By Jeff Tittel

This year will be the most important Earth Day since the first one.

All the progress we have made in the past 48 years is at risk from the Trump administration. It has declared war on the environment -- clean air and water, cleaning up toxic sites, fighting climate change. People have been outraged by these attacks and have been showing up at protests and demonstrations.

We need to take all that energy and hard work and make real changes to protect our environment at the local, state and national levels. As the public mobilizes on green issues, we can use that momentum to pass important environmental legislation.

More than 20 million people took part in the first Earth Day, many of whom were too young to vote. Those citizens not only took part in protests and cleanups, they also learned how to organize and get involved politically, supporting pro-environmental candidates. This led to targeting the "dirty dozen" of Congress in 1970. The country came together to vote for candidates who would fight for the environment rather than cater to corporate polluters. We defeated seven out of the 12, sending political shock waves throughout Washington and across the country.

That political action led to the election of hundreds of pro-environmental candidates at state and local levels. More important, it pressured Congress to pass landmark environmental legislation, including the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and to create the Environmental Protection Agency.

This is the year I personally got very politically active, helping to elect a pro-environmental mayor of Hillside, Alex Menza, who went on to become a state senator. Others included Betty Wilson as deputy commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Protection and Jerry English as a state senator. I joined the New Democratic Coalition, which was the "Indivisible" of the time. This led to New Jersey passing landmark laws such as the Pinelands Act and the Spill Act.

This year there again is inspired leadership from the youth movement. March for Our Lives was very much what we did back then -- organized and carried out by teenagers across the country.

We have the power to enact change and our youth shows us this. We need to use the same momentum to fight for the environment and against President Donald Trump's dangerous anti-environmental actions. Polls show that almost three-quarters of Americans believe in the threat of climate change, and 85 percent of New Jersey citizens are concerned about our drinking water. People care about the environment, but now we need everyone to start voting on it.

Trump is dismantling all of the progress that has been made by ending programs to stop climate change and reduce air pollution. He eliminated former President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan, pulled us out of the Paris climate accords, rolled back protections for clean air and water, and made massive cuts to the EPA. The Trump administration is opening public lands and coasts for drilling and pushing through pipelines without environmental reviews. When you eliminate clean air protections, our air becomes poisoned. When you allow coal mines to dump toxic waste into our rivers, they get poisoned. When you cut programs for lead, children get poisoned.

It's not enough to make promises. We need the Murphy administration to implement important rules for protecting our environment and preventing Trump's rollbacks. New Jersey needs to pass legislation to commit to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 and get us off fossil fuels, and Gov. Phil Murphy must veto the nuclear-energy subsidy bill.

They need to pass bills such as the Defend New Jersey Act to protect us against federal rollbacks. We can install charging networks to promote electric vehicles and implement strong clean air and water regulations while banning fracking and fracking waste to protect our resources.

We must focus more on making the environment a political issue so that more people will vote for candidates who will protect it and fight climate change. We need to hold our Congress members accountable, especially those such as Rep. Leonard Lance, R-7th Dist., who used to vote for the environment and now does not, and Rep. Tom MacArthur, R-3rd Dist., who has one of the worst environmental records in Congress.

The polls show that people care about the environment; now we need these people to come out and vote for it. We need to organize, register and vote like we've never done before because our planet depends on it.

Jeff Tittel is the director of the New Jersey Sierra Club.

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