--- title: The Case For Making Earth Day a Religious Holiday description: Celebrating the world as a living miracle should be more fun and important than it currently is, writes Paul Greenberg and Carl Safina. canonical: https://time.com/6273684/earth-day-religious-holiday/ author: Paul Greenberg article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2023-04-21T18:21:21.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:44:43.914Z article:section: Ideas og:title: The Case For Making Earth Day a Religious Holiday og:description: Celebrating the world as a living miracle should be more fun and important than it currently is. og:url: https://time.com/6273684/earth-day-religious-holiday/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc15e42ef2798c9db/698a3c31b21a9c7f5a5072dc/Earth-Day-World.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2120 og:image:height: 1193 og:image:alt: Earth-Day-World og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Case For Making Earth Day a Religious Holiday twitter:description: Celebrating the world as a living miracle should be more fun and important than it currently is. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltc15e42ef2798c9db/698a3c31b21a9c7f5a5072dc/Earth-Day-World.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- # The Case For Making Earth Day a Religious Holiday > Sponsored content. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ## Video: Setting Boundaries: Johan Rockström's Quest for a Healthy Planet [Watch (HLS stream): Setting Boundaries: Johan Rockström's Quest for a Healthy Planet](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/ZJVfj7hC.m3u8) (6:28)  _Published 2023-04-20. In the climate science world, Johan Rockström is known as a bit of a... rockstar. He's on the 2023 TIME100 list. He has a viral TED Talk. He stars in a Netflix documentary. And when people talk about the practical steps needed to slow climate change, they talk about his work._ Apr 21, 2023 6:21 PM UTC  Globe earth eco concept. Earth world environment day symbol. Copy space. Minimal nature idea to artwork design. Globe earth eco concept. Earth world environment day symbol. Copy space. Minimal nature idea to artwork design. Getty Images by [Paul Greenberg](https://time.com/author/paul-greenberg/) and [Carl Safina](https://time.com/author/carl-safina/) Apr 21, 2023 6:21 PM UTC Earth Day is upon us—that forlorn little non-holiday that some years sandwiches itself between Easter and Passover, or other years trails in the wake of those “real” holidays. If the Super Bowl is America’s unofficial national day of celebration, Earth Day is the collective yawn that brings a shrug. No recipes offer Earth Day chips and dips to serve when friends and beloveds gather in celebration of the miracle of a living planet. Because they don’t. Not even ours. For the two of us environmentalists—one of us nominally Jewish, the other a recovering Catholic—we find the ill-defined nature of the only day honoring the place that makes life itself possible more than a little sacrilegious. So, on this 53rd Earth Day we thought it useful to pose what a real Earth Day should represent and how it could form a central time for a new approach to worship. Before we step further into that loaded word, let’s back up. Even as Earth has sizzled—New York City had its [warmest January](https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/january-2023-warmest-on-record-for-new-york-city/1478251) on record and a February more like April—the idea of honoring this planet with its miraculous coating of life has somehow fizzled. It wasn’t always that way. The first Earth Day, co-chaired by Republican Senator Pete McCloskey and Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson in 1970, brought more than [20 million](https://www.earthday.org/) people—a tenth of the U.S. population of the time—to the streets. According to a CBS News Special [Report ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbwC281uzUs)of the day, many high schools announced they would excuse absences. Earth Day 1970 remains, [reputedly](https://www.earthday.org/history/), “the largest single-day protest in human history.” We remember when air in big cities still hurt our young lungs, and rivers were so polluted they repeatedly caught fire. The spirit then was to protest against chemical pollution and smog. Within a few years of that first Earth Day and the national sentiment behind it, President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and Congress passed unprecedented environmental laws including the Occupational Safety and Health Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, Toxic Substances Control Act, the National Environmental Education Act, and other protections that have greatly improved human health in our cities and communities and prevented the extinction of hundreds of species. --- ### More from TIME --- But Earth Day may have fallen victim to its own success. Even though we face new and seemingly overwhelming environmental issues—the extinction crisis, the toxic chemical crisis, the climate crisis, acidification of the seas, the plastics tsunami—the spirit of the day is no longer mass protest. Yet current environmental problems pose existential threats to planetary and