Earth Week Challenge 2020: Appreciation Sunday

The seven-day Earth Week series draws to its close with "Appreciation Sunday." The challenge Before It's Too Late set for this day is to "Restore your sense of connection to nature. This is what you fight for." Their two suggestions for doing so are to "Try a meditation...Say Thank You for all your blessings!" (ugh, too sappy for me) or, "If you can, spend some time in nature." That "if you can" is a necessary caveat for more people than ever these days, since COVID has made getting out into the natural world a lot harder than it used to be. Here in New Jersey, all our state and county parks have been shut down; in my town, even the tiny local parks have all the playground equipment and park benches marked off with yellow CAUTION tape to prevent anyone from sitting down and, you know, appreciating nature. You're allowed to walk past as much nature as you can manage to see in the minute or so it takes to cross this tiny park, but no stopping.

Going out for a walk on the street is still allowed, and I'm lucky enough to live in a place where you can see at least some nature just by doing that. In addition to the trees and flowers in people's yards, there are plenty of "street trees" planted along the major roads in town, including many ornamental cherries that are in full bloom right now. But unfortunately, today just isn't that great a day for going out and appreciating them. It's chilly for April, currently below 50 degrees, and it's been raining off and on all day. Even the bit of nature appreciation we were planning to do in our own yard, digging up the bed for our new flower garden, has been put off until the next sunny day. (The plants I ordered from Wit's End Gardens haven't arrived yet, though they are supposedly on the way, so it's not an urgent need just yet.)

Yesterday, however, was a much nicer day — sunny with highs in the sixties — and we took full advantage of it to go for a long walk in town and appreciate as much nature as we could manage to take in while dodging around other humans. If we could count yesterday's walk as today's appreciation, we'd be all set. But unfortunately, that's not how these Earth Week Challenges are set up. What you did yesterday, or even what you do most days, doesn't count; the only thing that matters is what you do today.

And that, for me, is a fundamental flaw in the way this entire weeklong challenge is constructed. All seven of these challenges are things that we do nearly every day just as a matter of routine. But for challenge purposes, that's not good enough; you have to do them on the specific day the challenge is set, or it doesn't count. You have to avoid meat not most of the time, but on Meatless Monday itself; you have to avoid driving not most of the time, but on Transportation Tuesday. And so on.

The thing is, this isn't the way environmentalism works in real life. If you want to reduce the carbon footprint of your diet, the best way to do it isn't to eschew meat and dairy on one particular Monday in April; it's to reduce the amount you eat of them all the time. And it's the same for all the other challenges: driving less, reducing water use, producing less waste, writing to elected officials, supporting small businesses (when you can), and appreciating nature should all be part of your regular routine. Doing them habitually has much more impact than doing them just once in honor of Earth Week and then forgetting about them until next year.

In short, I think for someone who already has ecofrugal habits, these Earth Week Challenges just aren't very useful. If I were constructing my own Earth Week series, I might keep the same basic themes — food, transportation, and so on — but I'd make them about the whole week, not just one day each. So, for instance, the Meatless Monday challenge would be, "How many days this week can you go without eating either meat or dairy?" For Transportation Tuesday, "How many days this week can you go without driving?" I'd present them all at the beginning of the week rather than shelling them out one at a time, and each day's email would just be a reminder and tips about one of them. Not only would a challenge in this format have been much easier for me personally, but I think it would also be a much more useful way to teach eco-friendly habits for those who aren't used to them.

The real message of an Earth Week challenge, I think, should be that living an earth-friendly lifestyle is a marathon, not a sprint. It's not just about what you do today, but about how you choose to live every day of your life. In other words, we should make every week Earth Week.