Earth Day Research Articles

Water resource prospects for the next 50 years on the water planet: personal perspectives on a shared history from Earth Day, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and One Health to the futures of alternative energy, bioconvergence and quantum computing

ABSTRACT The history and the future of water resource management as well as the endeavours that it influences are inextricably woven into the fabric of the past, current and future states of all life on our watery planet. From the first Earth Day in 1970 and the founding of the International Water Resources Association (IWRA) in 1971 to the development of modern biotechnology applications and alternative energy sources across subsequent decades, this paper reflects on these and other historical underpinnings of how we manage the use of our essential water resources now and might hope to in the future.

The ESG Value Opportunity: A Decision Point for Utilities

As communities around the globe experience more frequent and severe effects of climate change, governments, individuals, and the scientific community are demanding action to decarbonize economies to slow the pace of climate change and take actions to mitigate its effects. The idea of human's impact on the climate and surrounding environment began with the introduction of the first Earth Day in 1970, followed by the passing of the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) and many others. As extreme weather events continue to affect communities globally in unpredictable ways, there is an ever increasing emphasis on governments and businesses to take deliberate action to respond to the impacts of climate change to build resilient communities. The development of the Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) criteria is one of the solutions in response to climate change. ESG requires organizations and businesses to consider their environmental impacts, how an organization treats and values their employees, and the principles and policies an entity uses to make decisions. ESG has become a focal point with investors and financial institutions as many investors are looking at corporations to address climate change and how companies should be performing on a moral basis. There is a growing need for an overarching ESG framework to be established at every company; however, utilities have the market and ample opportunity to lead efforts in this space.

Circle of worry song video clip as a campaign medium to save the environment from damage

The Earth Day is commemorated every April 22nd to remind the importance of environmental protection. The environment that sustains our lives is getting weary over time. A group of filmmakers compiled a video clip consisting of environmental destruction events. This video clip is used as the background of a song entitled Circle of Worry. The purpose of this song clip production is to campaign for environmental protection. The video clip was made using creative collaboration method. The video was then distributed through social media and online platforms to reach broader audience, especially the younger generation. Through this media, it is hoped that the younger generation’s attention and awareness will emerge to better protect their environment.

Project Earthrise: Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference of inVIVO Planetary Health.

The “Earthrise” photograph, taken on the 1968 Apollo 8 mission, became one of the most significant images of the 20th Century. It triggered a profound shift in environmental awareness and the potential for human unity—inspiring the first Earth Day in 1970. Taking inspiration from these events 50 years later, we initiated Project Earthrise at our 2020 annual conference of inVIVO Planetary Health. This builds on the emergent concept of planetary health, which provides a shared narrative to integrate rich and diverse approaches from all aspects of society towards shared solutions to global challenges. The acute catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic has drawn greater attention to many other interconnected global health, environmental, social, spiritual, and economic problems that have been underappreciated or neglected for decades. This is accelerating opportunities for greater collaborative action, as many groups now focus on the necessity of a “Great Transition”. While ambitious integrative efforts have never been more important, it is imperative to apply these with mutualistic value systems as a compass, as we seek to make wiser choices. Project Earthrise is our contribution to this important process. This underscores the imperative for creative ecological solutions to challenges in all systems, on all scales with advancing global urbanization in the digital age—for personal, environmental, economic and societal health alike. At the same time, our agenda seeks to equally consider our social and spiritual ecology as it does natural ecology. Revisiting the inspiration of “Earthrise”, we welcome diverse perspectives from across all dimensions of the arts and the sciences, to explore novel solutions and new normative values. Building on academic rigor, we seek to place greater value on imagination, kindness and mutualism as we address our greatest challenges, for the health of people, places and planet.

City Care: Historical and Contemporary Lessons from Environmental Justice Coalition-Building

This article examines the historical roots of the challenges facing contemporary climate justice advocacy campaigns, and draws lessons from this history regarding how to more comprehensively address racial equity in resilience planning and environmentalist advocacy. As the modern US environmental movement gained momentum in the 1970s, fault lines developed between environmentalists and civil rights advocates. A key source of tension was debates over whether urban environments were deserving of the same kinds of environmental protections as more traditional and pristine forms of “nature.” African Americans’ prioritization of economic equity alongside legal equality also led to a critical dialogue about economic growth and the economic externalities of regulating industry and safeguarding the environment. This article draws on environmental justice and environmental history scholarship as integrated lenses for analyzing racialized debates during the early years of the modern American environmental movement. I trace how public deliberations played out regarding the first Earth Day in 1970, and the City Care Conference of 1979—the first national conference that brought together major environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and civil rights organizations such as the National Urban League to deliberate the linkages between racial equity and environmentalism. Finally, I connect these historical analyses to recent data from the Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute’s Hoosier Life Survey in order to better understand contemporary racialized disparities of climate change vulnerability, and relatedly, of climate change opinion.

