Earth Day is special for me. I celebrated the first one, on April 22, 1970, by organizing all the children in my Dobbs Ferry, New York neighborhood and leading a cleanup of the Mercy College woods and streams that were in my backyard. At that time, they were a dumping ground for garbage and phosphates that came from our apartment complex and made their way downstream to contaminate the nearby Hudson River. I now teach environmental science as a visiting professor at Mercy College in my former home town, and the Hudson River watershed is now much cleaner thanks to U.S. environmental laws enacted beginning with the Earth Day Movement.

I spent this Earth Day, and in fact, the whole “Earth