Da Da Da Da Da. Don’t seem to care, ’cause indifference is our thing.

Da Da Da Da Da. We’re politically aware, but this Earth Day’s just a one time fling.

Da Da Da Da Da. Every spring ’bout this time, the environmentalists throw a fit,

Da Da Da Da Da. About how we’ve been treating the water, land and air like it was sh—.

Another Earth Day has come and gone, (I believe it was the 26th celebration) yet it lacked the commercial hype of the twentieth or twenty-fifth.

This is probably the reason that most of us were ignorant to this world-wide celebration until it was upon us.

After all, the soiree hasn’t really been around long enough to have acquired some type of meaningless commercial greeting card or cuddly animal mascot or to have become a national holiday (from work and school).

I find it amusing how we warp holidays (Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and almost any religious holiday) in order to make a buck off our emotions and social binders; God Bless Capitalism.

Getting on to today’s topic, I think it is time to evaluate what we, as students or faculty at this university, have been doing in the past few weeks to help the cause of Mother Earth.

For once, I will begin on a positive note; however, this incident didn’t involve any students that were over the age of six.

While walking to another lunch at the local food service I was shocked to see the next generation doing their part by cleaning up what we created. I will explain their deed, but first I need to give a little background.

Over the past weekend we engaged in our annual beer drinking, trash tossing, lake dyeing, lawn trampling, fossil fuel-burning celebration known as Veishea.

Now, I realize that the thought of who will pick up your plastic beer cups doesn’t enter most people’s minds when they are in an altered state of consciousness, yet this is something that should be considered.

The city of Ames did an excellent job of cleaning up after 50,000 people, yet this is a bit too much to ask of public sanitation, as traces of the mass hysteria remained this morning.

This is where the kids come in. A group of what I believe were kindergartners or first graders were being led by their teachers in a trash sweep of the old RCA complex and neighboring field.

It is nice to see that some adults do feel that cleaner surroundings are important enough not only to clean up our trash, but also to teach younger generations the importance of ecology and environmentalism.

These ecologically aware kids were doing what we deem a chore, and they were having fun in the process.

Now, this is not a call for reinstitution of child labor to solve our problems; it is meant to show the simple things we can do if we feel that the cause is important enough and to shame us for our negligence of our environment.

Moving on to another parable, this one involves a lake which was dyed bright green as a April Fool’s joke and then re-dyed an artificial aquarium blue-green so the weekend visitors would see the pride we take in our campus.

Personally, I think that the lake should have been left green, it better represents the history of Iowa State as a think tank for the many artificial herbicides, insecticides, fertilizers and farming concepts which have changed Iowa from a prairie and marsh ecosystem to the vast row crops which we drive past each day in our combustion engines.

I will admit that Iowa State is one of the current leaders in the fields of farm management, soil management and prairie reestablishment. However, it seems the current trend is to degrade the figures of the past even in light of their tremendous accomplishments, and I must say that Iowa State, like most, didn’t always back the current practices in land management.

Thus, the glowing green more correctly represented our university and students (both past and present) than the idealized, and I doubt at all realistic, color which now adorns our campus lake.

I hope that the visitors of our lovely campus don’t see the bikes which have been tossed into the lake or stream (near Old RCA), as this may roughen the luster which ISU’s public relations people have spent so much time and money to establish.

Funny how the university decided to start a number of improvement (land-wise, not educational) projects right before Veishea.

Maybe they need to impress those alumni and show them some physical evidence of their well-spent donations and tax dollars. I do salute them for trying to improve our surroundings, especially since we seem ineffective in such areas.

Getting back to my initial point, Earth Day is as important as any other holiday and should be given its respect, and should be a model for how we should AND CAN live to maintain our planet, as well.

If you did something for Earth Day, then don’t stop at Monday, keep working all year. Those kids could do it, so we have no excuse for not getting involved; and if you don’t know where to go for ideas about what you can do, get ahold of a SEC member (which I am) and they can point you in the right direction for local, national and global ecology.

We only have one planet and when it is gone, so are we.

Ryan McCammon is a sophomore in animal science / pre-vet from Mason City.