Welcome back to the Learn English Podcast, the podcast teaching English in context, so you can learn naturally.
If you are watching or listening to this episode when it comes out, it is April 22nd, and that means today is Earth Day.
Earth Day is a day that is celebrated in 190 countries, and it is a day that people are supposed to get involved with their community, to try to clean up their community, and to try to raise awareness about the environmental issues that our planet faces.
On today's episode, what I want to do is talk about the history of Earth Day, why it is celebrated on April 22nd, and how it is celebrated around the world.
With that, let's begin.
New reminder that in the description of this episode, and in our previous episodes, you will find a vocabulary list of the words and phrases that I use in this episode.
That way, you can use those words and phrases.
You can take them and put them into whatever vocabulary learning system you are using, and eventually you can start using them yourself in conversation.
Now let's talk a little bit about the history of Earth Day and how it started.
The 1960s were a very turbulent time here in the United States.
Now the word turbulent means choppy, a lot of motion, a lot of movement.
It's usually referred to when you are flying on a plane and the plane shakes and moves a lot, that's turbulence.
Or if you're in the ocean, if you're in a boat and the sea is very rough, you would say that the ocean is very turbulent or the water is very turbulent.
Now when we're talking about that word outside of those contexts, when you're not talking about physical motion, what we're talking about is a time period of a lot of change and a lot of conflict.
We have talked about the Civil Rights Movement here in the United States in the 1960s.
That took place in the 1960s.
The 1960s had a lot of protests, a lot of societal change with the Civil Rights Movement, with the anti -war movement that was led by students, by women's liberation movement that involved women and by the environmental movement.
What is credited with starting the environmental movement is the book called Silent Spring by Rachel Carlson.
If you haven't heard about this book, it was published in 1962 and it is considered to be the beginnings of the environmental movement because of the outrage people had when reading this book.
The book talks about the pesticides that were in the environment and the damage that it was doing to animal health but also human health as well.
This book is credited with starting the grassroots environmental movement and sparking the calls for change, for the calls for humans to stop impacting the environment as much.
If you haven't heard the term grassroots, what that means is that everyday people started becoming involved.
Not the rich and powerful, not the politicians, but everyday people, normal people, people who don't have positions of power but who get together and start demanding some type of change or advocating for some type of cause.
That is called grassroots.
Think of the earth and where grass is kind of low, close to the earth, not very powerful, not very high.
But if you get a lot of people together, they can have a real impact.
There was a senator from Wisconsin whose name was Gaylord Nelson and he became very inspired by the political movements of the time and by the environmental activism that also began to occur during this time.
He envisioned some type of movement or some type of event to bring attention to the environmental impact and the damage that was being done to the environment.
In 1969, there was a political activist, a UNESCO political activist named John McConnell who envisioned something similar.
He called it Earth Day and he wanted it to be a day to bring attention to the environment.
On April 22nd, 1970, Senator Nelson, Dennis Hayes, who was another activist, and others organized the first ever Earth Day.
You might be wondering why April 22nd was chosen as the date for Earth Day and it was selected because they were trying to maximize participation.
They picked a day that was in between spring break, which is usually around Easter time in March, and final exams for students, which is usually in May.
They wanted to pick a time period in between this where they would have more people participating, especially young people, and that's how they selected April 22nd.
The first Earth Day was a resounding success.
Resounding success means that it was very successful, a lot more successful than people thought it was going to be.
It is estimated that 20 million Americans took part in the first Earth Day.
Schools and campuses had rallies, demonstrations, and hosted cleanup efforts so people could go into their local community and clean up trash, plastic, and just beautify their environment.
The amount of people who took part of it really sent a message to lawmakers and policy makers that young people wanted change.
They wanted the environment to be taken care of and they wanted to bring attention to the damage that was being done to the environment at the time.
The success of the first Earth Day had an immediate impact.
It led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, which is called the EPA, here in the United States.
This is the government agency that is supposed to help protect the environment.
That's why it's called Environmental Protection Agency.
They are the agency, the part of the government that says how much certain chemicals damage the environment and therefore how much should be released or should not be released into the environment.
They ban certain pesticides that are considered too damaging.
They limit other pesticides and chemicals that could be damaging.
They oversee pollution by corporations and companies.
Along with the EPA, Congress also passed the Clean Air and Water Act.
Together, these two things have dramatically changed the air quality and the water quality here in the United States.
These acts help the EPA regulate how much chemicals, how many pesticides are allowed to be in our air and in our water and they help set standards for what is considered to be an acceptable amount and what is considered to be unacceptable.
