People around the world will come together this weekend to celebrate the planet and to take action to protect it.
Here's everything you need to know about Earth Day 2018.
When is Earth Day?
First celebrated in 1970, Earth Day takes place worldwide on April 22.
This year's event falls on a Sunday.
Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images, FILE
What is Earth Day and why do we celebrate it?
Various events are held annually on Earth Day across the globe to show support for protecting the environment.
U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, a Wisconsin native, is largely credited for organizing the first Earth Day in spring 1970, a time when it was still legal for factories to spew noxious fumes into the air or dump toxic waste into nearby streams. That's because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency didn't exist then, and there were no laws to protect the environment.
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Nelson recruited Harvard University professor Denis Hayes to coordinate and promote Earth Day nationally. The event was a success.
Twenty million Americans took to the streets on April 22, 1970, demanding action on environmental pollution. That December, Congress authorized the establishment of a new federal agency, the EPA, to ensure environmental protection. The passage of the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act and many other landmark environmental laws followed soon after, according to the EPA.
Earth Day went global 20 years later, mobilizing 200 million people in dozens of countries and putting environmental issues on the world stage.
Now, more than 1 billion people in 192 countries are estimated to participate in Earth Day activities every year, according to Earth Day Network, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that organizes the event worldwide.
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What is the 2018 theme?
This year's Earth Day is dedicated to providing the information and inspiration needed to eventually end plastic pollution, according to Earth Day Network.
Many of us use or encounter plastic every single day, even if we don't realize it. There's single-use plastics, such as bags, bottles, plates, utensils and straws. But there are also plastics in our electronics, cars, clothes and paint.
So what happens to all this plastic? Some of it gets recycled. But a lot ends up in landfills or is simply littered as plastic pollution, which gets into our waterways.
Plastic is made to last forever -- it cannot biodegrade. Disposed plastic materials can remain in the environment for up to 2,000 years and longer, according to a 2009 article published in scientific journal Chemistry & Biology.
Earth Day Network has called the management of plastic waste a "global crisis."
"Plastic pollution is now an ever-present challenge. We can see plastics floating in our rivers, ocean and lagoons, littering our landscapes and affecting our health and the future of billions of children and youth. We have all contributed to this problem –- mostly unknowingly," Valeria Merino, vice president of Global Earth Day at Earth Day Network, said in a statement.
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An estimated 275 million metric tons of plastic waste were generated in 192 coastal countries in 2010, with 4.8 to 12.7 million metric tons entering the ocean, according to findings in a 2015 study led by Jenna Jambeck, an environmental engineer at the University of Georgia.
Recent research commissioned by Orb Media, a nonprofit journalism organization based in Washington, D.C., found that 94 percent of drinking water in the United States and 93 percent of bottled water sampled from nine countries are spiked with chemically-laced plastic particles, many of which have been linked to major diseases.
In recent years, many countries have taken steps to ban bisphenol A (BPA), phthalates and other chemicals from plastics in some products.
"There is a growing tidal wave of interest in ending plastic pollution and some countries and governments are already in the vanguard. Earth Day Network believes we can turn that tidal wave into a permanent solution to plastics pollution," Earth Day Network president Kathleen Rogers said in a statement.
This year, Earth Day Network will mobilize its global network of non-governmental organizations and grassroots groups, as well as local elected officials, faith leaders, artists, athletes, students and teachers "to build a world of educated consumers, voters and activists of all ages who understand the environmental, climate and health consequences of using plastic," according to Rogers.
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How can I get involved?
While recycling is important, Earth Day Network says it's not nearly enough to bring an end to plastic pollution.
"You may be lulled into thinking it is OK to consume disposable plastic products because you plan to recycle them, but many plastics can’t be efficiently recycled and will end up in the landfill or littering the planet, even in the most remote places," Merino said. "Also, some localities lack the most basic infrastructure to manage waste and to sort and recycle plastics. For this reason, it is much more important to focus on reducing your own level of plastic consumption."
Here are some suggestions from the Earth Day Network on how to reduce your plastic footprint:
Every time you consider buying a disposable plastic item, ask yourself: Do I absolutely need this? Can I use something else that I already have? Could I buy something that I can use long-term instead?
Properly dispose plastic products and be careful not to toss plastic products near waterways, beaches or in open spaces.
Pick up plastic trash whenever you see it, especially in ponds, streams, rivers and on beaches.
Don't buy products containing microbeads, which are plastic particles commonly found in exfoliating body washes and facial scrubs. Instead, purchase products that have natural exfoliates.
