Alva Review-Courier -

BOSTON (AP) — Gina McCarthy remembers the way things used to be: Tar balls clinging to her legs after swimming in Boston Harbor. The Merrimack River colored bright blue and green by textile mill chemicals. Black smoke everywhere.

Kim Wasserman worries about what it's like today: Hundreds of diesel trucks rolling down residential streets in her mostly low-income, Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago. Houses blanketed in ash from a recent smokestack demolition at a shuttered coal-fired power plant. High rates of asthma and other illnesses.

Fifty years after the first Earth Day helped spur activism o...