Earth Day

Submission 20,072

Overview

Earth Day is a worldwide event held annually on April 22nd to promote protection and conservation of the environment. Since the inaugural observance in 1970, it has grown into one of the largest secular holidays in the world coordinated by the Earth Day Network and celebrated by more than a billion people every year.

Background

In 1969, American peace activist and environmentalist John McConnell proposed the recognition of March 21st as an annual holiday to honor the planet Earth, coinciding with the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere. One month later, United States Senator Gaylord Nelson suggested a separate Earth Day to be held on April 22nd as an environmental educational day. The first Earth Day, observed on April 22nd, 1970, drew millions of participants from over 2,000 universities and 10,000 schools in the United States under the coordination of the environmental activist Denis Hayes.

Notable Developments

Earth Day 1990

In 1990, Hayes took the event to over 141 nations around the world with an estimated 200 million participants. That year,an "Earth Day Special" video was released, which featured a skit with comedians Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams (shown below).

Earth Day 2000

The celebration of Earth in 2000 was the first time the Internet was used as the primary tool for organizing the event.^[1]^[4] At the Mall in Washington, D.C., Leonardo DiCaprio hosted the official Earth Day event, during which former United States Vice President Al Gore gave an eight-minute speech on the environment.

2015 Google Earth Day Quiz

On April 22nd, 2015, Google^[3] released an Earth Day-themed interactive quiz as a doodle on Google.com, allowing users to answer questions to be paired with one of 12 animals, including the giant squid, honey badger, red capped manakin, Komodo dragon, woolly mammoth, pangolin, sea otter, whooping crane, honey bee, cuttlefish and coral.

That day, a thread about the quiz was submitted to the /an/^[2] (animals & nature) board, where users submitted which animal they had received (shown below). Also on April 22nd, Cheezburger^[6] highlighted several parody versions of the quiz answers featuring various Internet memes.