The History and Importance of Earth Day Essay Example

Every year on April 22nd for the past 50 or so years, we have celebrated the biggest non-religious holiday, Earth Day. Earth Day is a single day in the year dedicated to making the Earth a better place for us to live, meaning we need to do our part and help keep the Earth as a suitable place to live. Over 190+ countries every in the world every year participate in Earth Day to help benefit the environment and from those 190+ countries, there are about one billion participants in total, if not more. Ongoing for 51 years, Earth Day is still going strong and has left positive benefits every year that people have participated in it.

The first Earth Day (Spring of 1970) happened just about 51 years ago, making it the biggest non-religious holiday over half a century old. Senator Gaylord Nelson was tired of the deteriorating environment of the Earth, he took advantage of the anti-war effort and decided to try to shift the attention of these activists toward air and water pollution as well as other things we pollute within our environment. Denis Hayes was hired by Gaylord to set up campus-teach-ins around spring break during exams to maximize the number of young adults they could harbor. Hayes managed to build an entire team of 80+ people as he felt as if this movement could motivate all Americans to take action and help the planet, the day was called Earth Day and 20 million Americans took place in helping clean their neighborhoods, homes, and the outdoors. Along with that were thousands of protestors demanding change as they wanted to help the environment and make it a more suitable living quarters. Later in 1990, Earth Day went global with 200 million+ participants which ended up boosting recycling efforts.

Earth Day has many accomplishments, the first being that it is the largest non-religious holiday, meaning anyone no matter their race, ethnicity, gender, or age, could attend. As for individuals, people can benefit from Earth Day by unplugging their phones, turning off unneeded things, driving less, it not only helps the Earth but also saves money. People all around the world go out to volunteer for Earth Day and help their local community, some people pick up litter while others try to conserve energy or spend their time educating others. Earth Day can motivate people into participating in more activities to help out their local community and to recycle more. Adding onto the environmental side of things, people plant millions of plants every Earth Day which is extremely beneficial for the air everyone breathes. Earth Day has also pushed several new laws and bills to be placed as Earth Day was a wake-up call for the things we can do to help the planet.

Earth Day specifically in Virginia serves as a day to populate our environment with saplings and plants, to simply put it, make our communities greener. Virginia has a plan to reduce all the community-wide greenhouse gas emissions from the state by 80% by 2050. Several acts in the state have been passed such as the RGGI (Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative) and boards such as the APCB (Virginia Air Pollution Control Board) exist as they are important factors to reducing greenhouse gasses and carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Locally, many restaurants, farms, and other places have dedicated themselves only to sell fresh produce as it's organic and more healthy. Virginia has many big plans that it wants to accomplish to help its local community which will overall help the general population and the Earth.

Overall Earth Day is very beneficial to our environment and it's quite staggering to see many small and big communities take place in such a helpful event to the planet. Throughout the world everyone takes place in helping the Earth, whether it be from saving energy to driving less, to even cleaning litter, every little thing helps. Earth Day has brought a lot of awareness to how we need to treat our planet, and what we can do to help. It's important to take action while we can before there are irreversible effects and Earth Day helps bring attention to these issues and contributes to solving them as it motivates people every day to take place in something as simple as recycling.