With Earth Day falling earlier this week it made me think back to what things were like before people took a good look at our planet and what we could do to help preserve it.

When I was a kid, I saw firsthand what a polluted lake looked like.

I knew what it was like to swim in the ocean at Atlantic City and have flash cubes floating in the water beside you.

I lived on the East Coast, but I saw smog on the evening news in Los Angeles.

Pollution was a very real, everyday thing in the 1960s.

I have been proud that my kids grew up not seeing, smelling or tripping over the garbage that I did as a kid.

But it seems like there is a change on the horizon, and I’m pretty sure my grandchildren are likely to grow up in a world more like mine and less like their parents’.

In the past few years county and local governments have slowly backed away from recycling.

Why?

The answer infuriates me.

Because there is no money to be made in recycling anymore. When did it become about money and not the environment?

When I was 11 years old I used to spend one Saturday a month with my next-door neighbor in the parking lot of the local high school collecting recyclables.

My neighbor was a scientist, and she worked during the week screening produce and flowers that arrived through New York airports to see if they were safe to enter the United States. She was the first true environmentalist I ever met.

On that one Saturday a month we would arrive at the high school at sun up where we would be met by six National Guardsmen with three troop transport trucks. We spent the day collecting paper grocery bags filled with tin cans, glass bottles and newspapers and sorting them into the different trucks to be hauled off to be recycled.

Back then it was truly an act of love because there were no laws requiring it, and frankly even though we were busy all morning, we were still only collecting from the smallest slice from the local population.

But still every month we filled the three trucks to capacity and we went home feeling like we had made a difference.

Last month Kidder Township discontinued its recycling program because the price had tripled.

The cans, bottles, plastics and paper aren’t going to go away. They will still hopefully end up in the trash and not on the side of the road. But the tonnage going to the landfills will increase significantly as will the cost of collecting and hauling all of that extra garbage.

There is such a dichotomy in the world today. The Pocono Mountain Visitors Bureau spends millions of dollars a year on tourism promotion and advertising. Last year the Pocono Mountain Visitors Bureau launched a program called “Pick Up the Poconos.” The program encouraged townships to put together teams to clean the roadsides.

I would encourage anyone interested in learning about true recycling and zero footprint do some research into the recycling and composting programs instituted at Penn State main campus or by the Philadelphia Eagles and Lincoln Financial in Philadelphia.

Both of these institutions have created long-term, realistic programs that are sustainable and create jobs.

Locally, Pocono Raceway uses solar power to meet all of its energy needs and aggressively encourages visitors to the track to recycle, often using incentives to get the recyclables into the proper receptacles.

But unless the federal, state and local governments get involved and stay involved in caring for our environment the chances of these programs succeeding in the long run are just not good.

Capitalism plain and simple tells us that without the number of responsible businesses growing, the cost of keeping programs like those at Penn State and Lincoln Financial won’t be able to survive.

These changes, these steps away from environmentally responsible governance will hurt all of us in the long run. The trash needs to go somewhere. Doing away with recycling and limiting the number of trash bags brought to the transfer station means that the garbage is going somewhere else.

Will it be long before our roads are more garbage-strewn than we already see?

Will the trash make its way into our pristine creeks and lakes?

Will the beautiful game lands that surround us become illegal garbage dumps?

Time will tell. But the trend is in the wrong direction right now and it needs to be reversed or our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be paying dearly for the decisions being made today.