For Our Sake And For The Sake Of Future Generations, We Have To Work Together To Protect And Preserve This One And Only Oasis In Space We Live On
A Brief Earth Day Commentary by Doug Draper
Posted April 22nd, 2026 on Niagara At Large
With all of the bad news raining down on us these days, I sometimes find myself looking at a poster I have hanging on a wall above my desk showing a frog grasping a swan by the neck as the bird is on the verge of swallowing him.
A caption on the poster reads; “Don’t Ever Give Up.”
As hopeless as I sometimes find myself feeling about how short governments in our country and around the world are falling in what needs to be done to protecting our environment and address the climate crisis, I keep reminding myself that for the sake of our children and the future of all life on this planet, we have to be like that frog and never give up.
So my message to all of us on this Earth Day is let’s do what we can – each and every one of us as individuals – live our lives in ways that leave a softer footprint on our planet and let’s continue to press governments at all levels to use all the powers that they have to do the same.
I may never be able to rekindle the amount of hope and idealism that inspired me when I was a young high school student growing up in Welland to participate, to the extent that I did, in that very first Earth Day on April 22nd, 1970, but I have to try and I hope you do too.
Immediately below is a photo of me and a few of my Welland Centennial High School Students – I’m the one at the front wearing the gas mask and holding up a sign reading; “If You’re Not Part Of The Solution, You Are Part Of The Pollution,” – in front of a now, long-gone polluting Union Carbide Plant in Welland on that first Earth Day.
On the very first Earth Day in April, 1970, here is yours truly, Doug Draper, out front, wearing a gas mask and carrying a sign “If You Aren’t Part of the Solution, You Are Part of the Pollution,” with fellow high school students. in front of an industry in the Niagara municipality of Welland, Ontario that was notorious at the time for belching filth into the atmosphere for as far as the eye could see. Some of the plant workers came out and yelled at us to “go back to school.”
I still give thanks to our principal at Centennial High, Joe Krar, for letting us take the day out from regular classes to participate in these Earth Day protests and I thank my art teacher at the high school, Mr. Forsyth, for caring enough to loan me that gas mask.
I also want to pay tribute to all of the grade school teachers in Niagara that I met while I was an environment reporter at The St. Catharines Standard over the years who went out of their way to include the importance of protecting and preserving our environment into the curriculum. I met many of these great teachers on or around Earth Day when they invited me to speak to their classes on environmental issues or when they were taking their students out into the community to do things for our planet that made a little difference.
If even a few of those students grew up to embrace a more environmentally sustainable lifestyle, those teachers can certainly feel proud.
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Have a good Earth Day and by all means, let’s make every day Earth Day, Doug Draper
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