Friends of Bahia Honda
Earth Day Event
Earth Day 2024
PLANET VS. PLASTIC Auction
Earth Day 2024Saturday APRIL 20thPlanet VS. Plastic
Bring the Family
Saturday April 20, 2024
Experience Bahia Honda State Park’s Earth Day Celebration: Bahia Honda State Park, 36850 Overseas Highway in the Lower Keys, will stage its 27th annual Earth Day celebration Saturday, April 20th, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Attendees can learn about earth-friendly practices from conservation-minded vendors, and also enjoy live music and crafts. Kids can join a scavenger hunt “journey” to visit the festival’s many exhibitors — including the Florida Keys’ Turtle Hospital, Reef Relief and Save-A-Turtle. If you can’t be here for the event itself, check out our Friends of Bahia Honda annual Earth Day Online Auction.
ALL proceeds raised go directly to the park and continues through April 20th.
Gift certificates to over 80 Keys attractions, hotels, restaurants and more will go to the highest bidders.
Scan or Click for Auction
Until Earth Day Celebration 2024
2024
PLANET VS. PLASTICS
The FIRST Earth Day
Every year on April 22, Earth Day marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970.
Let’s take a look at the last half-century of mobilization for action:
ORIGINS OF EARTH DAY
In the decades leading up to the first Earth Day, Americans 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 America remained largely oblivious to environmental concerns and how a polluted environment threatens human health.
However, the stage was set for change with the publication of Rachel Carson’s New York Times bestseller Silent Spring in 1962. The book represented a watershed moment, selling more than 500,000 copies in 24 countries as it raised public awareness and concern for living organisms, the environment and the inextricable links between pollution and public health.
Earth Day 1970 would come to provide a voice to this emerging environmental consciousness, and putting environmental concerns on the front page.
THE IDEA FOR THE FIRST EARTH DAY
Senator Gaylord Nelson, the junior senator from Wisconsin, had long been concerned about the deteriorating environment in the United States. Then in January 1969, he and many others witnessed the ravages of a massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. Inspired by the student anti-war movement, Senator Nelson wanted to infuse the energy of student anti-war protests with an emerging public consciousness about air and water pollution. Senator Nelson announced the idea for a teach-in on college campuses to the national media, and persuaded Pete McCloskey, a conservation-minded Republican Congressman, to serve as his co-chair. They recruited Denis Hayes, a young activist, to organize the campus teach-ins and they choose April 22, a weekday falling between Spring Break and Final Exams, to maximize the greatest student participation.
