Time until Earth Day

Earth Day is 22 April, first held in the United States in 1970 after an oil spill off Santa Barbara pushed environmental protection into mainstream politics. It now runs in close to two hundred countries and is coordinated by EARTHDAY.ORG. The date was chosen partly because late April sits between spring break and final exams on American campuses. It is a fixed date rather than a public holiday, so it lands on a different weekday each year.

Schools and employers do most of the actual work in the week around it rather than on the day, which is why teachers and organisers start planning in March. Clean-ups, tree planting and volunteering days need permits, tools and insurance arranged well ahead, and local councils often run one coordinated event rather than many small ones. The date sits near other environmental observances that are easy to confuse with it, including World Environment Day in June. Because 22 April is not a holiday, a weekday edition tends to be marked inside institutions while a weekend one draws larger public turnouts. Corporate campaigns cluster on the day as well, and the distance between an announcement made on 22 April and anything measurable afterwards is the usual criticism levelled at it.

The United Nations calls 22 April International Mother Earth Day, a name adopted after a proposal from Bolivia, and the Paris climate agreement was opened for signature on the date in 2016. Italy gives the day to a multi-day festival in Rome, and Japan holds an Earth Day gathering in Tokyo's Yoyogi Park. What confuses people is that there are two Earth Days: an earlier one proposed by John McConnell is kept at the March equinox, and the United Nations still rings a peace bell for it, roughly a month before the April date this page counts to.

The next one falls on Thursday, 22 April 2027, and this page counts down to the midnight that starts it in whatever time zone your browser reports.

The first Earth Day was organised by Senator Gaylord Nelson after the Santa Barbara oil spill of January 1969, with Denis Hayes running the national coordination and university campuses doing most of the work. An estimated twenty million Americans took part. The political effect was immediate: the Environmental Protection Agency was created later the same year, and the Clean Air Act amendments, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act all followed within four years.

The form it took was the teach-in, borrowed from campus anti-war campaigns, which is why schools and universities still carry most of the day. It went international in 1990, when organisers in about a hundred and forty countries ran events on the date and it is credited with pushing kerbside recycling into a great many American cities. The organising has always been done by a private network rather than by any government, which is the main reason the day has no legal status anywhere.