At 35, An Earth Day Surprise

Today the environmental movement’s defensiveness and the right’s carping obscure something critical: The leading edges of a rich and formidable environmentalism are emerging in thousands of surprising places. People in Colorado, Arizona, South Carolina, Virginia, Florida, Texas, and Utah — just to name a few — are taking startlingly progressive steps to build new transit lines, protect farmland and open space, mandate renewable energy projects, block Wal-Marts, establish new mining restrictions, bring local farm food into public schools, construct energy-efficient green buildings, and design systems to conserve water. They are buying fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles, purchasing homes in walkable communities, instituting growth boundaries to curb sprawl, building alliances between ranchers and conservationists, replacing highways with better and less expensive alternatives, and taking thousands of other actions that — as the original Earth Day organizers said— “look beyond tomorrow.”