Earth Day Is All the More Important This Year!
Image: worldbeyondwar.org
By Nancy Price
Under this administration, the Environmental Protection Agency continues to abandon its mission to protect our health and Mother Earth. This Earth Day it is time to say: “Not on our watch”!
Speaking on April 4,1967, at Riverside Church, Martin Luther King warned in his famous “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” speech: “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
Three years later, after accumulating environmental disasters, Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson proposed April 22, 1970, as Earth Day. Almost immediately, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its business allies worried that increasing environmental and public health regulations might curtail their successes here and abroad. For almost 45 years, the corporate, financial, and political elite have systematically been implementing the blueprint for advancing and protecting the free enterprise system spelled out in Lewis Powell’s famous 1971 memo.
Now, with the Poor People’s Campaignwe can pick up where we left off when Martin Luther King was assassinated, to build a movement challenging the evils of systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, ecological devastation, and the nation’s distorted morality. It’s time to change the system!
Materials
