Earth Day - # 45

Today is the 45th annual anniversary of Earth Day.  With today's celebration, people of the world are hoping to spread the word that what is now known as a "small carbon footprint" is extremely important.  I have to admit that the first Earth Day did not make a great impression on me - that was in April 1970, and enforced desegregation had become the law in Florida in January.  My new school was meeting in the afternoon at Howard Bishop Junior High, with Bishop students attending school in the morning.  There had been rioting at the other new school, but our school was quiet.  I don't even remember who was my Science teacher for that half-year.
  My sister Kathy was deeply involved in both the Peace movement and the Environmental movement at that time, so I'm sure we must have discussed it frequently.  I just don't remember it.  I know that my Science teachers at Eastside, once we were in our own building, addressed the state of our environment heavily.  They encouraged all of us to be less wasteful and more in tune with nature.  Spending a lot of time in the swamps and woods in the state of Florida, and having Dad teach me about conservation of resources, I think I was pretty aware of the current issues.
  I became much more aware of the issues when I was a contractor for the United States Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D. C.  There, I worked in the research library - and my main task was reading, evaluating, assigning, and answering any and all comments or questions that were arriving on the EPA's website.  When I arrived, we were receiving 400 to 600 e-mails per month.  When I left, we were receiving 6,000 to 8,000 e-mails per month.   I was amazed by the lack of the publics' knowledge of what the Environmental Protection Agency did, and by their assumption that a US regulatory body could "fix" something as mundane as the time of local trash pick-up.  It was certainly an eye-opening job.
  I did become acquainted with a lot of amazing statistics regarding chemical incidents and how long it takes for certain items to biodegrade.  It's frightening to realize how long the trash we have produced will last.  I became a huge fan of compostability and recycling in my first six months of work there.  If you smoke, and you smoke a filtered cigarette, do you realize that the filter of your cigarette is a man-made synthetic?  That, even if you strip the paper off and shred the filter, it will take more than 270 years for the synthetic material to breakdown into re-usable components?  And that the chemicals that are removed within the filter stay around for 500 years before breaking down?  I recycle.  I compost.  I have my own tiny garden.  I grow catnip for my cats.  I conserve water.  I try not to use a lot of plastic items - and I make sure that the plastic items can be recycled.  I don't own a vehicle.  I get around by mass transit, by foot, and by bicycle.  I'm trying to reduce my carbon footprint - how about you?