Every day should be Earth Day
MARTIN DICKIE examines global and local events that took place on 22nd April and asks whether Earth Day is still relevant in the 2020s.
Like pen friends, Live Aid and MySpace, Earth Day seems like an anachronism in 2021. Not because celebrating the planet isn’t a worthwhile cause, but that, in the era of climate emergency, the notion seems short-handed, even twee. Shouldn’t every day be Earth Day, one could argue? But there are still some charities and event organisers who mark Earth Day, which was 51 years old on 22nd April.
The idea was originally developed by peace activist John McConnell at a UNESCO conference in 1969. Inspired by Rachel Carson’s 1962 bestseller Silent Spring, he intended to hold an annual celebration on 21st March, the Northern Hemisphere’s spring equinox. It was a US senator, Gaylord Nelson, who proposed a nationwide environmental teach-in for 22nd April 1970. He hired a young activist, Denis Hayes, to coordinate the event, and the pair re-branded it ‘Earth Day’. Their environmental rhetoric caught the zeitgeist, and on the morning of Wednesday 22nd April, more than 20 million Americans poured onto the streets for what was described as the largest single-day protest in human history.
The day of activism went global in 1990, and in the early 2000s it entered the digital sphere. Since then, it’s moved into more year-round activities, such as the tree-planting initiative, The Canopy Project and A Billion Acts of Green, a database of grassroots pledges and civic actions.
This year, Earth Day fell at the same time as a two-day virtual summit on climate change held by President Joe Biden. However, in an opening testimony by this century’s foremost activist, Greta Thunberg, who advocated for ending fossil fuel subsidies and new fossil fuel exploration, there wasn’t even a mention of Earth Day.
In a testimony by Greta Thunberg, there wasn’t even a mention of Earth Day
In Sussex, Earth Day events were thin on the ground. Brighton & Hove’s energy services co-operative, BHESCo, hosted an online panel discussion from leaders of energy saving companies aimed at empowering communities in the transition to NetZero, and was sponsored by a solar battery firm. Continuing the digital theme, the Earth Planet Energy charity marked the day by launching an impressive new website for children, hapsie.com, where cartoon characters are on-hand to guide 5-8-year-olds through games and activities with an environmental focus.
There was one local event that flew the flag of Earth Day with understated aplomb, cleverly marrying its original ethos to an actual event in nature. The Nest Collective is run by Mercury Prize-nominated folk musician Sam Lee, who organises festivals, nature pilgrimages, a campfire club and, every Earth Day, a live Singing with Nightingales show. This year’s edition was live-streamed between 11pm and 1am from an undisclosed Sussex woodland and saw folk artists and poets such as Penguin Cafe’s Arthur Jeffes, storyteller Karine Polwart, cellist Maddie Cutter and Kate Stables from This is the Kit perform against a live backdrop of nightingale song.
For a short period in mid-April each year, a thousand or so nightingales arrive in the UK from Africa. They can be heard in a few special locations, many of them in Kent and Sussex, taking up songful residence after dusk. The territorial males serenade each night for no more than six weeks among the blackthorn and forest margins.
Inspired by famous recordings of cellist Beatrice Harrison playing with a nightingale in 1924, folk singer, song collector and nature lover Sam Lee has been hosting reverent celebrations of this endangered bird each spring since 2014. His whispered introduction to the evening’s entertainment, presented fireside, is an atmospheric precursor to the two hours that follow. The only visuals on The Nest Collective’s YouTube channel are a darkening sky over silhouetted trees and a live chat window in which viewers from all across the globe share their thoughts and Sam silently announces upcoming acts. Other than that, everything is given over to the sound of the nightingales accompanied by tone-perfect music and poetry. It was a magical way to fall asleep, and a worthy way to end Earth Day.
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