Join us for an Earth Day celebration and our next chapter-wide action on Saturday, April 24th, the end of Earth Week.

This Earth Day, we will celebrate the beauty and bounty of the earth and also fight hard to protect it.

Massachusetts recently passed a bill to move our 2050 carbon emissions reductions from 80% to 100%. While this is the largest climate bill in the last 13 years, it is incredibly insufficient given what we now know about our carbon budget. We have under 7 years for our 3 degrees f (1.5 degrees c) carbon budget. A slow transition over 30 years doesn’t cut it.

Our event will begin at the Massachusetts Statehouse in Boston with a couple of speakers and some climate disco (a choreographed dance party in the name of the earth). We will then parade around the City of Boston to express gratitude for our planet and its biodiversity while also pushing the state and city for immediate action on the Climate and Ecological Emergency. This event will be “Emergency” themed filled with climate firefighters, dancing, and lively music. ** The parade will end with XR flair

Climate can’t wait; 2050 is too late. We demand that the City of Boston and State of Massachusetts declare a Climate and Ecological Emergency and act on it!

Masks and social distancing are required. More information and registration here.

There is parking at the Boston Commons parking Garage.

Please share this event! Love and Rage

The Goethe-Institut Boston joins this year’s global Earth Day celebrations with a variety of online and in-person events. (Full listing here.) A tradition since 1970, thousands of organizations in over 193 countries around the world come together every year to honor our Earth and call for common climate action. In addition to online film screenings, author conversations and a student contest, we will celebrate Earth Day with song, art and coming together in and around our newly-renovated building on April 22nd.

Classroom materials for German teachers and the national Earth Day-design contest for your students can be found here!

Be assured, our in-person festivities are carefully planned taking into account current COVID-19 restrictions and environmental sustainability. All visitors are required to wear a mask and social distance while in attendance.

First event: A portrait of the Earth in the Anthropocene – at seven locations that humans have transformed on a grand scale: Entire mountains being moved in California, a tunnel being sliced through rock at the Brenner Pass, an open-cast mine in Hungary, a marble quarry in Italy, a copper mine in Spain, the salt mine used to store radioactive waste in Wolfenbüttel and a tar sands landscape in Canada.
Initially shown from above as abstract paintings, these terrains are subsequently explored on the ground: The film weaves together observational footage of machines in operation with conversations with the workers. Alongside statements on work processes, environmental damage and technological change, Erde makes this constructed world visible in unique fashion by subtly paring it down: the piles of grey matter, hills and mountains. The blackness and the cracks. The sandy landscapes, criss-crossed by an array of mechanical devices that scuttle about like caterpillars or worms. The dimensions are gigantic, the proportions out of control; the world has slipped from humanity’s grasp.
“There is always a bigger machine, a bigger engine and when all fails there is dynamite. We always win.”
Or do we?

REGISTER HERE

Seaside Sustainability, a nonprofit based in Gloucester, MA with a mission to protect coastal waters through education and action, has released a new guide to provide activists with step-by-step support for proposing single-use plastic bans in their communities. This guide will help aspiring activists all over the United States act locally to propose sustainable legislation.

The guide is available for free download on Seaside Sustainability’s website: https://www.seasidesustainability.org/plastic

Power Shift Network is organizing an Action Day during the week of our Power Shift 2021 convergence. Our goal is to amplify the virtual and in-person actions hosted by youth-led PSN partners and other organizations that are taking place across the country on Earth Day. Because this Action Day is the same day as Biden’s Leaders’ Summit on Climate Change event, we want to put even more pressure on the administration by highlighting youth demands. We are especially demanding that the administration deploy financial resources to communities hit hardest by the climate crisis because economic justice is climate justice!

AMC is hosting a socially-distanced trash pickup the weekend of April 24th and 25th.  Each participant will clean up trash in their own neighborhood, and can share the pictures with the larger group online.  Sign up here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1h_kxTlQpKOrjOomUjg4CUKQEfpo5YHSz-8UXvKKpOmw/edit

Every 30 seconds in the United States, a football field’s worth of natural area is lost to development. Worldwide, the United Nations estimates that about a million species are now at risk of extinction and that biodiversity is declining hundreds of times faster than the normal rate—a pace never before seen in human history. We are facing a nature crisis, one that is part and parcel of the larger climate crisis. In fact, they are two sides of the same coin— and conservation is a critical part of the solution. Perhaps the most cost-effective way to mitigate climate change is to protect more of the Earth’s lands and waters, especially carbon-rich ecosystems like forests and wetlands. Building on our work as a leader of the nationwide campaign to fully and permanently fund America’s most important conservation and recreation program, the Land and Water Conservation Fund, AMC is now joining the Campaign for Nature in support of a bold and inclusive vision for protecting 30% of our nation’s land and water by 2030 (30×30). The Biden Administration committed to meeting this 30×30 target using a science-based, equity-focused approach that empowers the ongoing, locally-driven conservation efforts of communities across the country. AMC has long been at the forefront of such efforts across the priority landscapes of the Northeast, from the Mid-Atlantic Highlands to the Northeast Forest Network strategy, to a watershed-level effort at the Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge, to the Land for Maine’s Future Program leveraging LWCF investment across the largest contiguous forestlands left in the region. Please join AMC’s Conservation Policy experts for an Earth Day-inspired discussion of how our on-the-ground efforts to protect the places you love connect with the national and global campaigns to save nature and stabilize our climate before it’s too late. Register here.

Start off Arbor Week with a guided tree meditation.  It offers an opportunity to connect and ground the self with the environment around.

Surrounded by the beauty and life of the Arnold Arboretum, this meditation will be benefitted by the ancient awareness and alchemy of trees and the subtle healing capacities of nature. Join us if you’re ready to root yourself into the energy of spring!

Attendance is limited to 10 people so please only register if you can attend.

This event will be held outside at the Arnold Arboretum, socially distanced with masks required.

You can see more events throughout the week here.