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Every April 22, Americans across the country
celebrate Earth Day, a time to commemorate the
environmental gains we have made throughout the past
year and to come together to create new plans for
further environmental progress. The date chosen for
Earth Day is appropriately coincident with the
historical date of Arbor Day, a national
tree-planting holiday started in the late 1800’s. I
would like to encourage all Mainers to carry on this
noble tradition and celebrate Earth Day this year.
The first Earth Day was held on April 22nd,
1970 and had participants and celebrants in two
thousand colleges and universities, roughly ten
thousand primary and secondary schools, and hundreds
of communities across the country. It was largely
the result of Senator Gaylord Nelson’s efforts to
raise awareness about environmental issues affecting
the country. A longtime environmental activist in
the U.S. Senate, Senator Nelson worked to
demonstrate popular political support for an
environmental agenda. The day proved to be very
popular in the U.S. and celebrations have continued
every year since.
Senator Nelson credited the first Earth
Day with persuading U.S. politicians that
environmental legislation and issues were important
to citizens across the nation. He may have been
correct, as many important environmental laws were
passed by Congress after the first Earth Day,
including the Clean Air Act, laws to protect
drinking water, wild lands and the oceans. The
Environmental Protection Agency was also created
within three years of the first Earth Day.
I would like to take this opportunity to
discuss some projects being undertaken locally in
Maine by your neighbors that are helping the
environment. Ellen Hills, an 85 year old retired
school teacher from South Orrington, has been
working to turn land that has been in her family
since the 1880s into a ‘green’ cemetery. Such
cemeteries are similar to quiet memorial gardens
where families can visit deceased loved ones. It
also has the added benefit of being better for the
environment than more traditional cemeteries.
Gary Fish of the Maine Board of
Pesticide Control has been working tirelessly to
promote the concept of YardScaping, also known as
sustainable landscaping. Fish has pointed out that
the use of pesticides has more than tripled in the
past 10 years and that when the pesticides run off
into our water sources, they can cause immense
damage to the natural ecosystem. Gary Fish
encourages people to select plants native to Maine
for their yards so that they can cut down on the
amount of pesticide they use on their lawns.
Another environmental pioneer, Robin
Stanley of the Mount Agamenticus Conservation
Region, is training people to identify the hemlock
woolly adelgid, an invasive species that is lethal
to hemlock trees. Stanley’s volunteers have agreed
to survey specific stands of hemlock to look for the
pest and inform scientists. Greater knowledge about
their numbers and spread will hopefully allow forest
service officials to make more educated decisions
about battling them. This project is essential since
hemlocks are of such economic and ecological
importance in northern Maine, where they make up 10
percent of the state’s saw wood harvest.
There is a new medical office being
completed in Portland next to the DoubleTree Hotel.
This building is no ordinary structure; it is due to
be the first office building in Maine to be
certified by the U.S. Green Building Council as a
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)
building. This pioneering building will put less
stress on the environment through such design
features that allow it to use less energy than
similar buildings and advanced recycling practices.
This year, the Maine Council of Churches is holding
an Earth Day event entitled ‘One Earth, One
Community: Environment’ in Brunswick from 8:30 to
3:30. This event is a one day symposium of
presentations and discussions that hope to inspire
and reinvigorate individuals’ commitment to
protecting the Earth. It would be wonderful if
everyone would look up other events taking place in
their local communities and participate in them.
Also, there is a wonderful quiz that each person can
take that illustrates your footprint on the earth,
located on the web at
http://www.earthday.net/Footprint/index.asp.
This Earth Day, I encourage everyone to follow the
example set by their fellow Mainers by getting out
and doing something for their community, their
country, and the earth. Start small, as many of the
projects I have discussed have, and see where it
takes you. Most importantly, we must all remember
that Earth Day is not something we are confined to
celebrating just once a year- Earth Day is every
day.
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