happy 45th anniversary Earth Day

 (free poster found here at the Earth Day Network)

"Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste . . . ” ~ Wallace Stegner, excerpt from his famous "Wilderness Letter", December 1960

"Is it not likely that when the country was new and men were often alone in the fields and the forest they got a sense of bigness outside themselves that has now in some way been lost.... Mystery whispered in the grass, played in the branches of trees overhead, was caught up and blown across the American line in clouds of dust at evening on the prairies.... I am old enough to remember tales that strengthen my belief in a deep semi-religious influence that was formerly at work among our people. The flavor of it hangs over the best work of Mark Twain.... I can remember old fellows in my home town speaking feelingly of an evening spent on the big empty plains. It had taken the shrillness out of them. They had learned the trick of quiet...." ~ Sherwood Anderson, in a letter in the 1920's, quote included in Wallace Stegner's "Wilderness Letter", December 1960

Wallace Stegner's "Wilderness Letter" may be found in its entirety here, at The Wilderness Society (scroll down).

The history of Earth Day here. at the Earth Day Network.

What are you doing for Earth Day this year? We're going on a neighborhood garden tour, focusing on drought resistant landscaping and water conservation and native plants.