50 years ago today, Denis Hayes kicked off a movement that would fundamentally change our perception of the environment and our relationship with it. This first Earth Day began the mobilization of the American public and in that spirit, this year has been dubbed, “The Year of Action”. Usually, this would require that we take to the streets, but in this time of the Coronavirus, the best action that can be taken is one of staying home. One of the few silver-linings we have is the opportunity to directly see the impact we each have on the environment. Instead of organized beach clean-ups, shelter-in-place orders have brought us massive drops in air pollution recorded around the world. In revealing vistas that have not been seen in decades, we see possibilities for the future. For many, this has given us time to reflect on just how tied to the environment we are. 

However, despite the dolphins in the Venice canals, access to water remains a fundamental issue of our time. According to the WHO, 2.2 billion people still do not have access to a “safely managed source” of water. For perspective, this is seven times the population of the USA without reasonable water access. That’s a hard number to comprehend. But that’s the beauty of Earth Day. All of the environmental issues that have been addressed in the last 50 years have been too big to comprehend, to mindblowing for an individual to feel that they could ever have any effect on the crisis at hand. And yet Earth Day helped each of us understand that it is MY plastic straw hurting sea turtles and that we can do better. 

One of the original goals of Earth Day was to personalize the environmental crises that were unfolding around the world. Moving the needle of perspective from, pollution is a necessary byproduct of progress, to one that perceives it as harmful to not just the environment's health but to your personal wellbeing. It tied the abstract of a poverty-stricken population halfway around the globe and deforestation to the choices we make, as a problem that affects each and every one of us. While there is a long way to go, the needle was fundamentally moved. 

For most of us in the USA, our relationship with water is so mundane that it is difficult to fathom that access to clean water is a problem that needs to be tackled. When access is interrupted we see it as a temporary nuisance or in the worst case, a failure of governance like in Flint Michigan. We see it as something fixable and we are rightly gobsmacked when it’s not fixed. Each of us does not need to solve this problem for our 2.2 billion neighbors but we can all be part of the solution with simple actions of conservation and support for those closest to the problem.