Earth Day gratitiude

Just finished watching the PBS "American Experience" film on the nascent environmental movement of the early to late seventies. It's hard for a person of my generation to fathom any sort of broad progressive grassroots movement meeting with any success, but the environmental movement fostered a number of legislative victories throughout the seventies. Remember, it was Nixon that ushered in the EPA, and Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House. Reagan, of course tore them down.
While the Nixon and Carter eras were met with the first true energy crises in decades, encountering the cold realities of the OPEC oil embargoes, they also forced us as a nation and our leaders to deal with issues of conservation head on. Conservation and care for the land are some of the oldest virtues we posses as a nation, and it took the Environmental activists to rekindle that passion in modern popular culture. The Reagan and Bush eras set our progress back decades, but even now there is tacit acknowledgment of the urgent need to move beyond oil. And since the seventies, there has been a patchwork forest of progressive initiatives, from recycling to renewable energy technology, that are slowly becoming the national norm.
This Earth Day, we should pause and give thanks for these brave and tireless groups of men and women that not only launched the modern conservation era, but who have kept fostering it through my generation and the next.