Tuesday, April 22 is Earth Day, a reminder of our responsibility to steward the only planet we’ve ever called home.

In our Go Green edition this week, you’ll find environmental success stories on Vashon and ways to get involved yourself, including safer ways to dispose of hazardous waste and the island’s upcoming day of service event to rid our beaches of old, crumbling tires.

It’s important for each of us to do our part locally. Learn more about the environment around you. How do the creeks and woods and bugs and birds interact outside your home? How are your activities helping or hurting them? What could you and your neighbors do to make Vashon a model for community environmentalism?

Just as natural selection shapes a species to survive its changing environment, so are islanders evolving to prepare for climate change. The Mukai Farm and Garden Fruit Barreling Plant project is one of several efforts to make Vashon more nutritionally self-sufficient. Island water experts and scientists are planning to research the island’s aquifer system to better understand precisely how much water we can provide at a time.

Those efforts are all needed, but big-picture activism is needed to solve more entrenched issues, such as global climate change, microplastic pollution and the degrading health of the southern resident orcas.

Good news on the latter: A new baby, J63, has been spotted travelling with J Pod. The child is believed to be the first calf of J40, according to reporting by The Seattle Times. Happily, recently born J62 is also, according to researchers, looking “nice and fat and … energetic.”

But scientists say a lack of quality food, further marred by pollution, threatens the pod’s survival. Inbreeding has threatened their health, too. Further, underwater noise from ships scrambles their hunting by echolocation — imagine if you had someone shouting in your ear every time you went to the grocery store.

In the short-term, helping rid our beaches of those nasty tires will be a great way to build motivation and education around the pollution that harms orcas. In the medium-term, we need to rapidly boost our renewable energy investments and maintain (with the goal of phasing out) some fossil fuels so that we can one day soon breach the Lower Snake River dams without also breaching our energy supply. That will open up salmon habitat and maintain the federal government’s treaty promises to allow the Tribes to maintain their way of life.

And in the long-term, our job is the same as it’s been for decades: Educate ourselves and loved ones about the ecological challenges our Earth faces. Approach those challenges with a smile and determination, not with an attitude of despair and doom. Promote and elect candidates and measures which phase out air, sea and land pollution, and invest in technology that will make those efforts easier and less expensive.

Don’t know where to start? We’re up to our ears in green-thumbed hippies who would love your help. Reach out to the Vashon Nature Center, the Land Trust, the Vashon Bird Alliance, the Backbone Campaign or our many, many other environmental groups for ideas.

And when next you step outside, drink in the natural world around you. Breathe in the spring air. Let the warm sun wash over your face. Listen to the singing birds and buzzing insects. In this moment, you are connecting with countless generations of your ancestors who have done the same thing, no matter what part of the planet they came from.

This is what we’re fighting for — the planet Earth from which we are all born.