Happy Earth Day! I caught an article in this weeks New Yorker about Earth Day 39 years ago. I highly recommend reading the full article, but here is a clip:
The first celebration of Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, was a raucously exuberant affair. In New York, Fifth Avenue was closed to traffic. People picnicked on the sidewalk; dead fish were dragged through midtown; and Governor Nelson Rockefeller rode a bicycle across Prospect Park. Students in Richmond, Virginia, handed out bags of dirt (to represent the “good earth”); demonstrators in Washington poured oil onto the sidewalk in front of the Interior Department (to protest recent oil spills); and in Bloomington, Indiana, women dressed as witches threw birth-control pills into the crowd (no one was quite sure why). All told, some twenty million Americans took part—far more than the man who thought up the occasion, Senator Gaylord Nelson, Democrat of Wisconsin, had expected. “That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day,” Nelson later said. “It organized itself.”
What we celebrate isn’t the Earth Day as it was envisioned — it is more like a Hallmark version. NBC changes its peacock to green, all this week we should do something good for the environment, but come this Sunday, we’re back to “normal.”
The one thing that you can do that will last all summer is plant a vegetable. Forget all of the fancy things I talk about on the website. Go to Home Depot or Lowes, buy some spinach seeds and throw them in backyard in a square foot spot. Don’t worry about raised beds, fertilizers, or proper spacing. By June 1st, you’ll be able to make a spinach salad.
Hopefully that will encourage you to plant a full garden by next Earth Day.
