My earliest memory of Earth Day was from the earnest ‘80s, my mother took little me to a fair (it might have been the fairgrounds from the Dublin Fire Carnival but I was maaaybe 6 and everything was mysterious)

Anyway there were big white tents, big enough that there were multiple kiosks within each. One of the kiosks I dunno who ran (this was PA so my guess is Quakers or at least Mennonites) but it was a basketball throw, you’d donate your dollar and get X throws to get a hoop.

And the prize? OK, there were these big glass tubes filled with glass beads, representing USG spending, big full red ones for military spending and almost-empty green ones for social spending - big full “M-X Missile”, meager “rent assistance”, etc.

And the prize was you got to move one bead of spending as you wished, the idea being at the end of the day the tubes would illustrate the budget the people really wanted. This was the first place I encountered the bumper sticker about the Pentagon hosting a bake sale.

Anyway I didn’t make a single shot because I was like 5 but the nice lady faked it for me. As my reward, I moved a bead from “AIDS treatment” to “the Seawolf-class attack submarine”, because I’ve always been like this.