On This 55th Anniversary Of Earth Day, Let’s All Pledge To Be ‘Part Of The Solution’

A Brief Earth Day Commentary by Niagara At Large reporter/publisher Doug Draper

Posted this Earth Day, April 2025 on Niagara At Large

Our earth, photographed for the first time by astronauts orbiting the moon in late 1968

The very first Earth Day was held on April 22^nd, 1970 in the wake of seeing that first iconic photo taken by astronauts orbiting the moon of our earth – the one and only oasis in the universe that we know, to this day, that we have to live on – glowing like a jewel in the vast darkness of space.

That first day ballooned into tens-of-millions of people around the world, including in Canada and the United States, rallying for more action on the part of ourselves and our governments to protect and preserve the life-sustaining resources of this precious planet.

In the wake of the grassroots movement spawned by Earth Day 1970, we saw governments in Canada and other regions of the world create whole departments dedicated to protecting the environment, and pass legislation to better care for the quality of our water and air.

U.S. President Richard Nixon, left, and Canada’s Prime Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, shake after signing the first Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in 1972

Two years after that first Earth Day, the then Prime Minister of Canada, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and then President of the United States, Richard Nixon, signed a precedent-setting Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement which became a spring board for citizens in both countries to press for more action to protect what are the largest  freshwater bodies  on earth.

More recently in Ontario, it was pressure from people at the grass roots, more than anything else, that forced the Ford government to back off on its plans to carve out what he called “chunks” of food-growing land in  our Greenbelt for sprawling development and to stop his government, to the extent it has, from destroying  more wetlands, meadowlands and woodlands from low-density urban sprawl.

On this Earth Day, as much as ever, we need that grassroots movement to keep governments at all levels from, as I fear, taking advantage of the current trade war with Trump, along with the housing, energy and all of the other economic challenges we face, to do more building and construct more pipelines at the expense of what is left of our life-giving natural resources.

Already, we are hearing Ontario Premier Doug Ford say he is going to “cut red tape” and do away with measures that he says slow down plans to build more roads and housing because, as he so mockingly puts it, “a grasshopper is in the way.”

It is up to we, the people, once again to take the lead in showing that we can grow our economy with greener energy and without paving over more of our natural heritage and using our air and what is left of our watersheds and  natural lands like a garbage dump for more climate-ravaging carbon and other pollution.

Now, as much as ever, it is we. to paraphrase one of the rallying cries from the first Earth Day,  who must take the lead in ‘not being part of the pollution, but part of the solution.”

On the very first Earth Day in April, 1970, here is yours truly, Doug Draper, out front and wearing a gas mask and carrying a sign reading; “If You Aren’t Part of the Solution, You Are Part of the Pollution,” with fellow Centennial High School students, outside the fences of a  plant belching filth into the air in the Niagara municipality of  Welland, Ontario

On this Earth Day, let’s all make a pledge to each other, for the sake of the life-sustaining biodiversity on this planet of ours, to be part of  the solution.

• Doug Draper, on Earth Day, 2025

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