Bright water rushes across the depths of red canyons. Giant evergreen trees stretch high and fade into the sun. On mountaintops, the clean air tightens your lungs as you squint to see past the horizon. Caves offer high ceilings and hidden springs. Golden dunes mold along to the wind. In the ocean, waves crash into each other and create a wonderful mess of blue before crawling up sparkling sand. All of this together, and more, is God’s creation. It is Earth.
Every year, on April 22, we celebrate our planet because of Wisconsin’s Senator Gaylord Nelson. In 1970, he created Earth Day to bring the environment more into politics and media. Arbor Day (1872) and Bird Day (1894) already helped bring recognition to nature and the dangers of deforestation and unsustainable practices. Earth Day, though, brought conservation to an entirely different level. The Library of Congress recorded that around 20 million people involved themselves in Earth Day activities in 1970. On the 20th anniversary, in 1990, 141 countries and over 200 million people joined the Iroquois Native Americans in celebrating Earth and every single creature living in it.
“For the many people who care for the environment, Earth Day became the first opportunity they had to join in a nationwide demonstration to send a big message to public officials–a message to tell them to protect our planet,” says AmericasLibrary.gov.
Earth Day eventually led to the creation of the Clean Air Act (CAA) in 1970 and the Clean Water Act (CWA) in 1972. The CAA, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), established National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) to “protect public health and public welfare and to regulate emissions of hazardous air pollutants.” The CWA, with its original basis set in 1948, regulated “discharges of pollutants” in U.S. waters and “quality standards for surface waters.” These acts, among others, have worked to protect us and the planet to the best of their abilities.
However, those acts from the 1970s are not enough. Giant trees are now fields of stumps. Pollutants overwhelm now-murky water. Abandoned fishing gear, plastic bottles, candy wrappers and other trash cover beaches. Overfarmed soil depletes the ground of nutrients. Overcrowded cities fill the air with smog. It makes you wonder why we still bother celebrating Earth Day.
Honestly, I believe it’s a way to avoid the problem. We pat ourselves on the back for throwing a bottle in recycling. Our social media posts flick through where we’ve traveled and the wonderful sights we’ve seen. But we don’t want to do the work.
Recycling is not a “one time a year” event. It needs to be every day, incorporated into your lifestyle. Social media should be used to expose the corruption of harmful corporations. Our paper should be letters to our government officials to demand sustainability and stricter regulations against overfishing and deforestation. If we continue on our path and view Earth Day as a check on the bottom of a list of priorities, we are in trouble.
Frontiers in Conservation Science reported climate disruption, biodiversity decline and human overconsumption and overpopulation as the three crises facing Earth life. The underlying figure in those three issues? Humans. We’re killing what God gave us to sustain. He put us in charge of creation, to exercise dominion over the plants and the animals. He didn’t tell us to kill them.
It seems like a lot to fix and it can be easy for us to blame the generations before us, yet because we haven’t made any important changes to save Earth, we are just as guilty as they are. The only difference is that we are aware of the problem but aren’t doing anything about it.
Nelson wanted Earth at the forefront of media, especially on Earth Day, but also every day afterward. It’s time to break old habits and listen to him. We only have one Earth. Once it is gone, there won’t be anything we can do to bring it back.
