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It's Earth Week—and we’re dealing with the Covid 19 pandemic. These are unsettling times. The Covid 19 virus has, in a matter of weeks, shut down the global economy, wreaked havoc on human lives, stressed healthcare and essential workers, tested us all as we quarantine, cancel graduations and important celebrations, shift our work online and required people across the globe to stay at home.

Earth Day has always had a special meaning for me – a birthday for Earth and a call to action to do what we can to protect it. In 1970, I organized the very first Earth Day event at my school in Oakland. Eschewing the bus, I enlisted a crew of friends in a bike caravan to ride 10 miles to school. Alarmed by the oil spills along the coast, and the poisoning of wildlife and humans from DDT, my classmates and I led a day long teach-in. This was the spark that ignited what has become a lifelong career as an activist. Fast forward 20 years, it seemed only fitting to celebrate the opening of Clean

50 years ago, someone had the idea that if we gathered together on a single day, we could show solidarity in our demands to protect and restore our environment, show strength in numbers, and gather comfort from being with like-minded people. Rivers were on fire, people were dying from pollution and everyone was being poisoned by the world around us. Over the next decade, we passed laws that became the bedrock of environmental protection in this country. The Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, creation of the EPA – all of these happened, not as a result of Earth Day itself