We used to agree on Earth Day. Political division has changed the environmental priorities
This year marks the 55th anniversary of Earth Day, but rather than enjoying its golden years, the planet is facing a new kind of peril. In recent weeks, the Republican party — the same party that oversaw the creation of the eco-conscious holiday back in 1970 — has delivered considerable blows to the environment, including taking steps to undo critical Nixon-era policies that protect the nation’s air, water, natural lands and threatened species.
President Nixon presided over the first Earth Day, founded in large part as a reaction to a devastating oil spill off the coast of California. Nixon and his wife, First Lady Pat Nixon, planted a tree on the White House lawn to commemorate the occasion.
The holiday ushered in a decade of environmental activism and legislation under his conservative leadership, including the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the signing of the Clean Air Act in 1970; the Clean Water Act in 1972; and the Endangered Species Act in 1973.
Now the landscape looks considerably different. In the first months of his second term, President Trump and his allies, including EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, unleashed a slew of orders that experts say are undoing the very policies their party once helped champion.
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-04-22/republicans-created-earth-day-now-theyre-coming-after-the-environment
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Right about politics and war.
Right about the environment.
Right about society.
Right about the music.
The establishment said the hippies were longhairs, and drug users, and unkempt, and some of that may be true. What's also true is this:
55 years of Earth Day and the planet is more poisoned than ever.
