Earth Day XXXVII

Saturday marks the 37th Earth Day since the late Sen. Gaylord Nelson held the first one in 1970. The positive response led to the official creation of the day becoming an annual event.

Xoff, Nelson's biographer, has a good post with some ideas on how to spend the day.

Lisa Kaiser, for the Shepherd, has a column about the growing problem of electronic waste.

Computers are a major culprit with people buying new ones every few years and dumping the old ones in landfills. The state of Wisconsin setup a Computer Reycling Program in 1997 to deal with just that problem. If you drop your computer at one of the specified sites, the state (via the Department of Corrections) will use those parts to put together working computers. They then get donated to preschools, daycare centers, and other organizations and individuals in need of them.

If you're in Wisconsin, there's a list of sites here.

In the long run though, there needs to be more coherent national and international policy to deal with this issue since computers and their components simply stop working eventually.