I remember the first Earth Day. I was in 7th grade and the river ran all these pretty colors, the sun a gorgeous orange, and the mountains weren’t there at all. I read all about the rallies next day from newspapers blowing by. We walked home coughing and looking for cool beer cans, and broken glass sparkled everywhere in the sun. That orange sun was kinda creepy, though, a goldfish upside down in a bowl floatin’, as the Captain put it, but the even oranger moon was nothing but cool, beautiful even. Our eyes had stopped stinging by nightfall, and our coughs quieted away, and we’d breathe in the rank night air and stare up at that big pumpkin moon and scarcely realize that it didn’t have to be orange at all. And if someone tells you that nothing has improved in the decades since, that no one cares and man is doomed, just look at that dull white moon.