Earth Day 2011 Celebration Cancelled due to lack of attendance

Time: 6pm-10pm

Dress Code: Try to wear all or something green!

Dinner: Organic Potluck - please bring dishes that are made with all or mostly organic meats, vegetables, grains and deserts. Please post what you are bringing.

Earth Day Elepahant Exchange Game: Please bring a GREEN item, NOT wrapped to play the game. For example, toliet paper rolls made from recycled paper, earthy friendly cleaner, a box of organic shampoo and conditionar, a live plant, herb ext.

To play the game we will each go around and talk about our item and answer questions like; why it is green, have you used it and did you like it, where can you buy it. Then we will set the items in the middle of the room and draw numbers from 1 to 12. We will take turns picking items. An item can be stollen only two times.

Earth Day Movie: King Corn (2007) Length, 90 min.

Some history about Earth Day taken from http://www.earthday.org/earth-day-2011

Each year, Earth Day -- April 22 -- marks the anniversary of the birth of the

modern environmental movement in 1970.

The height of hippie and flower-child culture in the United States, 1970

brought the death of Jimi Hendrix, the last Beatles album, and Simon & Garfunkel’s

“Bridge Over Troubled Water”. Protest was the order of the day,

but saving the planet was not the cause. War raged in Vietnam, and students

nationwide increasingly opposed it; four of them even gave their lives

at a protest at Kent State University.

At the time, Americans were slurping leaded gas through massive V8 sedans.

Industry belched out smoke and sludge with little fear of legal consequences

or bad press. Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of

prosperity. “Environment” was a word that appeared more often in spelling

bees than on the evening news.

Earth Day 1970 turned all of that around.

The idea came to Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator

from Wisconsin, after witnessing the ravages of the 1969 massive oil spill in

Santa Barbara, California. Inspired by the student anti-war movement, he realized

that if he could infuse that energy with an emerging public consciousness

about air and water pollution, it would force environmental protection

onto the national political agenda. Senator Nelson announced the idea for a

“national teach-in on the environment” to the national media; persuaded

Pete McCloskey, a conservation-minded Republican Congressman, to serve

as his co-chair; and recruited Denis Hayes as national coordinator. Hayes

built a national staff of 85 to promote events across the land.

As a result, on the 22nd of April, 20 million Americans took to the streets,

parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment

in massive coast-to-coast rallies. Thousands of colleges and universities

organized protests against the deterioration of the environment. Groups

that had been fighting against oil spills, polluting factories and power

plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness,

and the extinction of wildlife suddenly realized they shared common

values.

Earth Day 1970 achieved a rare political alignment, enlisting support from

Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor, city slickers and farmers, tycoons

and labor leaders. The first Earth Day led to the creation of the United

States Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the

Clean Air,

Clean Water

, and Endangered Species Acts. "It was a gamble," Gaylord recalled, "but it worked."