The first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, was the end result of years of efforts to secure a place on the national political agenda for environmental issues. Inspired by the success of the antiwar movement of the late 60s in generating grassroots opposition to the Vietnam War by organizing symbolic events, teach-ins, and large public gatherings, early environmental activists managed to mobilize 20 million demonstrators in thousands of schools and local communities on that memorable day 35 years ago. Today’s Earth Day observances are more subdued but no less urgent to the environmental movement’s committed core.

As it was from the beginning, Earth Day is more about people than about the earth. The earth is 4.55 billion years old. In its youth it had a molten surface; we expect in its old age it may be a cinder. And it abides these intervening eons impassively without prejudice or preference about what arises and falls on its surface. All of our annual talk on Earth Day about “saving the earth” is a conceit; what we are really talking about is saving ourselves.

From a practical standpoint, chemical pollution of our air, water, and soil can severely limit or even shorten our lives, triggering a fearsome arsenal of diseases, from asthma and birth defects to lead, mercury, and zinc poisoning, inexorably weakening our immune systems and leaving us vulnerable and sick. Because these threats only become clear to us in our individual experience over the course of a lifetime, we tend to react slowly, put off the remedies.

Researchers quantified the price we pay for this indifference years ago. In 1998, scientists at Cornell analyzed population trends, climate change, increasing pollution, and emerging diseases and concluded “40 percent of world deaths can now be attributed to various environmental factors, especially organic and chemical pollutants.”

Statistics like that should remind us to take whatever steps we can to preserve in our world those things that nurture human life — clean air, water, and soil — and to be more mindful of the consequences of corner-cutting and compromising, either through laziness or greed, that undermine those efforts. Fortunately, not everyone needs reminding.

This week we report on two separate local efforts in the cause of environmental (and self) preservation taking place at the margins of two of the most egregious environmental lapses in Newtown’s recent history. The members of The Potatuck Club, a private fish and game club adjacent to the town-owned property at Fairfield Hills, have announced the creation of Pootatuck River Conservation Association, and the Candlewood Valley Chapter of Trout Unlimited is launching a series of projects designed to protect the Deep Brook Class A Trout Fishery. Every Newtowner should be a backer and believer in these two initiatives now that we have been baptized in the 8,500 gallons of heating oil dumped into the ground at Fairfield Hills in two separate incidents in 2003 and 2004.

Perhaps it is the counterculture antecedents of Earth Day as seen through the lens of the anti-intellectual conservatism of our current political culture that encourage critics to belittle environmental science as the delusions of aging hippie tree-huggers trying to recapture past glories. That is one of the unanticipated consequences of the success 35 years ago in placing environmental issues on the national political agenda. Politics is unique to our species and is always rife with suspicions, accusations, and ideology. But we must remember, especially on Earth Day, that there is something wholesome and redeeming about the natural world. Hal Borland said it best in his book Sundial of the Seasons: “You can’t be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion, or challenge the ideology of a violet.”

It just may be our political proclivities that eventually do us in. The earth does not care a whit whether we survive as a species. It is up to us to secure our survival in the long run. Our best hope may lie in the lessons laid out before us every day by the tree, the bird, the squirrel, and the violet.