Today is Earth Day – the most-celebrated secular holiday in the world! To get you in the spirit, here are some fun bits of trivia about the day:
- Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to watch a TV for three hours – it’s equivalent to half a gallon of gasoline.
- Earth Day is a relatively new holiday and was first celebrated on April 22 in 1970. More than 20 million Americans participated in this first Earth Day celebration
- Earth Day was founded by a senator of Wisconsin and the day is credited for creating the environmentalism movement.
- April 22 is the first official day of Spring in the Northern hemisphere and of Fall in the Southern hemisphere and was chosen to be Earth Day for this reason.
- Never underestimate the importance of recycling: if every newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year. Unfortunately only 27% of all American newspapers are recycled.
- More than 20,000,000 Hershey’s Kisses are wrapped each day, using 133 square miles of tinfoil. All that foil is recyclable, but not many people realize it.
- Only 11% of the earth’s surface is used to grow food.
- The world’s first national park was started in 1872 at Yellowstone National Park in the US.
- The first major international conference on environmental issues was held in Sweden in 1972 and was sponsored by the United Nations.
- The first wildlife refuge was formed on Pelican Island Florida in 1903.
- The patron Saint of ecologists is St. Francis and the first proclamation of Earth Day was made by the mayor of San Francisco in 1970.
Enjoy your day responsibly … walk where you can, pick up some litter outside, and use real dishes. It all adds up!