Happy Earth Day

How could any green-thinking individual not offer an increasingly gladdened salute to the day? It's hard not to consider where we could have been by now if the original Earth Day, 40 years ago, had been embraced more widely. But by golly, at least now the momentum has shifted, and even though every institution with an advertising budget is busily greenwashing itself — for example, the one that brags widely about their "ecoimagination" on one side, while continuing to oppose the cleanup of the Hudson River they publicly agreed to on the other — there are real and tremendous strides being made.

So let's toast the day with a glass of pure water, giving some grateful credit to all the pioneers of this awareness — like the people PBS is chronicling in "Earth Days," the story of "the dawn and development of the modern environmental movement through the extraordinary stories of the era’s pioneers.

And while we're at it, let's not forget to celebrate to whatever force or forces deserve the credit for the amazingly beautiful planet we're standing on.