Earth Week 2020: Family Action Day One

In honor of the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, Families for a Livable Climate is offering a week of daily activities and actions for parents and kids to do together. Each day focuses on a theme critical to our time and place in the climate movement, with tie-ins to global and local actions & events.
Click here for more information, and to sign up!

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Day One: Monday

Theme: Taking action to protect our earth 

Why it’s important: 

From EarthDay.org: “(The first) Earth Day was a unified response to an environment in crisis - oil spills, smog, rivers so polluted they literally caught fire. On April 22, 1970, twenty million Americans - 10% of the U.S. population at the time - took to the streets, college campuses and hundreds of cities to protest environmental ignorance and demand a new way forward for our planet. The first Earth Day is credited with launching the modern environmental movement, and is now recognized as the planet’s largest civic event.”

2020 marks the 50th year anniversary of Earth Day, and the planet critically needs climate action now more than ever. There are many things we can do to effect change and protect the environment for our children, communities and future generations. Earth Day provides a chance to come together with the global community, our local community and our families to raise awareness and get involved. Our voices and actions are critical in paving the way forward for our planet. As we enter our week of action, we invite you to reflect on ways that you and your family can contribute to change- through personal shifts and larger systemic actions- so that we can create a brighter and more livable climate future. 

As we reflect on the ways that our families will take action to protect the earth, we encourage you to follow and support the leadership of those on the frontlines. Indigenous peoples have been organizing on the frontlines of environmental protection for long before Earth Day was created. Right now, Land and Water protectors across our continent are actively engaged in critical fights to resist fossil fuel infrastructure, such as pipelines, on their native lands. 

Organizations in focus: 

Today’s Actions: 

For the Family:

  • Have a discussion with your family about Earth Day. Talk about things that you can do together to make a difference. Make a pledge to commit to one year-long action for yourself and/or your family. (See below for resources for each of the following:)

    • Join a local environmental action group and commit to participating in one action per month 

    • Lower your family’s carbon footprint 

    • Foster a love of nature and stewardship of the land - get into nature with your family regularly

    • Grow your own food and learn about local food systems 

    • Reduce waste, especially single use plastics

For adults & older kids:

  • Tune into this Voices from the Frontlines webinar today at 5pm to hear from indigenous leaders on the frontlines of fights against fossil fuel projects on tribal lands. Learn how you can support frontline, Indigenous-led resistance to the Line 3, Keystone XL, and Trans Mountain tar sands pipelines, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and gas infrastructure in Washington State. 

    Register here: https://bit.ly/MazaskaTalksWebinar or watch a livestream on the Mazaska Talks Facebook page

  • Can’t make the webinar? Learn about and support current indigenous-led fights against fossil fuel infrastructure on ancestral lands:

Activities: (Choose one or two)

For the family:

  • Create a Vision Board together to show what the environment can look like 50 years from now. Talk with your family about actions that we can take now to support this dream.

  • Plan a veggie garden and talk about the importance of a healthy environment on the foods we eat/grow. If you don’t have outdoor space to utilize, you can grow herbs in a sunny window, or vegetable plants in pots on a stoop or balcony. You can even regrow some veggie scraps into new plants! It’s a great time to start seedlings in a sunny window, or work on preparing a space in your home or yard for a garden. Create a drawing of the garden now and one of how it will look once things are growing!

For younger kids:

  • Get out on a walk or hike and see how many things you can find with these Nature Scavenger Hunts - Hunt 1 , Hunt 2

  • Try a Seed starting experiment. Young kids love playing with dirt, filling pots and poking seeds in. Discuss the process of germination with older kids. 

  • Learn more about animals and the conservation efforts happening around the globe with these Earth Day videos about animals 

For older kids:

Related resources: 

General - Earth Day:

Indigenous land & water protectors

Related to family year-long action topics:

Good luck with day one!
Don’t forget to share your progress with us on instagram & facebook.

Thanks, and see you tomorrow!