No such thing as small actions

There’s a saying about how Earth becomes smaller every passing year. There is an element of literal truth to that. Each day, several hundred tons of hydrogen, helium, and oxygen leak out of our atmosphere, more than offsetting the 40-some tons of asteroid debris and other space dust that enters. But the saying is really about how technology makes our world feel smaller.

With the internet, information travels across the planet at light speed. Commercial jetliners allow us to get virtually anywhere in under a day. But as the world feels smaller, we may feel smaller still. While the shrinking world puts more within reach, our influence seems to be shrinking, too. There are plenty of factors that make us feel personally insignificant.

Happy birthday, Yellowstone

The idea of the national park is 150 years old today. On March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed an act setting aside Yellowstone as a public park. It wasn’t the plan, but it ended up being the first of many. Over the century and a half that followed, the United States added another 62 parks and hundreds more federally-protected scenic areas, monuments, seashores and rivers.

The concept of the national park has been called “America’s best idea,” but as Yellowstone has shown, the idea itself has evolved dramatically over the years.

We all have a role on Earth Day

A lot of environmental activism focuses on what others need to do. Switching to clean energy. Stopping pollution. Conserving large swaths of land. And so on. But individuals play a role, too. We can’t afford to act as if taking care of the planet is always someone else’s problem.

Speak up to save migratory birds

The bird population in North America has plunged by nearly a third over the past 50 years. That’s a loss of nearly 3 billion birds. And that’s even with regulations designed to protect vulnerable birds.

The losses could soon grow even worse. The Trump Administration now wants to essentially eliminate one of those protections: The Migratory Bird Treaty Act. You have only until March 19 to speak up to try to save it.