Earth Day 2021 was celebrated across the world this past Thursday, bringing people from all backgrounds together in an effort to further humanity's efforts of caring and advocating for our home. After doing research on the origins of Earth Day and other days like it last year, I learned that every Earth Day has a theme. These can be all sorts of things ranging from "Green Cities" rallying behind greenifying urban areas to "Protect Our Species" raising awareness for the rising level of extinctions that are happening around the globe. These themes help convey a unifying message spanning our actions around caring for the planet and can help people get behind a cause.
This unifying nature of the theme is a particularly human thing. Since the founding of Earth Day, it's been pretty clear that the goal of the day is to raise awareness on environmental issues and encourage others to care about our home. Yet every year we have a new theme focusing on some aspect of this broad goal. There is something inherently attractive to people being able to rally behind specific causes, which is why this kind of messaging is potent for us humans. Finding the right words to encourage participation in something is uniquely human. Given the Earth Day theme is a way to rally people behind environmental causes, I want to take a look at them to see if they succeed in conveying their underlying goal. With that on the table, this year's theme is "Restore Our Earth." Let's dive in!
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April marks the date for two days dedicated to the Earth that I'm aware of: Earth Day and Arbor Day. Despite knowing of these days and treating them as days of celebration for the planet, I realized that I'd never looked into their origins before. The only recollection I'd had was for Arbor Day, since I know the first US celebration of the day was founded by the family that started my local arboretum. I figured this would be a good opportunity to look into these origins and maybe learn a bit about how humans celebrated the Earth in the past by way of reserving days of the year for them. I was a little surprised by the results.
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AuthorPrismatic Planet wants to get excited for the planet, raise awareness of its inhabitants, and get smarter about Earth. Archives
March 2024
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