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Earth Day inspires environmental progress |
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Thursday, 17 April 2008 |
by JULIA HARR
Lifestyles Reporter
Earth Day will celebrate its 38th birthday April 22.
Two thousand colleges and universities and 10,000 primary and secondary schools, for a total of 20 million people, all held hands in celebration of Mother Earth, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The movement was started by Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson who did it to “shake up the political establishment and force the issue onto the national agenda,” according to earthday.net.
“Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level,” Nelson wrote for Envirolink.org.
Earth Day did exactly what Senator Nelson had hoped.
In 1970 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was founded with a mission to protect the
environment and public health and the Clean Air Act was pushed through Congress establishing
standards for air quality, auto emissions and anti-pollution efforts, according to the EPA.
Since then, Earth Day has continued to inspire such governmental actions like passage of the Clean
Water Act, the phasing out of leaded gasoline, the ban on DDT, a cancer-causing pesticide, the clean
up of the Great Lakes and regulations for nuclear waste disposal, according to epa.gov.
The Appalachian State University Sustainable Energy Society is known for the Earth Day Festival held
on Sanford Mall every year.
This year’s festival will take place Tuesday between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m.
Appalachian and Community Together will also take part in the Earth Day
Festival. According to their Web site, they will provide “fun,
learning, idea and clothes swapping, solar cooking, mural painting, and
grub!”
They request that students wear green in support for Mother Earth.
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