Earth Day is a birthday. On April 22, 1970, twenty million Americans joined together to promote a healthy, sustainable environment and gave birth to the modern environmental movement. Today, we celebrate activism, community development, and altruism. We celebrate a growing empowerment among people who believe that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness includes a healthy environment and that habitat preservation includes every one of us. 
At age 39, environmentalism is gaining general acceptance. We drive hybrid cars and leave carbon footprints. As more people learn of the universal importance of healthy living, they see beyond the “environmentalism” stereotype of hemp granola munching hippies versus the corporate suits. Today, the suits are eating hemp granola to control their cholesterol and the hippies run companies driven by sustainability, green energy and corporate responsibility. Groundbreaking laws, such as the California’s Global Warming Solutions Act and Senator Steinberg’s Sustainable Communities Strategy may steer a 21st Century California toward a healthier future in a cost-effective manner. On the federal level, the new administration is working to reverse eight years of practices that were disastrous to clean environments and healthy habitat.
Come celebrate with your community. Sacramento Earth Day 2009 will be at Southside Park this Sunday from 11-6. Walk, bike or take public transit. More than 100 vendors and booths will educate you on amazing new technologies and ways you can save money and make your life greener. Delicious, healthy food will be widely available with music, entertainment and fun all day, including classic rock jam band Deadlocke and reggae grooves from Zion Roots.
Presented by ECOS and Friends of ECOS.
The Sac Rag 
SMUD’s conservation program was such a success that they had to raise rates because such little electricity was being used. And we are ALL better off with DDT being banned. Never mind that delerious malaria-infested kid in Africa, dying because they can’t kill the mosquitoes. Don’t let the bedbugs bite you while you spray them with orange oil. And thank goodness the delta smelt will be around for future generations (if there are any, what with sanline levels increasing in the valley, levy instability, and restrictions on new development).
Not that preventing toxic waste from poisoning the ground for eons is bad. But not all “green” movemnt aspects are so great. And will SOMEONE please tell me where all the human population growth arguments from the ’70s went?? The “water” problem in Califronia isn’t a “water problem”- it’s a “too many people living there” problem. Now that Obama has declared my respitory waste/by product emissions (CO2) subject to regulation, I assume he will be taxing families that have too many emitters/poluters? About time someone went after them annoyingly large Mormon families…
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There is no good way to market population control, but I would love to see the commercials. You KNOW that someone on Madison Avenue 1971 was test marketing commercials for population control. No one will touch the idea because nobody wants to have Hitler mustaches drawn on their pictures.
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The human population growth arguments from the 1970s got shouted down by opponents to the voluntary methods that limit human population growth (birth control and abortion.) Turns out that teaching abstinence doesn’t work.
SMUD’s projected rate increases are largely due to vacant homes and businesses, and infrastructure built to serve recent developments that are sitting vacant, not conservation by rate payers. But even after the planned increases, they’re still cheaper than PG&E’s rates.
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My stock response to human population control arguments is: You first.
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