Pile, Roger Christian M.

May 7, 2020

20200114212

M13: LEARNING ACTIVITY

Discuss the beginnings of Earth Day Summit. What were the

recommendations of the Bruntland Report about environment.

Earth Day aims to “build the world’s largest environmental movement to drive

transformative change for people and the planet.” The movement’s mission is “to

diversify, educate and activate the environmental movement worldwide.” Every year on

April 22, Earth Day marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental

movement in 1970. We only have one earth, so we need to take care of her. That's what

Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin believed. He was disturbed that an issue as

important as our environment was not addressed in politics or by the media, so he

created the first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970.

Earth Day 1970 gave a voice to an emerging public consciousness about the

state of our planet. In the decades leading up to the first Earth Day, Humans were

consuming vast amounts of leaded gas through massive and inefficient automobiles.

Industry belched out smoke and sludge with little fear of the consequences from either

the law or bad press. Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity.

Until this point, mainstream remained largely oblivious to environmental concerns and

how a polluted environment threatens human health. Earth Day 2010 came at a time of

great challenge for the environmental community to combat the cynicism of climate

change deniers, well-funded oil lobbyists, reticent politicians, a disinterested public, and

a divided environmental community with the collective power of global environmental

activism. Today, Earth Day is widely recognized as the largest secular observance in the
world, marked by more than a billion people every year as a day of action to change

human behavior and create global, national, and local policy changes. Now, the fight for

a clean environment continues with increasing urgency, as the ravages of climate

change become more and more apparent every day. As the awareness of our climate

crisis grows, so does civil society mobilization, which is reaching a fever pitch across the

globe today. During the year 1987, in response to the deterioration of the environment,

the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), which had been set

up in 1983, published a report entitled “Our common future”. The document came to be

known as the “Brundtland Report". The Brundtland Report stated that critical global

environmental problems were primarily the result of the enormous poverty of the South

and the non-sustainable patterns of consumption and production in the North. It called

for a strategy that united development and the environment – described by the now-

common term “sustainable development”. Sustainable development is defined as

follows: Sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the

present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Saving our earth and its environment becomes highly important as it provides us

food and water to sustain life. Our well-being solely depends on this planet gives us food

and water to all living things this is our responsibility to take care of it. People around the

world should understand the need for a greener & cleaner planet. We all need to fulfill

our responsibilities & make efforts to protect our mother earth from planet harming

activities.

References:

https://www.earthday.org/history/ & https://www.are.admin.ch