Senior biology and science education major
This year marked Earth Day’s 45th anniversary. When it began in 1970, it captivated millions of Americans. The demonstrations and grassroots campaigns inspired by the first Earth Day spurred legislators to enact environmental laws and create the EPA. Today, Earth Day is celebrated internationally and cross-culturally.
As of Thursday, Earth Day 2015 has come and gone and I can’t help but feel, in some ways, that it has fallen from its former glory. Once a policy-influencing event, Earth Day now often consists of trees being planted and left uncared for, school uniform restrictions being lifted to allow students to wear green and unenthusiastic reminders from employers to buy incandescent light bulbs.
Yes, the Global Citizen 2015 Earth Day celebration in Washington was epic and maybe even influential, assuming you got past the fact that Usher was giving a free concert. Many organizations and communities across the world planned and executed events to teach and inspire environmentally friendly actions. However, I fear these events are the minority and whatever positive impact they had might not be lasting.
Even if the momentum of the Earth Day movement was sustained over the past 45 years, the rapidly worsening condition of our environment would still require more enthusiasm and action than even the novelty of the first Earth Day could supply. Our global climate, both environmentally and politically, requires us to update our approach to Earth Day.
This starts with education, particularly in primary schools, where students are forming the ideas they carry with them forever and are also conveniently forced to listen to instructors. The aim shouldn’t be to motivate by fear of a post-apocalyptic world led to its doom by global warming and deforestation but rather to establish a basic knowledge of global ecology. With this, people will have the ability to understand the challenges we face, analyze the effects of their actions and participate in the critical thinking required to create and implement solutions.
Earth Day can’t just be 24 hours of fun facts about green living and the planet’s decline. It has to be a sustainable and informative presentation of facts that provokes meaningful questioning and thinking. Inspiring change is not based on telling people to care but leading them to discover why they should.
Danielle Wilkin is a senior biology and science education major. She can be reached at dwilkindbk@gmail.com.
