By Frosty Wooldridge
THE GOOD
Across the American landscape there is something fundamentally wrong with our understanding of the Natural World. We think we can abuse it with GMOs, 84,000 chemicals and endless carbon exhaust. We think we can continue expanding and exploding our numbers as well as our profligate waste of water, energy and resources. The sad reality grows daily: we're coming to the end of the line. It could be five, ten or twenty years from now, but the end of the line is coming.
Wisconsin U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson, Father of Earth Day 1970, said,
The battle to restore a proper relationship between man and his environment, between man and other living creatures, will require a long, sustained, political, rural, ethical and financial commitment far beyond any effort we ever made before in any enterprise in the history of man.
As a college senior at Michigan State University, I wrote essays in the Michigan State News, called my senators, urged other students to participate and engaged faculty to speak about human overpopulation, species-extinction rates, degradation of our oceans and a host of consequences being played out across the globe.
During that time, my youthful enthusiasm drove me to speak up, write up and create organizations to address and solve humanity's degradation of this planet at the time. I figured everyone cared about the well-being of the planet because the Earth's health meant humans' health.
As a certified math-science teacher, I thought my work in the classroom would really make a difference here in the USA. We could stop DDT, Monsanto's Agent Orange, Dow Chemical's poisoning of the Great Lakes and 84,000 chemicals from being injected, sprayed and dumped into the natural world 24/7. I felt we could end poverty, homelessness, stop the Vietnam War, stop racism, domestic abuse and more.
On Earth Day 1970, human overpopulation stood as the preeminent crisis facing the planet. We humans in 1970 featured 3.5 billion of ourselves. By engaging birth control and 2.0 children per family, we could balance out the USA to a stable population of 250 million by 1990. In fact, by 1970, American women averaged 2.03 children across this country.
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