Each year, Earth Day, April 22, is celebrated and commemorated as the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970.
The height of counterculture in the United States, 1970 brought the death of Jimi Hendrix, the last Beatles album, and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” War raged in Vietnam, and students nationwide overwhelmingly opposed it.
At the time, Americans were slurping leaded gas through massive V8 sedans. Industries belched out smoke and sludge with little fear of legal consequences or bad press. Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity. “Environment” was a word that appeared more often in spelling bees than on the evening news, according to Earth Day Network.
Earth Day has been somewhat of a sore spot for many Americans. In a nation founded on prosperity and growth, the idea that actions would be taken to effectively limit that growth in an effort to preserve nature seemed like something best left to the beatniks and hippies, not something that corporate, capitalist America could get behind.
In the modern world, Earth Day serves as more than recognition of the birth of the environmental movement. It is also a time where many are called to acknowledge the human impact of environmental degradation and to take action. However, much of the way that the conversation regarding the environment is conducted leaves many Americans and people worldwide feeling completely powerless and miserable.
Headlines regarding environmental degradation often read “Global Carbon Emissions Hit Record High in 2017” or “Sea Level Rise Will Rapidly Worsen Coastal Flooding in Coming Decades, NOAA Warns,” which, though informative, leaves the reader feeling powerless and defeated. Often in these articles, there isn’t any kind of description of what people can do to take any kind of action in protecting the environment. Whether you believe in climate change or not, there has to be at least some kind of understanding that the earth is where we live, and keeping the earth safe for us and future generations has to be something we acknowledge as a society.
There’s a lot of pressure on people nowadays telling us we have to make big changes as a society to make a difference. Big changes are important, sure. Policy implementation and action on the political front is always what is going to cause the biggest ripple effect from the origin point of a cause, but it isn’t the only thing that a person can do to start making a change. Take shorter showers. Recycle. Pick up trash that you see. Have a meatless meal once a week. Teach your children to be conscious of what they use and what they waste. Each of these things, if done collectively by a group of people, begins a ripple effect where change can be made on the local level.
I’ve been lucky enough to have traveled to some beautiful places in my life, from Alaska to England and even Tallahassee, there are beautiful places on this earth that are worth protecting. Thinking about climate change on a global level can be incredibly scary, and we have to start retraining ourselves to see the issue as something that is not dependent on your political party, religious view, or even your social background.
The earth we call home belongs to each and every one of us, and on this Earth Day, remind yourself not to feel powerless but powerful in the changes that you can make.
