Some people may wonder why we in the Northern Hemisphere have our spring and summer when our planet is far away from the sun. (Equally confusing: our fall and winter come when we are near to the sun.) Shouldn't proximity to that nice warm ball of sunshine predict our seasons?
The headline fish species of the evening, along with the multitudes of extremely tanned men, served as a reminder that somewhere on the planet in this early spring, it is indeed seasonably warm.
It started with Rachel Carson's popular 1962 book on the dangers of pesticides, "Silent Spring, " and the eye on the planet increased with a photo of the Earth taken from Apollo 8 as it orbited near the moon in 1968.