This issue of the Cook County News-Herald will be in readers’ mailboxes and on the newsstand the week of Earth Day, April 22. So Earth Day seemed to be a fitting topic for this week’s Unorganized Territory. I’ve written about the global celebration in the past, so I thought I’d do a little research about the day, to try to find something fresh to say. As I searched, I realized that I am older than Earth Day.
According to numerous Internet sources—I never trust the first website I visit—the first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970, launched by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson. Earth Day has been around for 44 years. So truth be told, I am quite a bit older than Earth Day.
And it’s hard to believe. Not that I’m older than Earth Day. I’m older than a lot of things. But being older than Earth Day makes me feel ancient. It brings to mind the phrase “older than dirt.”
What surprises me is that Earth Day hasn’t been around longer. I’m surprised that it wasn’t already solidly part of our culture before 1970. It seems like it is something the Flower Power generation would have taken on. I’m surprised that Earth Day wasn’t celebrated in the 1960s, in the era of hippies, the “age of Aquarius.”
Maybe an official day to celebrate Earth was just too established for the antiestablishment crowd.
Whatever the reason, I’m surprised to realize that Earth Day wasn’t official until I was 13. I don’t remember there ever not being an Earth Day. In fact, I could have sworn that our neighborhood youth group—the Rose Harbor 4H Club—celebrated Earth Day long before then.
The 4H Club included members all along County Road 7, which was known as “the Old Highway” or the “Pike Lake Road” back then. Membership included kids from the Good Harbor Hill area on the west end of the road to the creek that was then known as Rosebush. Hence “Rose Harbor.” Some members lived a bit off County Road 7, on the Pike Lake Road or Olson Farm Road.
All of us gathered each year in the spring—probably around April 22 if the weather was nice enough— for a roadside cleanup. We hiked along County Road 7 and picked up trash for about four miles, from Rosebush Creek, as it was called back then, all the way out to where the “old highway” connects with Highway 61. Every year we collected a pickup truck load of trash.
It was a hard and dirty job but we talked and told jokes along the way. Time and miles flew as we kept track of which beer was the most popular and whether consumers preferred cans or bottles. We wondered where some of the trash came from. How did just one shoe end up in the ditch? What happened to the car that left all the shards of taillights or turn signals on the road shoulder? Why would someone toss a bag full of MAD magazines in the woods?
It was entertaining and we were fulfilling our 4H oath: “I pledge my head to clearer thinking; my heart to greater loyalty; my hands to larger service; and my health to better living, for my club, my community and my country.”
We were also living up to the 4H motto, “To make the best better.”
One of my favorite pictures in my mom’s old photo album is a group shot of a few of us 4H kids next to a cool old pickup truck packed full of trash bags. In the photo with me are other Rose Harbor 4H Club members—Susie Westerlind, Kathy Koss, Carol, Jimmy and Kenny Wisneski, and Margaret Sjoberg. We are all smiling proudly, happy that we had done our part to keep our community clean.
The date on the back of the black and white photo? 1967. It would be a few more years before Earth Day became an official event
I guess that is why I feel there has always been an Earth Day, because my circle of family and friends were participating in Earth Day-like activities long before there was an official day of recognition. We just knew it was the right thing to do.
In recent years there has been an initiative to get people to think of every day as Earth Day. I think it’s a great idea. We all need to work on the three Rs— reduce, reuse, recycle— every day. But I still think it’s good to have a day set aside to focus on special projects like that long ago 4H litter pickup. I’m still proud of those events, as well as my more recent participation in Adopt-a- Highway cleanups and Girl Scout beach sweeps.
I hope I’m serving as a good role model. Being older than dirt has to count for something, right?
Find a purpose to serve,
not a lifestyle to live.
Criss Jami
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