Earth Day
Webpages concerning "Earth Day"
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Wikipedia-Article "Earth Day"
Earth Day is a name used by two different observances held annually in the (northern) spring, both intended to inspire awareness of and appreciation for the Earth's fragile environment. Earth Day is in the public domain and open to all persons to shape. Some grassroots Earth Day organizers seek to move the date of the observance to the Summer Solstice, to take advantage of the warm temperatures in the Northern hemisphere (where most people live) to create greater participation.
"May there only be peaceful and cheerful Earth Days to come for our beautiful Spaceship Earth as it continues to spin and circle in frigid space with its warm and fragile cargo of animate life."
- --United Nations Secretary-General U Thant
March 21, 1971.
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The April 22 Earth Day
In January 1970, the Environmental Teach-In, decided to call their one-off event on 22 April Earth Day. The successes of that day led to it becoming a regular event. Gaylord Nelson, an environmental activist in the U.S. Senate, took a leading role in organizing the celebration, to demonstrate popular political support for an environmental agenda. Senator Nelson staffed the office with college students and selected Denis Hayes (a Harvard student and Stanford graduate) as coordinator of activities. It was the era of student political activism and outdoor protests that attracted news cameras.
According to Senator Nelson, Earth Day "worked" because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. Though he felt his committee had neither the time nor resources to organize the 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated, these things did happen. According to the Senator, "It organized itself."
The "holiday" proved extremely popular in the United States. The first Earth Day, in 1970, had participants and celebrants in two thousand colleges and universities, roughly ten thousand primary and secondary schools, and hundreds of communities across the U.S. Senator Nelson directly credited the first Earth Day with persuading U.S. politicians that environmental legislation had a substantial, lasting constituency. In 1971 Senator Gaylord Nelson announced an 'Earth Week' — for the third week of April — as a yearly event.
Many important laws were passed by the Congress in the wake of the 1970 Earth Day, including the Clean Air Act, laws to protect drinking water, wild lands and the ocean. The EPA was created within three years of the first Earth Day.
Earth Day leadership fractured over the years, with Hayes and Nelson and other widely-known Earth Day leaders favoring more programmatic and conventional public relations approaches to the observance(s), while grassroots groups have sought to make Earth Day into a day of action which changes human behavior and provokes policy changes. Most people know about Earth Day from a 30-second blurb on their evening news of kids at school planting trees or doing a trash cleanup.
During Earth Day 2000, the event's 30th anniversary, actor Leonardo DiCaprio was chosen by Hayes to be the spokesperson of the event, despite the fact that DiCaprio drove a large SUV at the time and was viewed as wanting to rehabilitate his public image in the wake of clever Thai environmental protesters targeting him during the filming of the actor's film The Beach in 1999 (which was filmed in part in a precious Thai national park).
The political reality is that Earth Day is almost universally ignored or dismissed by serious policy people working on environment. Few seem to realize that this most widely-known date to honor nature could be used to galvanize action to benefit nature through changes in human behavior or actions to affect policy.
The date chosen for Earth Day is coincident with the historical date of Arbor Day, a national tree-planting holiday started in the late 1800's. Arbor Day is celebrated on the birthday of its founder, Julius Sterling Morton. Another reading of the April 22 date understood by Earth Day organizers notes that the 1970 event took place between college students' Spring Break and final exams, as it was the era of student protest and they were thus available.
Some conservative critics of environmentalism point out the same date of Lenin's birthday. However, Earth Day has also been said to have been chosen on April 22 because it coincides with the birthday of actor Eddie Albert, who was an early contributor to many environmental causes.
Miscellaneous facts
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- The symbol for Earth Day is a green Θ (Greek theta) on a white background.
- The alternative rock group Dramarama released a popular song about Earth Day in 1993 called What Are We Gonna Do? [1].
- Canadian artist Devin Townsend has composed a song called Earth Day which appears on his 2001 album Terria.
- Earth Day was in part started by Ian L. McHarg, "father" of ecological urban planning.
See also
External links
- International Earth Day - The Official Site - Spring/Vernal Equinox
- Earth Day Network - Coordinating worldwide events for Earth Day 2000 and beyond.
- Earth Day Energy Fast - Global grassroots campaign (since 1991) to promote action during Earth Day observances
- Earth Day Information Center - Earth Day Fact Sheets
- United States Earth Day - The US Official Site for Earth Day
- Earth Day Canada - The Canadian Official Site for Earth Day
- Earth Day in Your Neighborhood - How to do an Earth Day on your block this Spring
- Earth Day activity and e-cards from The Nature Conservancy
- KidCast for Peace - Solutions for a Better World, an Earth Day Edutainment
- Kids Domain Earth Day Online Games
- Earth Day Groceries Project - Describes environmental awareness project in which students decorate paper grocery bags with environmental messages for Earth Day.
- The Tale of the Two Earth Days
- Arbor day
- Yahoo! Celebrates Earth Day - Yahoo! celebrates Earth Day by listing tips on keeping the Earth safe and clean, as well as products to keep it safe among other things