Wash synthetic clothes less frequently to reduce the amount of microfibers that are released.
When possible, purchase clothing and other items made of natural fibers when possible.
Get involved in local legislation and regulation to reduce and recycle plastics.
Earth Day - Astronauts Reflect on Earth
Need some motivation to get into the Earth Day spirit? Try turning on Nat Geo WILD's Spotify playlist.
If that still hasn't done it for you, try watching scenes from National Geographic's show One Strange Rock. It's told through the perspective of the only people who have gotten an outside view of Earth, astronauts, and each episode unpacks an Earthly wonder.
Clearly we here at National Geographic embrace Earth Day, and we're celebrating the day in a big way. But there are a lot of ways you can participate beyond our yellow border.
Since the first Earth Day in 1970, the day has become an international focus for action. Environmental group Earth Day Network estimates that as many as one billion people around the world celebrate Earth Day in some way. Unsure how you can get in on the action? Below are just some of the few ways you can participate.
Ditch Your Plastic
This year, Earth Day Network is putting the spotlight on plastic pollution. Plastic is pervasive, and it's more than a water bottle or two thrown on the sidewalk. The garbage patch the size of Texas meandering through the Pacific? It's made of 1.8 trillion tons of plastic and about 94 percent of that is microplastic. Those bit-sized pieces of plastic are found throughout the ocean, and can even end up on your plate.
The Earth Day Network has created a toolkit that helps you calculate your plastic use and create a plan to cut down on consumption.
You can start with easy steps like ditching your straw.
Plant a Tree
Trees play an important role in balancing our ecosystem by absorbing carbon. They can even help reduce the impacts of climate change by pulling greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
The organization One Tree Planted organizes meet-ups for people to plant trees together, but if you don't see your region represented, you can easily sign up to stage your own event. Earth Day Network also organizes tree-planting groups in urban areas and schools or allows you to donate.
Go Local
Local communities are at the front lines of keeping their towns green. Online platforms like Eventbrite and Facebook can help you find Earth Day events in your own town. Many cities hold gatherings like festivals, marches, talks, or concerts to help stoke that Earth Day fervor.
And, of course, you can always let your representatives in Congress know where your priorities are by writing to them.
Celebrate Through Song
How do you write a classical music score for the Earth? These composers tackled the challenge for National Geographic's Symphony for Our World event.
Symphony for Our World pairs stunning natural images with a symphonic composition by Bleeding Fingers Music. On Earth Day, the Nat Geo WILD channel will air an hour-long special at 7p.m. EST/6p.m. CST. Images will come from National Geographic and Joel Sartore's Photo Ark, a project to photographically document key animal species.
Earth Day turns 48 this Sunday, April 22, and Google is celebrating it with a Google Doodle of conservationist Dr. Jane Goodall, who nudges us in a video a “do our part for this beautiful planet.”
When Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisc.) founded Earth Day in 1970, his hope was to make the environment a political issue in an era where US rivers caught on fire and thick smog choked cities.
In many ways, it worked. Since then, major environmental laws have helped clean up much of the vivid toxic detritus in the soil, air, and water in the US. But our challenges today are no less daunting. The accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the loss of wilderness and species, and the acidification and pollution of the oceans have all become more acute — and more destabilizing.
In keeping with the tradition started by former Vox writers Brad Plumer and Joseph Stromberg, here are seven of the most troubling, intriguing, and encouraging things we learned about the Earth since the last Earth Day.
1) The plastic problem is even worse than we thought
One of the bleakest stories of the year so far was the report of a six-ton sperm whale washing up on the shores of southern Spain with 64 pounds of plastic in its stomach, a grotesque sign of the alarming rate at which we’re dumping plastics into the ocean.
The plastic crisis is a truly global one, and the numbers are staggering: A 2015 study found that between 4.8 and 12.7 million metric tons of plastic makes it into the ocean from land each year. By 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by weight.
Since plastic is synthetic, there are few natural processes that break it down, allowing bags, straws, and packaging to linger for decades if not centuries. And we’re not very good at containing it to landfills. About 32 percent of plastics make out into nature, where it often end up in the bellies of fish, birds, and whales. And, as it turns out, potentially in our stomachs too.
In one investigation, the nonprofit Orb Media found plastic fibers in 83 percent of drinking water samples all over the world, with some of the highest levels in drinking fountains at the US Capitol. In a separate investigation published this year, it found microplastic particles in 93 percent of the bottled water samples it tested (250 bottles from 11 leading brands including Dasani and Aquafina).
