{"id":20884,"date":"2021-04-22T09:00:18","date_gmt":"2021-04-22T16:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=20884"},"modified":"2021-04-23T09:46:14","modified_gmt":"2021-04-23T16:46:14","slug":"open-space-earth-day-needs-to-be-a-national-holiday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2021\/04\/22\/open-space-earth-day-needs-to-be-a-national-holiday\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Space: Earth Day needs to be a national holiday"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the college\u2019s hopeful return to on-campus classes in September shows, it looks like our pandemic troubles may be coming to an end by the fall. That being said, I would argue that the main thing we must work on when we begin our transition to our new normal is taking better care of our environment.<\/p>\n

We must remember the simple truth: if we let our climate get as out of control as the varieties of COVID-19 that are currently causing havoc across the world, we will be dealing with a crisis that will exceed everything we have gone through the past year and make us wish that we had never recovered from COVID-19.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what I propose: we must make Earth Day (which is supposed to be spent celebrating our environment) a national holiday. For far too long, we\u2019ve been ignoring this special day and have just treated it as a normal day. This behaviour must come to an end.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Today is Earth Day, and it should be a national holiday (photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What I am suggesting here is for our government to make Earth Day as important as any other holiday. Each year, we all have a long list of things to do that celebrates each and every yearly holiday. For Christmas, we buy presents for all our loved ones to stick under a $200 tree. For Thanksgiving, we all gather our families and eat a huge turkey dinner. For Easter, the kids have Easter egg hunts.<\/p>\n

We even feel free to decorate our houses for Halloween, a day that has absolutely no sentimental meaning outside of \u201cLet\u2019s all play dress up and have loud parties where we watch horror movies and drink and eat candy until we are sick.\u201d As soon as we are out of this pandemic, we must ask ourselves this important question: what has humanity ever done for Earth Day?<\/p>\n

And, no, the reason why we, year after year, just completely disregard this day is not because of a lack of Earth Day-themed events that we can indulge ourselves in. That is just a load of baloney. There are a bundle of things we can do.<\/p>\n

For example, we can all go out to forests or parks and plant trees and plants to help grow back our environment. Or we can spend the holiday building birdhouses and beaver dams so that our lovely animals have a place to stay; we could plant fruit trees so the animals have food to eat.<\/p>\n

We could take part in activities like nature hikes; we could be investing in electric bikes and cars instead of the planet-polluting gas-fuelled vehicles that we have grown too reliant on. Schools can also help out by organizing educational school field trips that teach our future generations how to care for our environment instead of how to continue to pollute it. If we start doing these things right now, I dare say we might end up with a healthier environment to live and work in.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll admit that I\u2019m just as guilty as everybody else. Having said that, I do believe that if we each hold ourselves accountable for our planet-polluting actions, I dare say that we can stop climate change from becoming a full-blown mess, like our current situation with COVID-19.<\/p>\n

And the first step to getting there is raising awareness, so that\u2019s why Earth Day needs to be a national holiday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the college\u2019s hopeful return to on-campus classes in September shows, it looks like our pandemic troubles may be coming to an end by the fall. That being said, I would argue that the main thing we must work on when we begin our transition to our new normal is taking better care of our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20885,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-webexclusive","category-views"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20884"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20886,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20884\/revisions\/20886"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}