Earth Day as a Social Movement

In the beginning of this school year I met with Denis Hayes, the founder of Earth Day as well as the CEO of the Bulitt Foundation. According to him, his wikipedia profile is fairly accurate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Hayes

This "holiday" started in 1970 with just the United States. And, in 1990, Denis Hayes took this event international. Today over 175 countries celebrate it each year.

The entire day is devoted to raising awareness about the facts of earth and its fragility and the desperate need for change from all people. Different organizations spread the messages of Earth Day by spouting facts of population numbers, resource use numbers, and various activities world wide in order to raise awareness.

Some people claim it is just another day, it makes no difference, and it has no real impact on the environment other than just a day set aside. I believe that Earth Day can be seen as a social movement for the environment in many ways. Although it happens just once a year, it encourages schools, both college level and below, students, businesses, and all other organizations to get involved. Many campuses hold events specifically to raise awareness for Earth day. The events themselves are held on April 22 each year, however, the message remains for every day after that. Earth day successfully recruits new members to the Earth Day Network each year.

Denis Hayes adamantly speaks about the amazing impact he feels this Day of Awareness has had on the world. There are global conversation days between communities and nations geared specifically at achieving higher sustainability world wide. He never thought his idea would carry out this far, being past its 40th anniversary, and that it would reach so many people internationally. Now that it has though, he hopes to continue to feed it until every country in the world recognizes it and helps to raise awareness for the Earth.

He says that the Earth is in trouble. It will never change that people want to improve their quality of life as much as they can. So the question is then how do we do this why ensuring the maintenance of Earth's resources for the rest of future generations. And, environmental policies will unfortunately but most assuredly be driven by politics and the best way to ensure that these policies are in the benefit of both people and the Earth is to get more people involved in the sustainability movement. One way to do this is to help push Earth Day farther and to the best awareness day it can be.

Change is happening whether we like it or not. So, we need to make sure that it is for the better. Earth Day helps raise awareness but can only go so far without people behind it pushing it forward.  So we must always consider the future net value of resources and not just what we have today.

-Kellen F.