societal stability, even to civilization itself. One day out of 365 to mark the entire planet is too far a cry from the reverence and recognition owed the beleaguered planetary basis for our entire existence, for all known life. **_Read More:_**[_Mark Ruffalo and Gloria Walton on How Storytelling Can Save the Planet_](https://time.com/collection/earth-awards-2023/6272882/mark-ruffalo-gloria-walton-storytelling-climate/) So, what would an earth-reverent belief system look like with Earth Day at its center? To begin with, let’s take a look at what established religions get right and where we might take a cue. Perhaps the first step might be, um, unearthing the nature-centered origins of our existing religious holidays. Most of us know in the back of our minds that Christmas and Hanukkah fall around the time of the winter solstice; that Easter and Passover are celebrated in tandem with the arrival of spring; that Sukkot and Diwali mark harvest and summer’s last warmth, and Eid follows the path of the moon. These holidays have origins in gratitude. Gratitude for the sun returning. Gratitude for the harvest that could avert the starvation winter might bring. Thanks for when it did avert it. We could conceivably reframe these holidays as days of thanks for what the natural world gives and reminders that our responsibility for what remains is an ongoing covenant. Next, we might look at what religions do to help us form community and mark life’s important benchmarks: birth, maturity, marriage, and death. What if we were to come to celebrate these benchmarks for what they are biologically? Birth, that ecstatic co-joining of atoms and molecules resulting in sentience might prompt a ritual of truthfully and factually recounting how inanimate becomes animate. Instead of (or in addition to) bar/bat mitzvahs and confirmations, would it be too much to expect our children to go beyond the average daily 20 minutes most American children spend outdoors, and commit to memory the names and descriptions of local plants and animals, or learn the considerations involved in correctly planting a tree? The covenant of marriage might be an opportunity to remind young couples to consider the burden children place upon the planet and to make vows of sustainable patterns of behavior going forward. Death, finally, might be recognized for what it is—a returning of atoms and molecules to the cycle. In the cycle of life, the coming apart is as miraculous a process as the joining. We _still_ don’t really know how nothing became something and formed a universe in which random pulses of energy and matter coalesced into beings writing op eds. In short, there’s plenty of mystery to go around. Lastly, we might just need a book. The Jewish Torah wraps around the year nicely from one Simchat Torah to the next, when we complete the annual reading of the story and start over again all in the same service, creating the feeling of a hermetic year. What if a book like that existed for the Earth? What if it were replete with hymns to this world of the living? What if it contained the stories of the prophets of natural earth knowledge—Darwin and Carson, Galileo and Humboldt? What if we came to mark those discoveries as the gradual opening of consciousness to the laws of nature. What if our Bible of the Natural World reenforced that a multiplicity of processes and phenomena still remain to be discovered? What if we used that book not to scold our children into following commandments but rather to light a path forward that encouraged discovery and reverence, and gratitude for the relationships that are this planetary spaceship’s life-support? Are we proposing a whole new religion? We’re not quite sure. Maybe an old one. The core of all religious feeling is the sense that we are part of something much larger in space and deeper in time than ourselves. The world is certainly that. At any rate we do know that spiritual inquiry, just like scientific inquiry, is not static. Likewise a whole new continent of scientific knowledge has been revealed to us since America’s first and second religious Great Awakenings. It seems perfectly reasonable and spiritual to us that in a New Great Awakening this new knowledge-continent be incorporated into a progressive wisdom of life, death, and the universe. In short, we must make nature central to our belief system with Earth Day or any number of earth-focused ceremonial days serving as regular reminders of what we owe our home planet. It’s symptomatic that many people seek nature in parks or on a dreamt-of photo safari. In a world of commodification, we presume nature must be a commodity, accessible by transaction. We’re accustomed to thinking that, just as cornflakes can be found in the cereal aisle, nature is stocked in places like Yellowstone. But nature isn’t just a place. And it shouldn’t be relegated to one box on the same calendar where “_pick up dry cleaning”_ gets more ink. We’ve got to convey to everyone that the planet whose rotation and revolution _creates_ all 365 days is worthy of a recognition that spans all 365\. Recognition of the planet was born in protest. Going forward it must be about reverence, about respect for the living world that makes human life, too, possible. Celebrating the whole world as