Every day is Earth Day

Today is the official Earth day, but what day isn't Earth day?  It's the only planet we've got and it's regularly and routinely mistreated as if another could be had for the asking.  The Phactor remembers the first Earth Day very well; it was my senior year in college, but another thing weighed heavy on my mind at the time: the war in Vietnam.  About 10 days later the shootings at Kent State happened and everything descended into chaos, and Earth day things were lost.  How nice it would be to recount all the wonderful things that have happened in the past 40 years, but so little progress and so much more damage.  Forty years ago we simply thought that all that was needed was education; explain to people what was happening, what action was needed, and things would turn around.  Back then some people used to ignore the facts, now they deny the facts by sowing disinformation thereby making more of a problem.  For an educator, this is very discouraging, so this year Earth Day finds my state of mind rather pessimistic, a bit depressed when thinking about how far humans have surpassed the carrying capacity of Earth.