One day isn’t enough. That’s why #WNCforthePlanet is doing more.

April 22 is Earth Day, but what if “every day was earth day?” — you’ve heard this before, maybe more than a few times. We say it to encourage more conscious personal behavior such as recycling, the use of energy-efficient light bulbs and shopping in the bulk aisle to cut down on unnecessary packaging. And, yes, there’s so much we can do as individuals in our homes, in our personal lives to reduce the amount of trash we send to the landfill, our use of water and our carbon footprint.

Many of the challenges that we face as communities and as a planet cannot be addressed solely by shorter showers or reusing our yogurt containers. When a polluter spills chemicals into our groundwater, or someone dumps their garbage upstream, the damage doesn’t respect our property lines. What comes out of the faucet comes from wells with common groundwater or through a network of pipes from shared rivers and watersheds.

Our lands, and our relationships with land, are also integrally connected to the wider world — from locally producing farmers to neotropical migratory songbirds. Similarly, carbon dioxide from smokestacks and methane released from leaky pipelines affect our entire planet, and we will all suffer from either increased droughts or floods, or invasive pest species and disease.

20 local environmental and conservation nonprofits, land trusts, community groups and businesses have come together for an ambitious project called #WNCforthePlanet. This is how Western North Carolina is celebrating Earth Day, with an entire month of social events and service projects where we can all re-introduce ourselves to our neighbors while helping to clean up our rivers and parks, build and maintain community gardens, restore native forest habitats, and more.

We built a website at WNCforthePlanet.org where you can sign up and, yes, we gave it a hashtag because we want you to tell your friends and family and even your neighbors to come out and lend a hand.

 

The following are paid links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.