a living miracle really should be more fun—and more win-win—than even the most-watched football game. ## Transcript I've always been important but it's more important than ever. We're putting the stability and health of the entire Earth system. At-risk day is a reminder that we not have to become what I called stewards of Guardian of the stability of the entire planet. In the climate Science World Johan. Rockstrom is known as a bit of a rock star. He's on the 2023 time 100 list, he has a viral tedtalk, he stars in the Netflix documentary and when people talk about the Practical steps needed to slow climate change, they talk about his work, he's best known as one of the scientist who developed something called the planetary boundaries framework. It's sometimes called the PBS and it's a way for everyone from scientists to politicians, to Business Leaders to evaluate 9 system that regulate Earth as a livable planet, each system, or PB has a boundary that humans can't afford to cross if we want to keep living on Earth. In the latest assessment. Six of the nine boundaries are outside of the safe space D6, our climate by diversity freshwater. Nitrogen phosphorus air, pollutants and chemical overloading depressing news report about climate change from the United Nations, which showed that the planet is warming at a rate that pretty much guarantees things like catastrophic drought, flooding, and species Extinction. So what should we focus on right now? Large Transformations. We need to urgently accomplished to come back with an amount as well, plan the future. I wouldn't plan to boundary is the energy transition soap to phase out, fossil fuels oil, coal and gas, cutting emissions by half every decade of a Nazi World economy by 2050, and the food system transition, it is about feeding Humanity without expanding into the remaining 60%. Land areas that are still intact nature and to produce food, and why is that do not destroy water, continue building carbon and do not, pollute are an old environment around it. Even in the face of these formidable challenges Rostrum is still hopeful. He points to Green shoot signs of Hope like the fact that renewable energy is increasing exponentially. We're seeing you know on average something like 10% of global electricity coming from solar and wind. If we continue on the pace we are today we would have over half 50% of the real Christie coming from wind and solar. Just buy 20, 30, second place, he sees green shoots is in changing ways of food production. Practices that have been around for decades with car to Coffee nature as much as possible to let routing systems and carbon and soil. Biology, be much more than a healthy State. We can Sequester carbon but also have more water holding capacity better routing depth, more resilient crops combine that with eating more healthy food, having diets that are more diverse. Can only give us a better healthy life but also contribute significantly to A Healthy Planet and we manage the planet. The simple answer is yes. We've done it before. In the late 1970s early 1980s, when were destroying the stratospheric, ozone layer with a big ozone hole caused by chemicals that we used for air conditioners on an ant spray and then different shampoo, products, science, identify the hole in the ozone. Layer policy responded with the Montreal protocol of 1987 and industries that stuff. An Innovative and delivered solution that were scalable. That could take us off those Planet damaging chemicals. We can't today conclude that the ozone hole is closing in and we've been able to protect life on Earth. As we know it, we can do the same for climate understands that word, we is complicated. The fact that is powered by fossil fuel energy. Systems is not something that any individual can solve on his or her own, but we can all vote with with outfeed. Keep the dialogue alive engage in in the passwords towards us. share those stories with your friends because if everyone has a buzz, if create a momentum, which is, I think what the world really needs right now, Rocks from teachers for a living. He works with young people, so he knows how worried and angry they are about the state of the planet. In fact, he's been a mentor of sorts to Greta thunberg, a relationship that began as she was found in Friday's for future, my fellow colleagues. Over the years, we've been kind of wondering, where are they use? Because it is in a way unacceptable, what, what we're doing to planet Earth? And I, we are at risk of handing, over a planet to the Next Generation Which is less and less livable before the game. And then all her fellow Fighters and future. Use roles in the 2018 took off in the first Global demonstration to try to Future was held in Berlin who spent the day together as much as we can as supporting use woman. They have such a cute message, listen to science and act accordingly. What? Right? Do we have to hand over less livable world to our children than the planet where we were born on? Waiting for jumpy ride, more droughts and floods, heatwaves challenges, melting ice or we can at least they're all from the most disastrous and unmanageable outcomes. The window for that is still open and we have the solutions. 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