From Pandemic to Apocalypse

The current study is an urgent warning on the Earth Day 2020 to prevent the blast of the COVID-19 pandemic to apocalypse. It is shown that the pandemic equations become unstable at reproduction numbers above 3.5...

Enhancing Environmental Literacy in Palestine: Reflecting on Secondary School Students’ Knowledge and Attitudes: تعزيز الثقافة البيئية في فلسطين وفقا لمعارف واتجاهات طلبة المدارس الثانوية

In the past, since the first Earth Day, organizations have endorsed the development of well informed and environmentally literate citizen as the answer to our threatened environment. According to many Environmental Education (EE) experts, knowledge and attitudes are important components of environmental literacy (EL), especially if the goal of environmental education is to change behavior. In our study, a questionnaire with two parts was randomly distributed to 49 selected schools which included 942 10th grade students in Palestine, with a 100% response rate. Results showed that participants had favorable attitudes toward the environment which ranged from 57.5 to 74.8 out of 100 points. The environmental knowledge scores are topicality, fragmentary or incorrect, which range from 45.72 to 67.36. Significant differences were found in the level of EL scores by gender. Educational implications and recommendations are discussed.

Detection of Large Exospheric Enhancements at Mercury due to Meteoroid Impacts

Abstract The Ultraviolet and Visible Spectrometer (UVVS) on the MESSENGER spacecraft observed three large transient events in Mercury’s nightside “tail” in which the exospheric brightness increased by an order of magnitude. Meteoroid impacts are the best explanation given that the events are brief, can be simulated with instantaneous injections of vapor, and were not associated with unusual solar wind conditions. Data–model comparisons suggest that the impactors are 10–20 cm in diameter and produce vapor temperatures of ∼104 K, much warmer than usually assumed for impact vapor. We estimate the impact frequency to be on the order of once per Earth day for meteoroids 10 cm diameter and larger, consistent with a pre-MESSENGER prediction. UVVS observed three atomic species during one event: sodium, magnesium, and calcium. Na and Mg brightened simultaneously, and their modeled ejection ratio roughly matches Mercury’s surface abundance. Ca showed no sign of an enhancement, consistent with earlier predictions that Ca in impact vapor is bound in a molecule that is undetectable to UVVS. This event provides an unprecedented opportunity to see three species respond (or not) to a single source and has implications for our understanding of Mercury’s exosphere.

Analysis of GRIHA’s Variant for Large Development: Case of Educational Campuses in India

With the world descending into chaos of 21st century namely ecological and environmental challenges, there is a need for force to work among us and to lift us, so as to create order out of those above mentioned chaos. Resources are depleting, they need to be saved, the environment needs to be protected. Several countries have started facing earth overshoot day almost every year now. To overcome these issues, different organizations are working on it and one of them in India is GRIHA. Also govt. of India has made it mandatory for some government projects to be GRIHA certified, and they are providing some incentives for that. Some PSU buildings also have made it compulsory to be GRIHA certified. There are different variants of GRIHA and one of them is, “GRIHA for large development”. Whenever large projects are designed, executed etc., they leave great impact on build environment, hence affecting ecology, the environment, so they must be well assessed with regards to building performance, since educational campuses are such large projects. In this paper, a qualitative evaluation research method is used. This paper studies the GRIHA’s variant for large development (mainly university campuses as they are like a small city within a country) and analyses the green features of the university campuses that are GRIHA certified.

Towards an Environmental History of Television. Water Pollution Issues on Finnish Broadcasting Prior to Earth Day 1970

Abstract If we want to understand the historical expansion of environmental awareness among the great public, then we must answer the questions, who communicated what to whom and how? In addition to traditional print media, television also presumably played a significant role in raising environmental issues to public consciousness. And yet, surprisingly enough, unlike with newspapers, empirical data about television is almost completely lacking. We simply do not know when, where, why and how television started to broadcast environmental news. Consequently our case study can be considered an entrée into the qualitative study of the environmental history of television. Our study focuses on Finnish Broadcasting Company and we explore how water pollution and protection issues were introduced on television to the Finnish public as a part of the 'long' emergence of modern environmental awareness prior to the Earth Day in 1970. The data sources consist of written content reports collected from the database of the television archives as well as digitised versions of original programme recordings. Relying on frame analysis, the article explores the glory days of television, a time when television network heads could expect that almost any programming would attract the undivided attention of its audience in all industrialised nations in the world.

