Life under Earth Day

The first Earth Day was celebrated April 22, 1970. If the environmental movement was conceived with the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, it was born on the first Earth Day. I was born not long earlier into a world where rivers burned and people were starting to ask what sort of life children of the day would live.

I had no idea in 1970 the level of existential dread and hopeful expectation I and everyone in my generation would face. I wasn’t even a year old, and the idea that humans had turned to planetary destruction-in part because of another existential threat that had been posed in…