As a teacher of environmental science, Lauren Wyatt doesn’t wait until April 22 to celebrate the earth

“Every day is earth day kind of,” Wyatt said. “I just explain that Earth Day is a day to celebrate our planet and everything it provides to us. It’s also an opportunity to give back.”

Earth Day began in 1970 and is celebrated every April 22. It was created as a way to bring awareness tpo environmental issues regarding our planet and a way to celebrate what our plant gives us. It is also a day when peole are encouraged to plany treets or give back to their community in some way.

“Usually with students and at home we do a trash pick-up and plant a tree or flowers,” Wyatt said. “We’ve made ‘seed bombs’ and planted those too.”

Earth Day engages more than 1 billion people every year and has become a major stepping stone along the pathway of engagement around the protection of the planet. 

Today, Earth Day is widely recognized as the largest secular observance in the world, marked by more than a billion people every year as a day of action to change human behavior and create global, national and local policy changes.

In the spring of 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson created Earth Day as a way to force this issue onto the national agenda. Twenty million Americans demonstrated in different U.S. cities, and it worked.

Here are some facts about Earth Day:

• 20 million people participated in the first Earth Day.
• More than 100 billion pieces of junk mail are delivered in the United States each year.
• The U.S. buried or burned more than 166 million tons of resources – paper, plastic, metals, glass and organic materials – in landfills and incinerators last year
• By reducing our waste 1% per year and recycling and composting 90% of our discards by 2030, we could save 406 megatons of carbon dioxide equivalent every year. This is the equivalent to shutting down 21% of our nation’s coal-fired power plants
• Recycling, reuse and remanufacturing account for 3.1 million jobs in the U.S.
• Half the world’s tropical and temperate forests are now gone.

Wyatt enjoys the spotlight the day goives to the environment.

“I think every day should be Earth Day,” sahe said. “I appreciate Earth Day because it’s a national holiday so more people are likely to recognize the day and do some community service.”