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By Emily J. Minor
    
They were different times back then, certainly, what with free love and the women’s movement and the Vietnam War. And for local resident and writer Kristin Alexandre, it was, in so many ways, the defining years of her life.
    Young and newly married to an older man with social interests and some power, Alexandre hooked up with a group of college students at Columbia University in New York City and helped to organize — get this — the first Earth Day.
    There she was, a French major just out of Virginia’s Sweet Briar College, working with the mayor’s office, getting FiFth Avenue shut down, reaching out to Barbra Streisand and Ali MacGraw and the Rockefeller family.
    “Barbra Streisand came and sang On A Clear Day,” she says, laughing, still a bit in awe of what they accomplished.
    Forty-two years later, this prolific author, traveler, and entrepreneur still worries about the same environmental and conservation issues they worried about then.
    “The No. 1 issue then and now is overpopulation,” Alexandre said. “After that, I would say it’s water.”
    So, how do you start such a movement? Whom do you call? Where do you meet? How do you get the troops energized?
    Alexandre, traveling out of state to discuss a possible cable TV series for her graphic novel series Nuncia, still loves to recall those heady times.
    “Really, people who had been part of the anti-war movement were kind of refocusing their energies on the Earth Day movement,” she said. “They were segueing. There was just this protest group of people, and we kind of refocused.”
    It was in the winter of 1969 that this group first went to a Columbia auditorium to hear environmental activist Denis Hayes discuss plans for a possible Earth Day, a day that would pay homage — and bring attention — to Mother Earth. Full of energy after Hayes’ speech, someone rented cheap office space to push along the effort. Pretty soon, they were meeting with then-New York City Mayor John Lindsay about logistics and sending out press releases to the network news.
    There were Earth Day events all over the country that first year: April 22, 1970. Today, Earth Day is celebrated on the same date, but in 192 countries.
    Former U.S. Congressman Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat from Wisconsin, is largely considered Earth Day’s true founder, since he held the political power to grease the wheels. But he has been widely quoted as saying the event took off, organically.
    “It simply grew on its own,” he would say in later years.
    Alexandre, who remarried after being with her first husband, William Hubbard, for just a short while, said “everyone was just so active at the time.”
    And while Alexandre says she is hopeful about the future of the environment — The electronic media do so much to spread awareness, she says — she’s also worried about the graying of America’s environmental movement, and the movement’s shift to more political circles.
    Issues like global warming and population “weren’t politicized back then,” she says.
    And today, young adults seem burdened with so many serious challenges, they don’t feel much power, she said.
    “It’s a sad thing today,” says Alexandre, who has lived in coastal Delray for about three years. “I have an 18-year-old, and she does not feel she has the power to change anything. The Baby Boomers, we felt like we could change it all.”