Earth Beautiful

This is a view I have seen dozens of times--it is on the road between our house in the Tetons and town, and yet every single time I pass it, I am struck by it's beauty, it's simplicity, and it's link between the present and the past in the American West. Today is Earth Day, created in 1970 as a day for environmental education, stemming directing from the publicationin 1962 of Rachel Carson's SIlent Spring, an indictment on man's assault on the earth, using DDT as the index poison. Here is a paragraph from that thin volume: "Who has made the decision that sets in motion these chains of poisonings, this ever-widening wave of death that spreads out, like ripples when a pebble is dropped into a still pond? Who has placed in one pan of the scales the leaves that might have been eaten by the beetles and in the other the pitiful heaps of many-hued feathers, the lifeless remains of the birds that fell before the unselective bludgeon of insecticidal poisons? Who has decided—who has the right to decide— for the countless legions of people who were not consulted that the supreme value is a world without insects, even though it be also a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight?"