What events in your life made you decide to live green?
The event that really made me embrace green living was Earth Day 1970. There was suddenly 10,000 people I think in the mall in Washington. Keep in mind what effect that had. That led very quickly to Richard Nixon, a Republican, signing the Clear Air Act and the Clean Water Act. He saw the writing on the wall. Suddenly you have 10,000 people on the mall celebrating Earth Day and demanding accountability for some of these things. But, what lead to that? What came before Earth Day? I ‘ll tell you what came before that and why people wanted the clean water act. You had the Cuyahoga River catching fire. That was an event that caught people's attention. Rivers are not supposed to catch fire. They are supposed to be water. They are supposed to put out fires, not start them. When that caught fire, people said maybe we should clean up our rivers. What else happened in 1969 that got people's attention that lead to the first Earth Day? The moon shot. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the moon and took casabla beautiful pictures there and brought them back and suddenly we had a sense of the splendor and entity that was the Earth. We looked at it as one. We looked at it as the whole thing, this beautiful water plant there. It is a great picture. It is the most reproduced picture in our world history, that picture of Earth taken from the Moon so we had a sense of that. We also had a sense of how fragile and precious life was because they looked on the Moon and they could see no evidence of life on the Moon. So, life became more precious for me because of the first Earth Day and the events that led up to it.
