On the Bright Side

Every April, people around the world pause to recognize Earth Day, a day set aside to appreciate the planet and renew our commitment to caring for it. Communities organize beach cleanups, plant trees, and talk about protecting the natural world for future generations.  At its heart, Earth Day carries a simple but powerful idea: what we nurture today will shape the world tomorrow.  Today, environmentalism is often used as a shorthand for tribal identity. What began as a universal concern for conservation has been tilled into a political battlefield, and the seeds of division have been harvested in gridlock and resentment.   But the seeds of the modern environmental movement weren’t sown in a vacuum of ideology. In 1969, a massive oil spill off the coast of California galvanized the nation. That disaster became the catalyst for the first Earth Day in 1970, and this led directly to the creation of the EPA and the passage of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act under the...

Go Ask Alice. What is the bright side to a life that was lived from rags to riches to a life sentence at an asylum? Finding someone 100 years later to reclaim your story and reimagine the T he idea struck me during a tour of Flagler’s Whitehall Museum in Palm Beach. Whitehall was a wedding gift from Henry Flagler to his third wife, Mary Lily Kenan, after his second wife, Ida Alice Shourds, was institutionalized in 1895. Gilded Age buffs know that the reason the Standard Oil magnate came to Florida in the first place was due to the poor respiratory health of his first wife, Mary Harkness. And that Whitehall was a gift to his young new bride, Mary Lily Kenan. But little is known about his second wife, Alice, the wife between the two Marys. The docent led us up the staircase of the Grand Hall to the second-floor exhibits, informing us that “after the death of his beloved first wife, and having to put his second wife in a sanatorium, he finally found love again in Mary Lily… this is the La...