Our Mortal Peril

Living in a time when the ongoing effect of humankind on the Planet Earth is part of the international conversation, nearly on a daily basis, it’s hard to imagine a time when it seemed necessary to set aside an entire day for Americans to make clear “that they understood and were deeply concerned over the deterioration of our environment and the mindless dissipation of our resources.”

That’s how U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat from Wisconsin, described the message of the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Nelson helped create the event at a time when there was no U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, no Clean Air Act, no Clean Water Act. All quickly followed — the EPA was created in December 1970 — and a decade focused on environmentalism changed the conversation, not whether to act but how forcefully.

Earth Day is a little more than two weeks away. It offers a reminder that while America has made great strides from the heavy pollution that preceded that first ecological celebration, there’s still so much work to do.

Locally, the reminders are everywhere. The region’s slow adoption of sewage treatment has meant residential development that dumps waste directly into the ground, from which we pull our drinking water. That same pollution works its way into our local water bodies, and the sharp decline in the region’s iconic shellfish populations is a terrible symptom of a larger disorder. The poisons will continue to seep down, and toward the bays, for decades to come, even if we shut off the flow of waste.

The good news is that the region generally needs no lectures on the need for environmental action. This is a community that agreed a quarter century ago to limit development and is often at the forefront of new tactics, from improved septics to eliminating plastic grocery bags. Sensible strategies are an easy sell to our population. They just need to be identified and promoted.

The Express News Group will mark Earth Day on Friday, April 21, with an Express Sessions event in Montauk focused on that hamlet and its sewer needs, and how that environmental measure also has development implications — and will decide how well Montauk can prepare for a planet with rising sea levels that threaten to turn it into a new Key West, placed at the end of an archipelago.

It’s worth quoting Nelson at length on the lasting lesson of the event he founded 53 years ago, which remains a guiding principle today: “So long as the human species inhabits the Earth, proper management of its resources will be the most fundamental issue we face. Our very survival will depend upon whether or not we are able to preserve, protect and defend our environment. We are not free to decide about whether or not our environment ‘matters.’ It does matter, apart from any political exigencies. We disregard the needs of our ecosystem at our mortal peril.”