Next Wednesday, April 22, will be the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day.

In 1990, I attended the celebration of the 20th anniversary of Earth Day on the Boston Esplanade. I even got on TV. Like other members of my spiritual group, the EarthSpirit Community, I was colorfully dressed, and I made a great visual. When the roving TV people spotted me, they made a right-angle turn.

I don't like cities, although I grew up on the outskirts of one and I enjoy taking public transportation. I really don't like crowds. So for me, the 20th anniversary Earth Day event was quite an experience. The Esplanade was solid people, an estimated 250,000 according to the MDC. It took forty-five minutes to slowly wend one's way a distance that on an ordinary day would be a five minute stroll. Organizations of all kinds had booths, and Arlo Guthrie was among the performers at the Hatch Shell.

But the most incredible thing about that event was the aftermath. My friends and I came back past the empty Esplanade in the early evening, after chipping in for dinner in Chinatown.

It was spotless. Not a scrap of paper, not a cigarette butt, not a paper cup or a bit of plastic was to be seen anywhere. The MDC was quoted in the Boston Globe as saying they'd never seen the Esplanade left so clean, that we "left it better than we found it."

And isn't that the spirit of Earth Day? To take this lovely planet we have been given by grace, and leave it, to the greatest extent of our ability, better than we found it?

There will be no great events for the 50th anniversay of Earth Day. No mass concerts, no parades, no walkathons, not even community clean-ups (too hard to stay six feet apart). I don't know if any were being planned before COVID-19 put us all into lockdown. But that doesn't mean the day will, or should, go unmarked.

A major rift between the "Boomer" and "Millennial" generations is climate change. Millennials accuse the Boomers (the generation that invented Earth Day and drove the environmental movement into phenomenal achievements) of causing climate change and not caring about the future. It was Boomers who "tuned in, turned on and dropped out," went "back to the land," hugged trees, made organic farming mainstream and pushed through sweeping environmental regulations, but now we're told that climate change is all our fault. It's a tragedy of human folly that the two largest generations in America can't come together about an issue that both of them care so much about.

But now COVID-19 is reminding all of us who is really boss on this planet. We're getting a vivid lesson on a few basic facts: that we are all interconnected, for better or worse, that fouling our own home will have consequences, that biology and physics don't care how we vote or what our opinions are, and that small mistakes can have very large effects.

It's something to reflect on, this Earth Day. Fifty years of environmental awareness--where are we now? And how far do we still have to go?

Inanna Arthen