Earth Day 2022: Is Earth Day Always On April 22? What Day Is Happy Earth Day?

Every year on April 22, Earth Day marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970.

Earth Day now includes a wide range of events coordinated globally by EarthDay.org (formerly Earth Day Network)[1] including 1 billion people in more than 193 countries.

The official theme for 2022 is Invest In Our Planet.

In 1969 at a UNESCO Conference in San Francisco, peace activist John McConnell proposed a day to honor the Earth and the concept of peace, to first be observed on March 21, 1970, the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere.

This day of nature’s equipoise was later sanctioned in a proclamation written by McConnell and signed by Secretary General U Thant at the United Nations.

A month later, United States Senator Gaylord Nelson proposed the idea to hold a nationwide environmental teach-in on April 22, 1970. He hired a young activist, Denis Hayes, to be the National Coordinator. Nelson and Hayes renamed the event “Earth Day”.

Denis and his staff grew the event beyond the original idea for a teach-in to include the entire United States.

More than 20 million people poured out on the streets, and the first Earth Day remains the largest single-day protest in human history. Key non-environmentally focused partners played major roles.