The first Earth Day was celebrated 52 years ago on April 22, 1970, and marked the beginning of the organized environmental movement. More than half a century has now passed, and much of what flowed from that era -- the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act -- has made us safer and healthier. But for every step forward, we seem to take at least one step back -- most recently under the ultra- reactionary term of the Malignant Loser, when we abandoned the Paris Climate Agreement and rolled back many environmental and wildlife protections. The Biden Administration, among its many daunting cleanup tasks, is working to restore those protections, and on his first day in office, President Biden signed an Executive Order to re-admit the United States to the Agreement.
It's easy to despair as the years and the decades go by, and we pass tipping point after tipping point without the dramatic changes that so many of us want to see to protect our only home. But, we need to keep in the fight and remind ourselves that this is an existential struggle in which no positive action is too small and no problem is too great.
One way to get involved today and onward: here's a toolkit offered by earthday.org. If you have other local, regional or national activities and ways to get involved and stay involved, go for it!