Quasi‐Periodic Variation of the Lower Equatorial Cloud Induced by Atmospheric Waves on Venus

AbstractA quasi‐periodic variation of the lower cloud amount induced by atmospheric waves was reproduced in our Venus general circulation model for the first time. This result agrees well with previous 2.3‐μm infrared nightside measurements. The cloud amount variation is mainly caused by a temperature fluctuation with a period of ∼5.5 Earth days near the cloud base, which is associated with a Kelvin‐like gravity wave with a zonal wavenumber‐1 structure. Our result might be able to explain the mechanism of the periodical variation of the brightness in the Venusian low‐latitudes shown by the previous 2.3‐μm infrared nightside measurements. It is also suggested that the temporal variation of the mass loading due to the temperature fluctuation is related to the abrupt appearance and disappearance of the large cloud particle (Mode 3) and explains the sharp discontinuity of the lower cloud found by the recent Akatsuki and ground‐based infrared nightside measurements.

Earth Day Sets Stage for New US Climate Goals

As people across the globe celebrated Earth Day this year, climate change and global efforts for reducing carbon emissions took center stage as President Biden held a two‐day Global Leaders' Summit on Climate. Virtually hosting more than 40 world leaders and top executives from various industry sectors, the event aimed to reset the global stage for the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) this November in Glasgow and to demonstrate strong US commitment to decarbonization after four years of significant rollbacks on environmental regulations and inaction on climate change under the previous Administration.

PARTICULATES//Tulips: (Or, Estimating Respiratory Effects of Ambient Air Pollution and COVID-19 Using a Policing-Climate Adjusted Hazard Function).

Through poetry, I offer a creative, critical analysis of the intersections of COVID-19, structural racism, and racialized police violence-situating present COVID-19 discourse within a broader historical arc of respiratory distress within communities of color, all while centering Earth Day and climate change as both metaphor and corollary. In doing so, I enact poetry as praxis, reflecting critically on the racialized contexts and consequences of overlapping threats to our health, while simultaneously crafting counternarrative to public health's ahistoric, apolitical, and racist proclivities in times of public health crises.

Spin state and moment of inertia of Venus

Fundamental properties of the planet Venus, such as its internal mass distribution and variations in length of day, have remained unknown. We used Earth-based observations of radar speckles tied to the rotation of Venus obtained in 2006–2020 to measure its spin axis orientation, spin precession rate, moment of inertia and length-of-day variations. Venus is tilted by 2.6392 ± 0.0008 deg (1σ) with respect to its orbital plane. The spin axis precesses at a rate of 44.58 ± 3.3 arcsec per year (1σ), which gives a normalized moment of inertia of 0.337 ± 0.024 and yields a rough estimate of the size of the core. The average sidereal day on Venus in the 2006–2020 interval is 243.0226 ± 0.0013 Earth days (1σ). The spin period of the solid planet exhibits variations of 61 ppm (~20 min) with a possible diurnal or semidiurnal forcing. The length-of-day variations imply that changes in atmospheric angular momentum of at least ~4% are transferred to the solid planet.

Integrating Sustainability into Learning in Chemistry

Earth Day 2021, with the theme of “Restore Our Earth”, along with Chemists Celebrate Earth Week 2021 from ACS with the theme “Reducing Our Footprint with Chemistry”, provides a rich opportunity to reflect on the extent to which we integrate sustainability into chemistry education. Chemistry plays a central interdisciplinary role among all the sciences. It provides the essential key to understanding chemical processes and products operating within and among physical, biological, ecological, and engineered systems with far-reaching impacts on the health and well-being of people and our planet. Capitalizing on this pivotal role requires interchanges of knowledge among all these disciplines as well as the social sciences, humanities, and the arts, so that we can tease out the specific knowledge relevant to sustainability in the chemistry curriculum. This editorial highlights how the interdisciplinary work of integrating sustainability into chemistry education can be guided by systems thinking, and by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and Planetary Boundaries frameworks. Such systematic approaches can energize educators and learners to situate chemistry within a broader landscape of knowledge and thus tap chemistry’s potential to enhance sustainability.

