The day may never come that Earth Day is recognized as an official federal holiday, replete with cessation of labor, fireworks and mattress sales.

Never, because we have been always been painfully slow on the uptake about environmental protection, and, if past is prologue, we won’t come around until it’s practically too late. And by then, we won’t feel like celebrating.

Earth Day 2007 -- Sunday -- brought good weather to most of the nation, which is unusual these days. Seems like someplace is almost always catching hell, with wildfires or freak snow storms or tornados or flood-pumping rains.

Weather, which used to be like background music, now demands our attention and directs our lives to an extent I don’t recall before. The evidence of global warming and its attendant dangerous changes is so powerful now that only the sorriest mules are still denying it. Even the Bush White House has had to admit it’s a real and present danger, though the foolish administration has yet to acknowledge the 800-pound troublemaker that is American industry.

The old myth that black people aren’t into environmentalism was dispelled a few years ago when a University of Michigan professor undertook a study about attitudes and found that, on the whole, black America is more concerned about the environment than are whites, who man most of the public demonstrations and environmental activist positions.

That 2003 study was not only comforting and affirming news, but only logical. Our communities are the ones that suffer, inordinately, from the decades of neglect, irresponsibility and selfishness, generally taking for granted that Mother Nature was not only forgiving and self-healing, but a patsy for humankind. If you want to see who is most likely to have allergy-induced asthma, live near a toxic dump or down wind of a refinery or in the runoff lanes of energy emissions, look in the mirror. It’s us.

It has everything to do with poverty and powerlessness, which go hand in hand and, when taking race into account, prey upon black people like it’s their job.

What time has revealed is that nature will only take abuse for so long before she riles up and strikes back. The slogan from that old margarine commercial -- “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature” -- is proving true.

Al Gore, who likes to say that he “used to be the next president of the United States,” has been ringing the alarm bell for 20 years -- first with “Earth in the Balance,” his manifesto for restoring the planet to its former greatness and stability, and more recently with his traveling slide show-cum-movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which got him an Academy Award and a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

Gore’s expose reveals a technologically advanced world that is so smitten by its discoveries, conveniences and wealth-bearing inventions that it has forsaken what makes life really worth living -- air that is clear and clean, water that is drinkable and plentiful, scenery that is inspiring and accommodating, food that is nourishing and safe, creatures that maintain the balance.

If we get down to bare tacks, and there’s limited breathable air and limited potable water and limited space, you wonder, who will get the last offering? It won’t be us.

Our concern is appropriate, but it’s not enough. Black America had better get active about this and speak up against greenhouse gas pollution, toxic wastes, oil dependence, strip mining and such. Before the air is too thick for our voices to be heard.