Earth day is on April 22th, 2024 this year, and is a holiday that honors the achievements of the environmental movement, and raises awareness for the need to protect Earth’s natural resources for future generations.
This year’s Earth Day theme is planet v.s plastics, and people around the world are going to be raising awareness about the damage that plastics are doing to the environment, animals, and humans too. “I think it’s still something a lot of people still have a hard time getting rid of the single use plastics in our life, and are everywhere, and getting people to change their habits can be really difficult to go from using single use plastics to reusable water bottles, and just making those small changes can be hard for some people if they don’t really care or don’t care out of laziness or they just don’t realize how big of a problem it is. So I think it’s a good thing to teach people who are lazy or don’t know how bad plastics are for the environment,” said Brittany Morgan, environmental sciences teacher at Lively Middle School.
Earth Day means a lot of different things to different people. “(To me it is) a day to stop, and reflect, and think about how you could do even more or share with others to make more of an impact,” said Morgan. “I think it means to be aware of our environment, and the ecosystems around us, and how we affect them.” said Paulinha Chandler, a student from Lively Middle School.
Lively Middle School is celebrating Earth Day by planting native plants throughout the week “during Earth week we will be planting native plants over by the portables by Ms.Vincent’s portable,”, and “Were also trying to think of it as Earth week instead of Earth day.” said by Morgan.
Here at Lively Middle School we have a program focused on recycling. And that service is where the students in Ms.Morgan’s class come pick up the recycling during advisory or other periods, and whoever has recycling that has only things that can be recycled get entered into the raffle each week. That raffle was thought of by Lindasy Ramirez Nieto. Who had this to say about it “I feel good it helps out people in the community.” said Lindasy Ramirez Nieto.
Morgan does have advice for our students. “Don’t feel like there’s no hope for fixing our environmental problems. I think especially in this age group, I deal with a lot of jaded outlooks which I think is way too young to be jaded already like to have that negative view of the world I don’t know if that’s because of social media or just that we haven’t made great changes in the last ten years but I just hope that we keep making progress, and not forgetting about the environment, and taking action to help fix the problem,” said Morgan.
