Earth Day observer
In 1970, at a time when the planet's ecological health was in a downhill spiral, a progressive Wisconsin senator named Gaylord Nelson enlisted a lot of help from his colleagues, surprisingly, given the tenor of our times, on both the Left and the Right, and put together an educational and consciousness-raising event called Earth Day—a celebration of the natural wonders still intact and an opportunity to do something concrete to protect the planet. Earth Day caught on big-time, and while environmental activism is not universally admired and many of the post-Earth-Day accomplishments, from the creation of the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species acts, along with the EPA, to numerous smaller things, like backyard composting and recycling, are all-too-often in danger of being disparaged and scaled back, still there's been progress. In this country, at least, much of the landscape is in better shape than it was in 1970, and it's no longer easy to trash the planet, in the name of "progress," with impunity. My role in all this is either to capture the planet's natural glories or to teach the rising generation about what they have and how to preserve it. That starts early, so, of course, I got my four-year-old granddaughter Stasia out for a gently subversive nature walk, complete with a using-binoculars tutorial. A nearby Osprey was good enough to pose.