Happy Earth Day!

Happy Earth Day!

Climate Change of over 20 °C Induced by Continental Movement on a Synchronously Rotating Exoplanet

Abstract It is generally believed that the addition of continents cools the climate of an aquaplanet with a similar orbit to Earth; this is because continents have a higher surface albedo than oceans. A similar effect has been shown in climate simulations for exoplanets. Here we demonstrate that the influence of a continent on ocean circulation could have a dominative effect on the climate of a synchronously rotating exoplanet compared with the effect of the surface albedo, especially when the rotation of the exoplanet is relatively slow (e.g., the rotational period is 40 Earth days). The global mean surface temperature could vary by more than 26° C, simply by moving a small continent to a different location. The ocean circulation on a synchronously rotating exoplanet is characterized by a strong westerly jet along the equator and one large gyre in each hemisphere. The surface temperature decreases when the equatorial westerly or the western branch of either of the gyres is blocked by a continent or an island arc chain. However, if the continent blocks the eastern branch of the gyre, the equatorial westerly is strengthened and the climate warms. A large number of potentially habitable exoplanets have been found orbiting around M-dwarfs in a tidally locked manner; our results indicate that their climates, as well as their atmospheric chemistry, may deviate from previous estimates if a small continent, or even an island arc chain, is present.

Methodological approaches to chrono- ecological express - assessment of the degree of chron-adaptation of the organism of the athletes under high physical

Impaired chronoadaptation in female athletes, which is more common in women than in men, including under conditions of high physical activity can adversely affect their physical and mental performance. This gives grounds to consider the need for chronoecological rapid assessment of the degree of chronoadaptation of the body of athletes under conditions of high physical activity.
 Objective of the study: identify and develop methodological approaches to rapid assessment of the degree of chronoecological chronoadaptation of the body of athletes under conditions of high physical activity.
 Research methods: used methods of theoretical analysis of scientific literature: generalization, synthesis, formalization, abstraction.
 Research results and conclusions: developed methodological approaches to chronological express - assessment of the degree of chronoadaptation of the body of athletes under conditions of high physical activity. It is concluded that the study should be conducted in three stages. At the first stage the chronotype of athletes is determined, at the second - the degree of chronoadaptation to the circadian chronobiological cycle sleep - wakefulness (basic rhythmic cycle on the planet Earth day - night), at the third - determination of the intensity of chronoadaptation mechanisms.

Our Contrary Normal Practice and Normative Attitudes Around Plastics Recycling

In time for the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, Frontline, an acclaimed investigative news show on American Public Television, is airing “Plastic Wars,” a report on the fght over the future of plastics. “Plastic Wars” and its related print articles expose that plastics manufacturers have promoted the recycling industry as the clever, benefcial, circular end to plastics waste, all the while knowing that plastics recycling systems have never been robust enough to address plastics waste. It tells that soft drink companies like Pepsico have repeatedly fallen short of stated goals for recycled plastic content in their bottles. It clarifes that end-consumers should not expect that every plastic part embossed with a chasing arrow symbol will be recycled.

Tembang Macapat: Kritik Sosial Sedulur Sikep terhadap Ekspansi Industri Semen di Pegunungan Kendeng

Macapat song is an ancestral heritage that contains life guidance for the Javanese. Each lyric or cakepan of the Macapat song has a deep meaning. However, for Sedulur Sikep Sukolilo Pati, the macapat song was used as a social criticism of the plan to build a cement factory in the Kendeng Utara mountains. Cakepan macapat song is adapted to the social criticism that is to be conveyed through the song. This research uses literary criticism studies (expressive criticism) with a descriptive analysis approach. The research data is in the form of cakepan tembang macapat. Sources of research data, namely Sedulur Sikep figures and social media. Methods of data collection using observation, interviews, and documentation. Data analysis using data reduction techniques, data presentation, and data verification. The results showed that the social criticism used by Sedulur Sikep through the macapat song consisted of five Pangkur songs and one Dhandhanggula song. The social criticisms include, 1) farmers land planted with cement factories, 2) justice must be upheld, 3) casualties caused by miners, 4) the government torments farmers, 5) the earth begins to prosecute nature destroyers, 6) commemoration of earth day is useless. 
 Keywords: macapat song, social criticism, Sedulur Sikep, cement industry, Kendeng mountains.