These kinds of findings have prompted environmental activists pushing to reduce or end the use of disposable plastics. Curbing plastic pollution is a key theme in this year’s Earth Day and there’s a high-profile campaign underway to ban plastic straws in particular.
UK Prime Minister Theresa May called this week to ban plastic straws, swabs, and stirrers. Some researchers last year openly called for an international agreement to control plastic pollution. And there was one bit of hopeful news for potentially more effective disposal in the future: scientists have discovered an enzyme that can digest plastic.
2) We lost the last male Northern white Rhino
Another benchmark we’re obliged to revisit each Earth Day is how many species we’ve lost forever.
In December, the US Fish and Wildlife Service declared the beaverpond marstonia, a tiny freshwater snail found in Georgia, to be extinct. The Center for Biological Diversity called it the first species declared extinct under the Trump administration, a consequence of water overuse for agriculture and pollution.
Also in the last year, the Christmas Island Pipistrelle, a bat found off the coast of Australia, was declared extinct. Three reptiles also went extinct on the island, including the chained gecko, the blue-tailed skink, and the whiptail skink, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Much of this is due to disease and predatory invasive species.
And some species are teetering on the brink of extinction. The last male Northern White Rhino, Sudan, died in March at the age of 45.
As the Northern White rhinos have been rapidly decimated by poaching, conservationists have tried desperate tactics to resuscitate them, including creating a Tinder profile for Sudan. The more viable strategy now is in vitro fertilization of a female Southern White Rhino with the eggs from the two remaining Northern White Rhino females and stored northern white rhino semen.
3) A few species have bounced back. And we discovered some brand new ones.
The Black-eyed Leaf Frog hopped back from the edge of the abyss. It’s now been classified as a species of “least concern” after having been “critically endangered,” the last step before extinction.
“This lovely leaf frog is hope in a small, green-and-black package,” said Jennifer Luedtke, an amphibian specialist at Global Wildlife Conservation, in a statement.
Researchers reported this year that other tropical frog species, like the variable harlequin frog, are also bouncing back after a fungal epidemic drastically slashed their numbers.
The Chesapeake Bay’s striped bass has also rebounded to a healthy population.
Scientists also described some new species for the first time. The California Academy of Sciences added 85 new species of plants and animals last year to its catalog, including “16 flowering plants, one elephant-shrew, 10 sharks, 22 fish, three scorpions, seven ants, 13 nudibranchs, seven spiders, three wasps, one fossil sand dollar, one deepwater coral, and one lizard.”
Researchers also discovered a sulfur-eating giant shipworm that lives at the bottom of muddy lagoons:
Other new species include a new parasitic wasp with spiked forelimbs and a variety of tardigrade found in a parking lot in Japan. It’s not too surprising since the notoriously hardy eight-legged microorganism is often a pioneer of new ecosystems, including those created by humans.
And scientists announced they’s found the first new species of great ape in 90 years, Pongo tapanuliensis, also known as the Tapanuli orangutan. But with just 800 individuals on the island of Sumatra left, it’s also endangered.
4) Greenland’s ice is melting faster than we realized
We know the Earth is warming, but we saw several jarring examples over the past year of how quickly and dramatically this is playing out.
Earth’s polar regions are warming twice as fast as the average rate of the planet. NOAA scientists reported late last year that the Arctic losing ice at its fastest rate in at least 1,500 years.
We also saw a heat wave in the Arctic. In the middle of winter. For the third year in a row. January saw the lowest extent of Arctic sea ice for the month on record. The sea ice maximum for the Arctic, which typically occurs in March, was at its second-lowest on record this year, bested only by 2017.
This warming is playing out in sharp and sudden ways across the Arctic. Researchers reported last year that a section of Greenland’s ice sheet suddenly started melting 80 percent faster. Another study found Greenland’s entire ice sheet is melting at its fastest rate in at least 400 years, and that the melt rate sped up drastically in 1990.
If the entire Greenland ice sheet were to melt, it would raise global sea levels by more than 20 feet.
Glaciers in Denali National Park are also melting 60 times faster than they were 150 years ago.
These examples show that the impacts of a changing climate aren’t always slow and gradual; global warming can push some phenomena to tipping points that lead to rapid, self-propagating changes.
5) Seagrass is regrowing in the Chesapeake Bay. And humans can take credit.
The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States, and for decades it was also one of its most polluted. Massive quantities of fertilizer, waste from farm and poultry operations, and stormwater in Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, and Pennsylvania were leaching into the water.
As nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus sullied the bay, much of the underwater life, including grasses and the fish and shellfish that lived inside it, died off. The impact was so severe that the federal government and states had to come up with a way to limit the pollution — and so they started paying farmers to farm in different ways to keep fertilizer from washing into the bay and cracked down on sewage treatment plants and other facilities that were dumping waste.
Happily, scientists writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in March report that these regulations to limit that runoff are working. The most striking evidence is the regrowth of the seagrass beds — now covering more than 42,000 acres, the highest cover in the Chesapeake in almost half a century.
The recovery of the “underwater forest” of seagrass also suggests that other forms of life in the Bay — like blue crabs and fish species that use it for food and shelter — will recover too. And given that seagrasses worldwide have declined by nearly a third over the last century, the successful efforts to limit nutrient pollution in the Chesapeake could help influence new policies to restore coastal ecosystems elsewhere.
“Nutrient reductions and biodiversity conservation are effective strategies to aid the successful recovery of degraded systems at regional scales, a finding which is highly relevant to the utility of environmental management programs worldwide,” the PNAS authors write.
6) We’re woefully unprepared for disasters. And we aren’t learning enough from them.
2017 was a brutal year for natural disasters in the US, and the ongoing blackout in Puerto Rico continues to remind us just how vulnerable we are to extreme weather especially as climate change makes these kinds of events more intense.
Hurricane Maria ripped through the Caribbean with 150 mph winds and upward of 36 inches of rain last September, knocking down 80 percent of electricity infrastructure and creating the largest blackout in US history for Puerto Rico’s 3.3 million residents.
Other parts of the United States were also hit hard last year, as the worst wildfire season on record torched California and as Hurricane Harvey drenched Texas with the largest amount of rainfall ever recorded for a single storm.
In fact, natural disasters across 2017 caused at least $306 billion in damages across the US, making it the costliest year on record.
And researchers expect that torrential rain, massive storms, and expansive infernos will get worse as average temperatures continue to rise.
“Human-induced climate change likely increased Harvey’s total rainfall around Houston by at least 19 percent, with a best estimate of 37 percent,” Michael Wehner, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said at the American Geophysical Union conference in December.
Despite all this, we’re already going back to our old habits. Homes are being rebuilt in floodplains around Houston and construction is still booming along Florida’s coasts despite rising seas. Meanwhile, California homeowners are rebuilding their torched properties in the same spots. Let’s do better.
7) We’re getting closer to finding another Earth out there
As far as we know, Earth is the only planet with life in the universe. But scientists are getting better at finding tantalizingly similar planets. And as astrophysics and astrobiology come together to make these discoveries, we keep learning more about our own home.
There’s been a boom in exoplanet discoveries since the launch of the Kepler Space Telescope in 2009. Of the more than 3,500 planets we’ve found outside of our solar system, Kepler has helped identify more than 2,500 of them.
These planets range in size from larger-than-Jupiter to smaller-than-Earth.
But by pooling from observations from telescopes around the world and in space, scientists have discovered more spheres like ours. Researchers reported last year that they found seven Earth-sized planets orbiting a dwarf star called Trappist-1, the largest batch of planets in the habitable zone of a star ever discovered.
“It represents a unique opportunity to thoroughly characterize temperate Earth-like planets that are orbiting a much cooler and smaller star than the Sun,” the scientists wrote.
NASA says we now know more about the Trappist-1 system than any other planetary system save our own. And earlier this year, the agency reported that the planets closest to the star could have liquid water, a necessary ingredient for life as we know it.
Researchers at the MEarth Project last April also found an Earth-like planet, LHS1140b, orbiting a star about one-fifth the size of our sun. “It also receives similar amounts of energy from its star that Earth does from the Sun, which means it may have liquid water on its surface!” the team reported.
And on April 19, NASA launched the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9. The $228 million mission is aimed specifically at “discovering new earths.”
#ICYMI Yesterday at 6:51pm ET we launched a first-of-its-kind mission, @NASA_TESS, into Earth’s orbit to hunt for unknown worlds outside of our solar system, including some that could support life. Get the details: https://t.co/2lqhaEiHzT pic.twitter.com/i4v56UPafM — NASA (@NASA) April 19, 2018
Does that mean we’re on our way to charting a cosmic escape route if we screw up the planet we’re on? Hardly.
Trappist-1 is 40 light-years (12 parsecs) away from us. LHS1140b is also about 40 light years off. It would take eons to get there.
We’re stuck with this planet and so let’s take care of it while we have the good fortune to be here.
