Earth Day pays tribute to whole wide world

All you had to do to know it was Earth Day was log onto Google on Tuesday.

There it was on Google’s “classic” home Web page—an idyllic mountain-and-waterfall scene in vivid blue and green. All it lacked was the sound effects of a gurgling brook and chirping birds.

Normally, my daily iGoogle page features a cute cartoon frog and ladybug as they go through their day, drinking coffee in the morning (probably in recyclable Google cups).

Then they play outdoor games such as croquet, also in an idyllic, blue-and-green spring setting.

I already felt better locking into Google’s Earth Day theme as my home page for the day as my personal tribute to the holiday, which isn’t really a holiday because we still had to work and stuff.

The day before, I celebrated the eve of Earth Day by perusing a recycled newspaper somebody had left behind on a table at Piggly Wiggly near Sunset Beach, which is soon to be recycled into a new Lowes Foods, complete with green logo.

There it was, in vivid black-and-white—a story in USA Today about actor Ed Begley’s Earth-Day tendencies decades before it became really fashionable.

Good ol’ Ed uses a solar stove to boil water for dinner and has solar panels on the roof of his basic, two-bedroom 1930s house.

He believes in “soaping up” with military speed in showers lasting 5 minutes or less and rides a bicycle wherever he can, even to business meetings in Santa Monica.

When he needs a ride home from LAX, he takes the dang bus.

All his eco-mindedness has created consternation for Ed’s wife, who prefers hot, half-hour showers and would like to add a bedroom and bath onto their too-humble-for-Hollywood abode.

She also wants to buy a Volvo, a gas-burner that apparently is somewhere on the back burner of Ed’s solar stove.

Surely he can afford these things, but Ed has loftier goals in mind when it comes to earthly concerns.

I, too, ride a bicycle, usually just around decaying golf courses that from the looks of things are gradually recycling themselves back into the ground.

Otherwise, I still have to venture out on U.S. 17 and hightail it to work in noisy traffic, in a polluting array of vehicles that are doing nothing to aid Earth Day concerns, except for a few hybrids in the crowd.

April 22 was the designated day to think green.

But with a little forethought and inspiration from Google and Ed, maybe every day can be Earth Day.

Laura Lewis is a staff writer at the Beacon. Reach her at 754-6890 or llewis@brunswickbeacon.com.