Five Great Ways to Celebrate Earth Day 2006

It requires all of us to preserve the beauty and safety of Planet Earth...and that includes YOU! Saturday, April 22, is 2006 Earth Day, an annual event for people around the world to celebrate the earth and renew our commitment to building a safer, healthier and cleaner world for all of us.

Here are five ways you can celebrate Earth Day by taking that next step to do your part.....

1. Sign-up for the Sierra Club's Insider email newsletter. Or even better, join the Sierra Club, which is America's oldest, largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization. Inspired by nature, the 750,000 members of the Sierra Club work together to protect our communities and the planet. The Club motto is "Explore, enjoy and protect the planet"® Take that first step today by visiting the Sierra Club's exceptional website.

2. Read Top Ten Things You Can do to Reduce Global Warming by Larry West, About.com's Guide to Environmental Issues. And do one of those things.

3. Pre-order Al Gore's new book, An Inconvenient Truth, which is the book-version of Gore's new documentary of the same name, the mega-hit of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. The film will be released to the public on May 24. You can watch a very cool preview here.

It's true, as AlGore.org says, that "Gore has warned about the dangers of global warming for years, arguing that without dramatic changes in the emission of greenhouse gases, the planet is likely to experience a dramatic increase in violent storms, infectious disease, deadly heat waves and rising sea levels that will force the evacuation of low-lying cities." (And if we can persuade Mr. Gore to run for the presidency in 2008, he could use your support, too.)

4. At EarthDayNetwork.com, find and participate in an Earth Day event in your local neighborhood. Earth Day Network works with more than 12,000 organizations in 174 countries, and within the US, with more than 3000 organizations and K-12 schools.

One of EarthDay Network's new program is its Trees Across America campaign to combat deforestation. Steve Nix, About.com's Guide to Forestry explains that Trees Across America has a goal to plant 285 million trees in the next 5 years, one tree for every American.

Steve explains, "In the past 30 years alone, we have lost 30% of all our urban trees - a loss of over 600 million trees. 1 tree for every American symbolizes a unified effort of all of our citizens to combat urban deforestation in and near America's cities."

5. Or do what I and my family are doing....stay home all day on Earth Day, and use absolutely no gasoline to go anywhere. We call it "A Day Without Gasoline." Just imagine if everyone did that just one day a year (or one day a month).....

I'm assuming that you're one of the 313,000 who've already joined the Stop Global Warming Virtual March, which "commits to each other that together, as our numbers grow, we will use our collective voices to demand that governments, corporations, and politicians take the steps necessary to stop global warming."

Says American sage Walter Cronkite of the Stop Global Warming Virtual March, "I am joining the hundreds of thousands who shall be marching to demonstrate the concern that we all hold for the future of our planet and all the living things that exist upon it. The governments of the world have tarried long enough, and the United States is scarcely without doubt the greatest culprit among them.”
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