Today is Earth Day, the best time to think about our relationship to the environment and our planet.
When the pandemic shutdown was just a rumor whispered on the street and “uncertain times” were yet to be upon us, I was living the life. In my last semester of college, before graduating, I stayed healthy by doing yoga twice a week and I was interning with a freelance journalist. Working with her was so much fun, and it was the first step to getting the confidence to work toward my dreams of becoming an author and working in media in general. One of the most significant projects we worked on at the time was for National Geographic’s Earth Day standalone newspaper.
Unfortunately, the newspaper was only released in print, so I never actually saw the fruition of my research, and I can’t link to it here. However, I can tell you about my experience working on it. I helped keep track of different pitches, find contact information for essential figures involved with the conception and creation of Earth Day, create a timeline of the origins and events of Earth Day, and research endangered animals. I learned a lot about the efforts behind earth day and even wrote a piece about climate change published in The Vector, NJIT’s school newspaper.
Everyone has their relationship with Earth Day, even if you think you don’t. Mine consisted of work and research to educate me more on the subject. Earth Day strives to bring awareness to issues endangering our planet and its inhabitants and find ways to slow or solve those issues.
Some may not know that every year Earth Day has a theme. This year that theme is “Invest in our Planet.” As stated on their website, “This is the moment to change it all — the business climate, the political climate, and how we take action on climate. Now is the time for the unstoppable courage to preserve and protect our health, our families, our livelihoods… together, we must Invest In Our Planet.”
We don’t all have the funds to sponsor an endangered animal or switch to organic foods, and we may not have the time in our busy schedules to attend every Earth Day event, but we can still make small changes every day to help our environment. Some of these changes are as simple as switching from plastic to reusable bags or switching from plastic water bottles to reusable bottles, or going thrifting instead of buying fast fashion. More actions that could help our environment are listed here.
The absolute bare minimum you can do to participate in Earth Day is to educate yourself and those around you. Teach children not to litter, research why Earth Day is so important or how it came to be, and teach yourself how to compost or create ways to recycle and repurpose old items. It may seem daunting or too difficult, but I promise you there are things you can do to help. After all, the global phenomenon that we call Earth Day was started by a bunch of college students.