Earth Day

Most people know about Earth Day. However, of those that do, most people don't actually do anything for it. People don't change their habits on that day, they don't help raise awareness for environmental issues, they just sort of ignore it. Let's try to make this year different.

Do you know how Earth Day started?

Wisconsin state senator Gaylord Nelson called to the nation and organized an environmental teach-in on April 22, 1970. Nelson was an environmental activist who was unsatisfied with the top-down approaches to environmental problems that political advisors like Fred Dutton were proposing - he preferred the grassroots effort, in which each community could focus on its own local concerns.

20 million people across thousands of universities and colleges organized protests that day, fighting against everything that was deteriorating the environment. Some of the problems included pesticides, toxic dumps, power plants, air pollution, oil spills, raw sewage, and loss of wilderness.

Some quotes from the organizers:

"We're going to be focusing an enormous amount of public interest on a whole, wide range of environmental events, hopefully in such a manner that it's going to be drawing the interrelationships between them and, getting people to look at the whole thing as one consistent kind of picture, a picture of a society that's rapidly going in the wrong direction that has to be stopped and turned around." [1]

"Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. We had neither the time nor resources to organize 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated. That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organized itself." [2]

So this year, on April 22, try to find that activist inside of you and do something for Earth Day. Sign a petition or donate to a cause, or maybe even just take a shorter shower or turn off your lights for the day. Do something! Every little bit counts!