Earth Day

Rising to Weep

Apr 20, 2019

As Earth Day approaches on Monday, I find myself battling again with despair about climate change and what feels like a large increase recently in the number of extreme weather events that it is causing. Today we are faced with an increasing number of cyclones, wild fires, hurricanes, extreme rainfall and flooding, tsunamis, earthquakes, tornadoes, desertification and probably a few others that don’t come as readily to mind. According to weather.com, there were 39 weather disasters world-wide in 2018 that caused more than 1 billion dollars of damage each, which is crazy high. The idea that global warming is not...

Earth Day – 22 April 2018

Apr 22, 2018

Earth Day was established in 1970 by Gaylord Nelson, US Senator from Wisconsin, who conceived the idea to hold a nationwide teach-in, in order to call attention to the need for environmental protection. This was partly in response to the massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California that occurred in January 1969. Also in 1969, the Cuyahoga River in north-eastern Ohio that feeds into Lake Erie became famous for being so grossly contaminated that it “caught fire.” At that time in history, cars used leaded gasoline, industrial air pollution regulations had not yet been legislated, and the ocean shorelines, lakes,...