Some history reveals...

The Day of the Earth, or also known as Earth Day, is celebrated every year on April 22 throughout the world to commemorate the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970.

Among other things, 1970 in the United States, where Earth Day (ED) was born, was also the year of the meltdown of fuel rods in the Savannah River nuclear plant near Aiken, South Carolina. This incident was not acknowledged for 18 years.

The founder of the Earth Day was Gaylord Nelson, at the time a US senator from Wisconsin. In 1970, he proposed the first nationwide environmental protest “to shake up the political establishment and force this issue onto the national agenda”.
“It was a gamble,” he said, “but it worked.”

According to the Earth Day website, at the time America’s population was breathing heavy leaded gas emitted by huge V8 sedans, while industry was belching out smoke and sludge with no fear of legal consequences or negative media coverage.

Rather like the current situation in Bulgaria and in other developing countries, at the beginning of the 1970s such emissions were a mark of prosperity in the US. But it was becoming increasingly common for people to express concerns privately about air pollution, and media coverage of the issue was on the rise. However, founding Earth Day brought a new change.

According to the Santa Barbara Community Environmental Council, “the story goes that Earth Day was conceived by senator Gaylord Nelson after a trip he took to Santa Barbara right after that horrific oil spill off our coast in 1969. He was so outraged by what he saw that he went back to Washington and passed a bill designating April 22 as a national day to celebrate the earth”.

On April 22 1970, 20 million Americans gathered on streets and in parks and halls to call for the healthy and sustainable environment that they believed they deserved. Denis Hayes, the national co-ordinator of the event, and his youthful staff organised massive coast-to-coast rallies. These rallies brought together participatns from 2000 colleges and universities, about 10 000 primary and secondary schools and hundreds of communities across the US. Disparate groups campaigning against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, highways, loss of wilderness or the extinction of wildlife, at that moment realised that they actually shared common values.

Simultaneously, the first Earth Day achieved a political alignment that was both rare and significant, with support from both Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor, citizens and farmers, tycoons and labour leaders.

A further consequence was the setting up of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the passage of the Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species acts.

For his landmark role as the founder of Earth Day, Nelson was awarded the highest honour given to a US civilian, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

20 years later...
In 1990 a group of environmental activist leaders asked Hayes to organise another big campaign, this time succeeding in mobilising about 200 million people in 141 countries, as well as lifting the status of environmental problems on to the world stage.

The 1990 event gave a huge boost to recycling efforts throughout the world and helped to lead to the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

In 2000, Hayes headed another campaign, this time with the focus on global warming and the promotion of renewable energy sources. In 2000, the campaign had the internet to help, linking volunteers and activists from even the most remote parts of the world. That year combined the big-picture celebration of the first Earth Day with the international grassroots activism of Earth Day 1990. A total of 184 countries were involved, uniting people from about 5000 environmental groups from across the planet.

There were a variety of events. In Gabon, Africa, a talking drum chain travelled from village to village. In Washington, DC, hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the national mall.

The celebration of 2000 sent a loud and clear message that citizens from around the world wanted quick and decisive action on clean energy.

Bulgarian Earth Day history...
Bulgaria joined the international Earth Day celebration in 1990 as one of the first countries from the post-communistic bloc to draw attention to the event. Bulgaria was represented on the international Earth Day committee by Blagovest Sendov (Bulgarian mathematician, politician and diplomat, Sendov was Bulgarian Science Academy head in the period 1988-1991 and is currently Bulgarian ambassador to Japan.). Sendov formed the National Earth Day Committee.

On April 22 1990, then-president Zhelyu Zhelev signed a pledge in the name of the Earth.

More than 30 000 Bulgarian children signed a pledge of commitment to the life of the Earth, submitted to the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio.

In recent years...
Starting in 2003, the motto of the Earth Day was “Water for Living” for three years in a row.

In 2004, Bulgaria’s Ministry of Environment and Water Affairs (MOEW), in partnership with the State Agency for Youth and Sports, Ministry of Education and Science, National Students’ Eco-Parliament, the Museum of Earth and Man, National Children’s Palace and the Debates National Association organised a nation-wide campaign. The basic topics were access to water resources, and problems in health and water use. The campaign aimed at supporting the management of domestic, national regional and global water resources and establishing a more sustainable world.

Children from many schools participated in the celebration. In 2004, children took part in a competition financed by the MOEW to come up with items made from refuse materials, and cleaned the area around the Palace of Children in Sofia, and watched a horse riding competition.

