LAGUNA VISTA — The little town by the bay will be doing its part to celebrate the earth.
An Earth Day Celebration has been scheduled for Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Roloff Park gazebo.
“It will be a public event featuring educational materials and activities geared toward stewardship of the environment,” said City Manager Rolando Vela.
Earth Day is an annual event celebrated on April 22, worldwide.
Various events are held to demonstrate support for environmental protection.
Earth Day was first celebrated in 1970 in more than 193 countries that are now coordinated globally by the Earth Day Network.
The network’s mission is to diversify, educate and activate the environmental movement worldwide.
Growing out of the first Earth Day, Earth Day Network is the world’s largest recruiter to the environmental movement, working with more than 50,000 partners in nearly 195 countries to build environmental democracy.
More than 1 billion people now participate in Earth Day activities each year, making it the largest civic observance in the world.
The first Earth Day in 1970 activated 20 million Americans from all walks of life and is widely credited with launching the modern environmental movement. The passage of the landmark Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act and many other groundbreaking environmental laws soon followed.
Twenty years later, Earth Day went global, mobilizing 200 million people in 141 countries and lifting environmental issues onto the world stage.
• In the past 50 years, humans have consumed more resources than in all previous history.
• The way we produce, consume and dispose of our products and our food accounts for 42 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
• More than 100 billion pieces of junk mail are delivered in the United States each year, which comes out to 848 pieces per household. The production, distribution and disposal of all that junk mail creates over 51 million metric tons of greenhouses gases annually, the equivalent emissions of more than 9.3 million cars
• The U.S. buried or burned more than 166 million tons of resources — paper, plastic, metals, glass and organic materials — in landfills and incinerators in 2008.
• Recycling, reuse and remanufacturing account for 3.1 million jobs in the U.S. — one out of every three green jobs.
• Nearly 80 percent
of the world’s energy
comes from oil, coal, or
gas.
• Half the world’s tropical and temperate forests are now gone.
• 75 percent of marine fisheries are now overfished or fished to capacity.
• Only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the United States have been tested for safety
• More than 2 million people globally die prematurely every year due to outdoor and indoor air pollution.
ecocycle.org/ecofacts
