Happy Earth Day 2015 from Good Earth Plant Company

Forty-five years ago today, the first Earth Day took place in 1970. It is now an annual event celebrated on April 22, coordinated globally by the Earth Day Network. It reaches more than 192 countries each year including hundreds of communities in the United States.

Many communities that support environmental issues choose to celebrate an Earth Week. Not to brag, but we celebrate Earth Day every single day at Good Earth Plant Company!

In honor of Earth Day and Earth Week, Good Earth Plant Company shares some fun facts with you.

• The late Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin founded Earth Day to raise public awareness of environmental issues. He was moved by the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill and other environmental concerns to push the issue onto the national stage. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom Award for his leadership.
• The very first Earth Day celebration saw 20 million Americans showing their support for environmental reform.
• On the first Earth Day, more than 100,000 people in China rode their bikes to save fuel and reduce emissions from vehicles.
• Environmental lawyer and prominent activist Denis Allen Hayes served as the coordinator for the first Earth Day in 1970. Hayes founded the Earth Day Network and expanded it to more than 180 nations. He is currently president of the Bullitt Foundation in Seattle, Washington and a proponent of solar energy.
• On the first Earth Day, Mayor John Lindsay New York City shut down Fifth Avenue and opened up Central Park for an Earth Day event.
• Earth Day could be the largest secular holiday in the world.
• The United Nations calls it International Mother Earth Day.
• Over one billion people celebrated Earth Day on its 40th anniversary in 2010.
• Earth Day 2010 launched a million-tree-planting initiative in cooperation with James Cameron, director of the movie Avatar.
• In 2011, the Earth Day Network planted 28 million trees in Afghanistan.
• One hundred species of endangered orchids were planted in Panama to honor Earth Day, helping to save them from extinction.

As part of Earth Day, the film “The Untouched” was created by Shreevivasan Manievannan. It is a time lapse film showing the beauty of the state and national parks in America. It took the filmmaker two years shooting 56 different sequences in 30 locations to put the 15,000 photographers together in this five minute film. Manievannan said, “My overall vision for the video was to simply showcase the beauty of nature. We need to have the urge to step up as an individual, as a community, as a country, and as a world, to conserve and combat the changes for the best of our future.”Watch and be inspired!

The Untouched – A Time-lapse Film from Shreenivasan Manievannan on Vimeo.

Earth Day and Earth Week have made a tremendous impact educating people about reducing their negative impact on our environment. Here are a few things you can do on Earth Day and every day:

• Recycling one can saves energy enough for three hours of TV viewing.
• It takes less energy to recycle cans than to produce new ones.
• Each individual produces an average of four pounds of garbage every day.
• If all the newspapers in the U.S. were recycled, a quarter billion trees could be saved every year.
• Fourteen billion pounds of trash ends up in our oceans every year. Out of those billions, the plastic alone will kill a million creatures that call the ocean their home.

For these reasons and many more, all of us at Good Earth Plant Company will do our part to continue the campaign for a healthier ecosystem. More importantly, will you? Volunteer. Organize a clean up event in your neighborhood. Install solar panels on your roof (and how about a green roof too?). Plant a community garden. Let your elected officials know environmental protection is important to you