MOEW held an open day on April 20 and supported a moot parliamentary session in Sofia’s Military Club, with 80 pupils taking part, on the topic “Accepting measures for better water preservation”.

Act now or later, but not never...
The theme of Earth Day 2007, for the second year in a row, is a call for action against climate change. After the devastating summers of 2005 and 2006, when huge parts of Bulgaria were flooded, MOEW and the Bulgarian ecological movement called for the country to join in action against global warming.

According to 2004 research on the carbon dioxide pollution shares of 130 countries around the globe, Bulgaria is in 54th place, with carbon dioxide production of 44 730.8 tons a year. By comparison, the US is the leader with 5 762 050 tons, followed by China with 3 473 600 tons and Russia with 1 540 360 tons (data from World Recourses Institute IEA, published in Bulgarian-language Capital Auto). Unfortunately, the world’s biggest polluter, the US, has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol, which now covers more than 160 countries globally and more than 55 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate change...
The rapid increase of burning fossil fuels, such as petrol, gas and coal, in all industries is leading to excessive carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon dioxide is accumulated by the atmosphere, trapping heat from the Earth’s surface and leading to global warming. Risk areas are: polar ice melting, followed by floods in some parts and droughts in others; change of rain- and snowfall quantities; changes to climate belts and thus spreading of viruses and bacteria that are typical for more southern areas to the more northern (for example), causing the spread of new diseases against which people have no immunity. Contributory factors to climate change include the felling of trees, which function to reprocess carbon dioxide into oxygen. Illegal tree felling appears to be a problem in developing Bulgaria, prompting local environmentalists from Forthenature.org to call for country-wide actions to commemorate the birth of modern environmental science.

Bulgarian nature threatened with devastation...
“Earth Day is coming and the Bulgarian nature is leaving” is the call from Bulgarian environmentalists to society in 2007. They are challenging all Bulgarians and people in the country to get together to organise Earth Day events on April 22.

Bulgarian conservationists are also calling on Bulgaria to announce a clear environmental policy.

They cite several causes for concern, including daily illegal felling of areas of sizes equivalent to several football fields. The loss of the longest sand beach area in Bulgaria, Kamchiiski Pyasutsi, in favour of private interests, is another sensitive issue. Strandja Mountain is under threat from private interests of losing its year-long protected area status, given that it is near the Black Sea and predictably attracts reckless investors tempted by its mild climate and virgin woods.

Forthenature.org also is concerned about Cape Kaliakra on the Black Sea coast. They object to the two new golf courts planned near Bojhurets and Topola, where steppe plant species of 12 000 years of age and unique to Bulgaria and Europe had been obliterated “for the golf courses’ rye-grass to be planted”.

The environmentalists give Pirin National Park as another example of “crime without punishment” with its pistes, several times wider than all known norms, the felled forests, followed by worsening drinking water quality, erosion, loss of species habitats and aggravation of climate change.

The initiators of the campaign see as a real threat the investment plan for Rila National Park to follow the footsteps of Bansko (Pirin) by becoming an enormous winter resort. The problem of the Natura 2000 European ecological network not including the Rhodope mountain, Stara Planina, Rila and Belasitsa mountain is, they say, another enormous threat to the future sustainable development of the country.

Where on April 22?
Events in support of Bulgaria’s nature are being held abroad in Karlsruhe and Amsterdam, and locally in Plovdiv, Stara Zagora, Rousse, Blagoevgrad, Sliven, Pavel Banya, Popintsi, Krumovgrad, Kurdjali, Varna and Bourgas.

In Sofia, an event is being held at 11am in the gardens in front of the Royal Palace on Alexander Battenberg Square. Environmental organisations and many civic, youth and childrens’ organisations are to take part in the celebration, thus widening the For the Nature coalition, Nadezhda Maximova of Forthenature.org told The Sofia Echo.

As a warm up, on the previous day of April 21, the organisers of the Earthdance Festival in Sofia (earthdance.org) are going to plant 1000 young trees on Mount Vitosha above Sofia. The place is above the area on Zlatnite Mostove (The Golden Bridges), at the glade in front of Momina Skala hut and the organisers (www.10x.cc) are inviting everyone who is willing to participate, to come at 11am.

This initiative is also part of a campaign started with Earthdance 2006 and aims at raising society’s awareness towards ecological problems in Bulgaria and in particular in Vitosha, a media statement of the event said on April 16.

During the 2006 festival, parallel to the international DJ crew entertaining the audience, there were several educational workshops in the mountain, which aimed at propagandating environmental consciousness among the young people.