Senator Nelson searched for many years to find a way to focus public attention on the environment. He thought he had found a way to bring the environment into the political limelight when he had persuaded President John F. Kennedy to make a nationwide conservation tour in 1963. Although President Kennedy travelled through Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Utah, Washington and California speaking about the need to conserve natural resources, the effort received little media attention. Senator Nelson realised he needed another mechanism for promoting environmental concern and asked himself, "how are we going to get the nation to wake up and pay attention to the most important challenge the human species faces on the planet?"

In 1969 anti-Vietnam War demonstrations called ‘teach-ins’ had spread to college campuses across the nation. While reading an article on the protest against the War, a thought occurred to Nelson: Why not have a nationwide teach-in on the environment? At a conference in Seattle in September 1969, he announced that there would be a national environmental teach-in in the spring of 1970. Upon returning to Washington, Nelson raised the funds to get Earth Day started. He wrote letters to all 50 governors and the mayors of major cities asking them to issue Earth Day Proclamations. He sent an Earth Day article to all college newspapers explaining the event and one to Scholastic Magazine, which went to most high schools and grade schools.

The response was electric. The American people finally had a forum to express its concern about what was happening to the land, rivers, lakes and air — and they did so with spectacular exuberance. An estimated 20 million people participated in educational activities and community events demonstrating their interest in the environment. It was a spontaneous response at the grassroots level. Nelson had neither the time nor the resources to organise 20 million demonstrators. That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organised itself on April 22, 1970, the first World Earth Day.

Protecting biodiversity means protecting life on Earth. Each species, ecosystem, gene and culture is important to the future of our planet. All these have a specific role to play on Earth. For example, animal species are predator or prey. If a predator species disappears, the populations of prey will grow until there isn’t enough food for all of them. The prey animals then begin to die as well. On the other hand, if the prey species disappears, the predators will starve. Each species is crucial to the system. When one species, one gene or one culture is destroyed, important information about how to adapt to the world is lost and can never be recovered.

Biodiversity loss is due to human activity, the causes of which are complex. The most important causes are:

Pollution: Pollution, as we all know, comes from human activities. Household cleaning products and agricultural fertilizer and pesticides contaminate soil, groundwater and surface waterways. The burning of fossil fuels, among other things, causes pollution and global warming, which damage biodiversity as well.

Over-exploitation: This includes fishing and hunting. Over-fishing is depleting fish populations all over the world. Illegal hunting and poaching to satisfy the global demand for animal products is also a major threat to biodiversity.

On Earth Day 2002 there was a worldwide campaign to save forests. People all over the world were told to plant trees as a symbol of unity, peace and environmental concern, for forests are the lungs of our planet. They purify the air, protect our water and soil, and are a critical habitat to millions of animals and plants.

Pollution of fossil fuels and nuclear power is contaminating the air, water and our food supply. It releases over 6 billion tons of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. These gases blanket the earth, warming it and stay in the atmosphere for decades.

The earth is 70 per cent water, as are our bodies. What we do to our water, we do to ourselves. Humans are increasingly putting this resource in danger. But, although 70 per cent of the earth is water, fresh water is a scarce resource. Freshwater ecosystems only cover roughly 1 per cent of the surface of the Earth. Conversion of salt water to fresh water is difficult and costly.

Yet each one of us can play an important role in conserving and protecting our local water supply. On Earth Day 2002 the world decided to conduct a community health assessment to assess the quality of our local environment. Focus on the quality of water we get and the impact that water quality has on our community. Protect local watersheds, educate ourselves and our community about water pollution, plant trees to promote flood management and protect soil, in turn protecting our water.

For Earth Day 2002, thousands of groups staged car free actions to let world leaders know that we need a transition to better transportation options and a clean energy future. Cars pollute our air, cause asthma and other serious respiratory ailments and heat up the planet. Car free events involving millions of people were held in major parts of the world.

Hundreds of groups around the world also held dialogues in their local communities to identify the environmental issues that are most important to them. It is now proposed that groups all over the world will use indicators to measure the health of their local communities. They will make assessments in relation to the issues, which community members have identified as being most critical to them in the Earth Day Dialogues.

How often, how wrong! It’s high time we CHANGE. Earth Day is not only about pressuring governments to change their policies. It is also about getting ordinary citizens like you and me to change their daily habits — to make a positive environmental impact. Since the first Earth Day, the Earth’s population has nearly doubled, and if every individual were to take small steps to save the environment, the overall impact would be significant. We can start in our own homes by doing little things like using less water, using less electricity, then going on and trying to join an NGO and help the local government in doing what they are doing. And slowly get involved at the local level and try to do something so that things get moving on a higher level. A booklet on Environmental Calendar by Shobhana Bijoor, produced by the World Wide Fund for Nature — India, suggests activities such as cleaning up beaches, roads, railway platforms and other public places, making recycled paper by giving students factual data of conservation of environment, making children sign the Earth Day Pledge Tree by making them write their environmental pledge for the year on a leaf of painted tree poster, and rallies as activities on
Earth Day.

If humankind is ever to realise the golden age that was supposed to have accompanied the end of the Cold War, we will be led there not by end of the Cold War, we will be led there not by our semi-literate politicians, but by informed, mobilised citizenry. It is we citizens who have the capacity to create global solutions that will protect our Earth. The environmental challenges that we face are enormous, but our power as a global community is far greater. Through international cooperation, we each have the strength of a million hands and a million voices.
— Rashna Ardesher

Earth Day achieved what I had hoped for. The objective was to get a nationwide demonstration of concern for the environment so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy and, finally, force this issue permanently onto the national political agenda.