Earth Day is an annual event celebrated on April 22nd to raise awareness of and support for environmental protection and restoration. It includes a wide range of activities and campaigns addressing issues such as habitat loss, pollution, deforestation, biodiversity loss, renewable energy and climate change.
The first Earth Day was held in 1970 in the United States, with an estimated 20 million Americans participating in rallies, demonstrations and teach-ins, making it one of the biggest single-day protest events in that country's history and demonstrating the overwhelming bipartisan public support for environmental reforms. It has since grown into a global event, with participation from more than 190 countries. It is coordinated by earthday.org.
Earth Day has been highly effective both in raising public awareness about environmental issues and in promoting the establishment of environmental legislation and its enforcement. The surge in public concern arising from the first Earth Day led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the U.S. later that year, making the U.S. the first country to establish a centralized governmental agency specifically dedicated to protecting the environment. This legislation was quickly emulated by numerous other countries.
Subsequent landmark environmental legislation in the U.S. included a major strengthening of the Clean Air Act in that same year as well as the enactment of Clean Water Act in 1972 and the Endangered Species Act in 1973. These laws led to substantial improvements in air and water quality and were also effective in the recovery of a number of severely endangered species such as the bald eagle, the humpback whale and the whooping crane.
In addition to fostering similar legislation in other countries, Earth Day also was an important factor in the establishment of international agreements, such as the Ramsar Convention in 1971 (the first major international agreement focused on protecting wetlands, especially habitats for waterfowl), the Stockholm Conference in 1972, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in 1973 and the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992.
Earth Day has also encouraged individuals to adopt more sustainable lifestyles, including attitudinal and behavioral changes such as reducing waste, conserving energy and supporting environmentally-friendly businesses. It has also helped educate many businesses regarding their effects on the environment and incentivized them to adopt more environment friendly practices.
Despite its great success, Earth Day is not without its critics. At one extreme, skeptics or deniers about climate change and other environmental problems regard the urgency and rhetoric surrounding Earth Day to be politically motivated and view it as part of a broader agenda aimed at manipulating people and pushing new regulations as a means to gain power.
At the other extreme, there are those who say that the results from Earth Day have been far from sufficient and that the event has lost its sense of urgency. They point out that despite Earth Day having occurred for more than half a century, the earth's environment has not begun to recover. Rather, it continues to deteriorate, including ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions, continuing loss of habitat and biodiversity, and ever growing levels of pollution. Some also point out that Earth Day has become increasingly commercialized and has turned into largely a marketing event, with many business-related activities being mostly symbolic or short-lived and with not a few companies engaging in greenwashing rather than in substantive reform.
In addition, while Earth Day has helped expose the often disproportionate effects of environmental damage on the developing nations as well as on low-income and minority communities in the wealthier countries, its critics emphasize it has been far less effective in bringing about reform there than in the wealthier areas. Some add that the growing importance attached to the environment in wealthier areas, in large part a result of Earth Day, has just shifted much of environmental burden to the developing countries, such as the sending of plastic and other waste for disposal abroad and the highly destructive mining of raw materials for electric automobiles in those countries.