Earth Day: Saving Our Home

The first time Earth Day was celebrated was in 1970. It started as a way to bring awareness and raise concern about all issues related to the environment and it has remained so. The idea of celebrating Earth Day belongs to a US Senator, Mr. Nelson, who believed educating the public on these topics could make the difference. Nowadays, Earth Day is celebrated on April 22nd in almost 200 countries around the world, getting more than a billion people to mobilize. Even United Nations celebrate Earth Day, but they do it around April 20th, coinciding with the Northern Hemisphere's astronomical mid-spring and the Southern Hemisphere's astronomical mid-autumn.

With a lot of different topics being part of the agenda -biodiversity, green energies, recycling, reducing emission of greenhouse effect gases, pollution, ice cap melting just to name a few- some 20,000 organizations are engaging in activities to educate the public and world leaders so that they commit to protect the planet, our home.

Although this celebration is quite important because of the political aspect of it, the main idea being to convince every country to help protect the environment through non-harmful policies to the planet, its power resides in telling people they can be part of the solution, thus becoming an educational experience for the new generations that are to be raised with a deep respect for our Home. Thousands of groups teach the general public easy ways to save energy (such as disconnecting VCRs and other appliances when not in use), greener approaches to everyday life (such as recycling, using vegetable wastes as fertilizers, cycling instead of driving, etc.), and many other things that everybody can do to minimize the damage us human beings have been causing.

But... is this approach working, are we getting any results? Some countries have agreed to change their policies, while others haven't. Even though each administration dictates the policies with the aid of representatives chosen by voters, it is a matter of time to get these boys and girls with a green background to grow up and become eligible themselves for office, creating a force towards respecting the environment. Some of these green background kids are actually changing things around the world; being the first ones to be educated in the first Earth Days, now they are fully aware that something must be done, and they are questioning old policies from back in the day when human beings used to think that they could do whatever they wanted in the belief that Earth would heal itself.

Changes are coming, it's up to us to embrace them or resist them. What's more, it's up to us to determine to what extent these changes are going to help us cure our planet that is showing some serious hints of being in intensive care, or to make us hostages of our own doing, regretting those days in which we could have made the right choice to save ourselves by saving our own home called Earth.