Earth Day

SINGKIT

- DOREEN G. YU

It's been 55 years since a US senator and a young activist called for a one-day celebration of Mother Earth. About 20 million folks across the US gathered for demonstrations and teach-ins (remember these?) on Earth Day April 22, 1970, bringing environmental issues into the mainstream and leading to the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency (the current EPA, under Trump 2.0, seems bent on upending previous gains on environmental protection and is set to roll back about 30 anti-pollution rules).

Last year, over a billion across the globe participated in Earth Day activities.

Back then in the 70s, global warming and climate change were vague terms, hardly in our consciousness or our vocabulary. Today, climate change is a very real crisis, affecting all aspects of our lives, whether we feel it directly or not — increased temperatures (in 2024, the critical 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold was breached for the full year for the first time; today, danger-level heat index warnings are issued more and more often), more severe and widespread storms and droughts, loss of arctic ice, increasing sea levels...

There used to be doubters, those — especially policymakers — who would scoff at alarmist tree-huggers as the Chicken Little of the environment. Today there is no question or debate over the reality of the crisis confronting humankind in relation to the Earth we call home.

So what do we do this Earth Day 2025? Actually, we all know what we have to do — government officials, business people, bankers, industrialists, even we ordinary folks — we're just not doing it, at least we're not doing enough.