Since 1970, Earth Day has divided people into three camps: those who celebrate and promote it vigorously; those who scoff; and the vast majority of the public who pay little attention. This year is different. The Earth Day campaign’s two key slogan words, “environmental citizenship,” carry less of the stigma than in the past and in fact seem like a mainstream phrase. We are, after all, stewards of this planet, and far more people now realize the gravity of the task.

The challenges are many. One example of how the planet can make life difficult — the plight of drought-stricken Australia — is spelled out starkly today in a commentary from the Independent. It is the sort of story you are likely to read more often as the climate changes and becomes more erratic elsewhere around the world.

Meanwhile, LiveScience this week published a set of in-depth articles intended to get beyond the headlines and provide greater insight into some of key issues surrounding Earth Day. Rather than Earth Day Birthday Cards, we simply starting asking questions a couple months back, and our reporters did a lot of digging, and then asked more questions.

We learned that the very word “drought,” in fact, has become hard to define given the increasing demand for a constant flow of water that Nature could care less about.

We discovered that ethanol, one of the darlings of the environmental movement, is not all it’s cracked up to be.

We were reminded of just how limited is the supply of oil.

And we looked far into the future to detail exactly what the experts think will happen as Earth warms up. One surprising prediction: The amount of time we’ll have to ponder all this will become less.

Earth Day is Sunday, April 22. While we all wait for more research, more facts, more data, more debate, let’s hope the notion of environmental citizenship increasingly means similar things to more and more of the planet’s nearly 6.6 billion stewards.