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The first Earth Day - April 22, 1970 -- is
credited with launching the modern environmental movement. It was a day of
peaceful, mass demonstrations by millions of people across the United States calling on
the government to adopt policies to clean up and protect the
environment.
U.S. government officials responded: Congress enacted laws to clean the
air and protect drinking water, wildlife habitats, and the ocean. Congress
also created the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, to oversee
the nation's progress.
EPA administrator Stephen Johnson recalls
the first Earth Day in 1970. " Approximately 20 million
people across America celebrated the first Earth Day," he said,"It was a
day and time when our cities were literally buried under their own smog
and polluted rivers caught on fire."
Thirty-five years later, Johnson says, due to the work of the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency and the nation, indeed, our air is
cleaner, our water is pure, and our land is better protected.
Johnson says that the EPA is currently spending most of its
seven-and-a-half billion dollar yearly budget on research and technology
to reduce the threat of climate change -- so-called global warming --
which many scientists blame on our industrial emissions of carbon dioxide.
"Climate change is an important issue," he says. "It's an important
issue for the president, for the entire [Bush] Administration. As an
Administration, we are devoting about five billion dollars worth of
resources to both understand the science...and to focus on the
technologies that will ultimately address climate change issues. Clean
coal technology is very, very important,both having energy security
and also having a clean and healthy environmental energy supply as well."
Today, Earth Day is an international observance, and its concerns are
global as well. Climate change is a major focus of Earth Day activities
this year -- according to Kathleen Rogers, the president of the Earth Day
Network. The grassroots environmental group is coordinating many of the
global events -- and,is sounding the alarm.
"Almost all of the developing world stands to lose everything as a
result of climate change," she says emphatically. "Everything. Because
only the richest countries will survive this disaster. Even the United
States can have problems. But the economies of these [poorer]
countries are just not going to be able to expand and develop because
they'll have energy needs that will not be met. They'll have economic woes
as a result of the shrinking market place around climate change. In
agricultural countries, because of climate change, they will see both
shrinking -- and destroyed, in some cases - domestic markets to feed their
own people. But, in addition, they will not be able to participate in the
international marketplace."
Rogers says education is a major component of the Earth Day activities
her group is coordinating in many parts of the world. In the western
African country of Togo, for example, she says, "We're doing training for
environmental journalists on climate change. We're doing a training workshop for about 700 teachers about climate change.
We're doing radio programs in six different areas of Togo. The focus of 90
percent of this is on creating expertise among the citizenship and
journalists on climate change. So our focus is on citizen participation,
building a better infrastructure for dealing with climate change, and
heading towards a fully informed democratic system for public
participation around the environment."
Rogers believes that informed citizens in Togo and other countries will
be better able to pressure their governments to adopt environmentally
sound policies. "We focus on environmental protection and building free
citizens, citizens who have control of their communities and of their
governments' agenda," she says. "We've been able to go to countries,
either working democracies or aspiring democracies and get environmental
protection to be front-and-center as we build active and civically-minded
people."
Rogers is confident the magnitude of this year's worldwide
Earth Day observances will send a timely message to government officials
about the need for environmental policies to put the brakes on climate
change. "How many people are going to go out and do something? I'm not
kidding: I think it's over a billion people!" she says. "But there's
certainly more than that -- finding out about Earth Day and being educated
about Earth Day and the issues. At least two-and-a-half billion people!
Think about that. It's the biggest secular event in the world by a long
shot."
Kathleen Rogers of the Earth Day Network says the tone of this year's
Earth Day is different from any other she's been involved in. She says
that for many participants, it's not going to be a festive event because
they believe the Earth -- and its inhabitants -- are in serious trouble.
People, she says, are very serious about climate change,about civic
engagement and very serious about Earth Day. | 
