Today is Earth Day! Earth Day is a day of political action and civic participation. People march, sign petitions, meet with their elected officials, plant trees, clean up their towns and roads. Corporations and governments use it to make pledges and announce sustainability measures. Faith leaders, including Pope Francis, connect Earth Day with protecting God’s greatest creations, humans, biodiversity and the planet that we all live on.
Protect Species
This year's focus is protecting the different species. The world is facing the greatest rate of extinction since we lost the dinosaurs more than 60 million years ago. But unlike the fate of the dinosaurs, the rapid extinction of species in our world today is the result of human activity.
Earth Day Network is asking people to join the Protect our Species campaign. The goals are to:
- Educate and raise awareness about the accelerating rate of extinction of millions of species and the causes and consequences of this phenomenon.
- Achieve major policy victories that protect broad groups of species as well as individual species and their habitats.
- Build and activate a global movement that embraces nature and its values.
- Encourage individual actions such as adopting plant based diet and stopping pesticide and herbicide use.
Read more about Earth Day and this year's challenge
One of the species mentioned by Earth Day Network are bees, in New Zealand one of our bees major threats is pesticides, find out more here
Take action by trying one or more of these challenges, I'm going to cut down on meat going forward!
