Listen up, you couch potatoes: each recycled beer can saves enough electricity to run a television for three hours.

By 1975 - and continuing to today - all Americans came to believe that they had a "right" to a safe, clean, healthy environment. When I grew up, no one seriously criticized the steel mills and paper mills for the deadly stench they produced - that was the smell of prosperity. In the modern society, no one would tolerate such conditions in an American city.

I suppose I'd characterize myself as having a faith-based optimism. My faith is parental and Darwinian.

It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.

Politicians had always viewed environmental issues as narrow things of no great political consequence. Sort of NIMBY issues. A big part of the reason was that the groups that cared about wilderness didn't talk with the groups that were trying to stop freeways from cutting through inner cities, and neither of them talked to the folks who wanted to stop the military from dumping Agent Orange on Vietnam.

That said, I'm embarrassed and furious that so many coal-state Democrats in the U.S. Senate are paralyzing international progress to protect the short term interests of a dying industry that ravages the environment from mine to slag heap.

When we held the first Earth Day, everyone said it was a success because of the huge turnout. It was probably the largest planned event across the country.