Day, but not Kid’s Day; they would respond that “every day is Kid’s Day!”
Why not for the earth, too?
Back then, the idea of saving the planet seemed sort of quaint, at least in retrospect; in Pittsburgh, where I grew up, efforts to clean up the air, polluted by the effluvia from the dying days of the Pennsylvania steel industry’s golden age, actually worked: by the time I was in high school, you could no longer really smell the rotten-egg stench of burnt sulfur in the spring breeze. You still got amazing sunsets from the magnesium and other chemicals in the air, but the days of really awful air pollution were over.
Problems like that seemed solvable, though; all they had to do was put scrubbers on the smokestacks of the steel mills; that, combined with the closing of all the biggest factories in the region as they headed off to China or wherever, led to huge improvements in the quality of air and water in my old hometown. Nowadays, though, there’s nowhere for the polluters to go; the whole planet is Pittsburgh, if you will, and those sulfur-laden sunsets are all but unavoidable.
It’s ironic, of course, and I’m sure many others have noted this, that there’s just one day a year for the Earth; these days, even Halloween gets the whole weekend and Black History, which everyone realizes is horribly marginalized, has to make due with a mere month.
We used to complain to our parents that there was a Mother’s Day and a Father’s Day, but not Kid’s Day; they would respond that “every day is Kid’s Day!”
Why not for the earth, too?
posted by Professor Dave at 8:50 AM
3 Comments:
Your parents said that thing about "Every day is kids day" too? I wonder if they were reading from the same "How To Annoy Your Children" handbook.
Also, you were 13 when you were in the 6th grade?
I'm sure they got it from the same source, whatever it was.
And yeah, I guess it must have been 7th.
Every day schmervery day, I like "the whole planet is Pittsburgh" - that's a good one Dave <grin>
the big sister, ever more annoyed by her baby brother than the parents ...
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