Earth Day continued to be celebrated and by 1990, it became an international event.
More and more countries began to participate and currently over 190 countries participate in Earth Day.
Earth Day continues to focus on the environmental challenges that the Earth faces.
Every year there is a theme that they try to bring national and global attention to and they try to highlight the impact that humans have on the environment.
It has become a day for environmental activists to bring attention to how humans impact the environment and ways that we can lessen the negative impact that we have.
It's still relevant because we can see that humans are changing the Earth.
They're changing the climate, for example, if you look at the global weather patterns, there have been changes in the past decades due to the greenhouse gas effect and the pollution that's been released by us as the human species here on Earth.
Earth Day continues to try to encourage people to minimize their impact, to make changes in their life that could be beneficial for the environment, and also acts as a way to unite people.
It encourages people to get into their local communities, to try to work together to clean up their communities and create a better world for us all.
As I said, Earth Day was a pivotal moment in the environmental activism movement here in the United States and led to the development of the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act.
In recent years, all three of those things have been under threat.
It is 2024 when I'm recording this episode, which means that it is a presidential election year here in the US.
Some senators will be elected, all of the House of Representatives will be elected, and there is a difference in the two parties here in the US and what they want to do with the EPA and the Clean Water and Air Acts.
There have been politicians on the Republican side who want to get rid of the EPA entirely, that want to get rid of the entire agency and cut it from the budget.
Other members of the party don't go so extreme with their views, but they do argue for giving the EPA less money and limiting how much that they can oversee corporations and the limits that they can put on pollution.
The Clean Air and Water Acts have also been challenged in recent years.
There have been court cases that have gone to the Supreme Court, which is the highest court here in the United States, that have challenged the ability of the EPA to use the Clean Air and Water Act to limit pollution and that have also challenged individual states and how they use the Clean Water and Air
Act to limit pollution and harmful admissions.
When we talk about harmful admissions, what we're usually referring to is carbon dioxide or methane, those greenhouse gases, but it could be other substances as well.
Here in the United States, I can say that the Supreme Court is majority conservative.
Most of the judges who are a part of the Supreme Court, and there are nine judges in total, most of them, six of them are Republican -backed judges.
They were people who were nominated by Republicans because of their views to the Supreme Court.
With these court cases that are going to the Supreme Court, with these challenges, the Clean Water and Air Act have been slightly diminished in their ability to regulate admissions here in the United States.
That means it's gotten a little bit less powerful that they don't have the same amount of power.
The EPA does not have the same amount of power as it did even a decade ago because of the Supreme Court cases.
I don't know the future.
I can't say for sure, but I think whoever is in power will be important to the future of the EPA and of these Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.
It's going to matter, and we will see who ends up getting elected, what the future holds, but there could be major changes to these ahead, depending on who ends up winning the election and who's in power for the next four years.
Now let's talk a little bit about how Earth Day is celebrated.
You may see different things in your local community, and if you participate in Earth Day, please let me know.
Tell me in the comments.
I would love to see how people are celebrating Earth Day and what they are doing on April 22nd to help clean up their environment.
I have seen advertisements in the past for community gatherings for people to come and join cleanup events.
I live in a city that tends to have a lot of garbage, tends to have a lot of trash by the size of the roads and in empty lots around the city.
People will have events and get togethers to go through, and they call it beautifying the city or a citywide cleanup.
What that means is that people go together, they walk around, they pick up trash, they try to get rid of some of the mess that's here in town and just make the city look prettier, make it look more beautiful, and that's what they mean by beautifying the city.
I've also seen similar programs for beaches, specifically with the trash and plastic that tends to wash up on the shores of beaches.
I'm in California and our entire state has a coastline going along the Pacific Ocean.
On Earth Day, there are groups that will get together and go through the beach, pick up trash, pick up plastic that wildlife might eat and that might be dangerous for them and just try to make the beach look better in general.
When I was in college, I also saw rallies and speeches and things that people were doing to try to continue activism, to try to put pressure on lawmakers, to continue to take the environment into account, which means to remember the environment, remember that we need to protect the environment and keep
it in good condition for us and for the future generations that are to come.
I hope you learned a little bit about Earth Day from this episode, the history of Earth Day and why it is celebrated.
I hope that you were also able to practice your English listening comprehension and that you were exposed to some new words and phrases so you can begin to learn them and use them yourself in conversation.
Reminder to check out the vocabulary list that is in the description of this podcast episode so you can learn those new words and phrases and improve your English abilities.
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