Earth Day | Every year on April 22, Earth Day marks the anniversary the modern environmental movement and the concern that started taking ground in 1970.
ORIGINS OF EARTH DAY
This Earth Day raised all those voices that came in the forefront due to emerging public consciousness about the state of our Mother Earth—
Before 1970, Americans were relentlessly consuming huge amounts of leaded gas through massive and inefficient automobiles based on obsolete technology. Industry poured out smoke and sludge with little care or fear of the consequences from either the law or bad press or how disastrous it can be and can even wipe out the life on this planet. Every body looked up to America’s development and air pollution created by them at that time was commonly accepted as the sign of prosperity.
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Extreme of anything is bad. Therefore, the stage was set for change with the publication of Rachel Carson’s New York Times bestseller Silent Spring in 1962. The book represented a watershed moment, selling more than 500,000 copies in 24 countries as it raised public awareness and concern for living organisms, the environment and the inextricable links between pollution and public health.
EARTH DAY GOES GLOBAL
As 1990 approached, a group of environmental leaders approached Denis Hayes to once again organize another major campaign for the planet. This time, Earth Day went global, mobilizing 200 million people in 141 countries and lifting environmental issues throughout the world. Earth Day 1990 gave a huge boost to recycling efforts worldwide and led the way to search for solutions by 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. These awareness about the environment prompted President Bill Clinton to award Senator Nelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the highest honor given to civilians in the United States — for his role as Earth Day founder.
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EARTH DAY FOR A NEW MILLENNIUM
As the millennium approached, Hayes agreed to revolutionize the world with another campaign, this time focusing on global warming and giving a push for clean energy. With 5,000 environmental groups in a record 184 countries reaching out to hundreds of millions of people, Earth Day 2000 built both global and local conversations, leveraging the power of the Internet to organize activists around the world, while also featuring a drum chain that traveled from village to village in Gabon, Africa. To catch the attention of the world residents, hundreds of thousands of people also gathered on the National Mall in Washington, DC for a First Amendment Rally.
30 years hence 1970, Earth Day 2000 sent world leaders a loud and clear message: Citizens around the world wanted quick and decisive action on global warming and clean energy.
EARTH DAY 2021
Today, Earth Day 2021, is widely recognized as the largest secular observance in the world, marked by more than a billion people every year as a day of action to change human behavior and create global, national and local policy changes.
Now, the fight for a clean environment continues with increasing urgency, as the ravages of climate change become more and more apparent every day.
As the awareness of our climate crisis grows, so does civil society mobilization, which is reaching a fever pitch across the globe today. Disillusioned by the low level of ambition following the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015 and frustrated with international environmental lethargy, citizens of the world are rising up to demand far greater action for our planet and its people.
The social and cultural environments that started in 1970 are rising up with much vigour today — a fresh and frustrated generation of young people are refusing to settle for platitudes, instead taking to the streets by the millions to demand a new way forward. To spread it faster and to a massive scale, digital and social media are bringing these conversations, protests, strikes and mobilizations to a global audience, uniting a concerned citizenry as never before and catalyzing generations to join together to take on the greatest challenge that humankind has faced.
Not to talk of the Pandemic COVID which has taught the world that nature will never forgive the harm done to environment by mankind.
The time has come for each and every individual to be respectful towards our own environment which has made the planet livable. It is now or never and not to quote respect the environment or die. Corona is a small sample the environment has put forth. So on this Earth Day 2021 we pledge to live a life while protecting the Environment to make sustainable.
