The Portland Alliance 2014 Earth Day Portal:
http://www.ThePortlandAlliance.org/earthday
Earth Day Celebration is an annual event organized by the Portland Earth Day Coalition, LLC. TheCoalition is a collection of individuals, organizations, businesses and neighborhood associations who host the event. Partnerships are formed, bringing people together to create a mindful Earth Day celebration in a neighborhood each year.
A coalition of organizations and businesses are coming together once again to produce the 2014 Earth Day Celebration. Circus Cascadia will be running the Kids’ Village entertainment, Abstract Earth Project is booking musicians for the main stage, Speaking the Unspeakable is leading the Soapbox Speakers Stage and The City Repair Project is setting up their main stage for music.
Earth Day is mostly planned, designed, organized, built and run by volunteers and on a minimal budget. At this point, a coordinator is paid to organize the event and as we grow, we hope to add more paid positions to our team.
The Earth Day Celebration brings over 4,000 people to a different community in Portland every year for what is probably the country’s largest community-organized, non-TNC (trans-national corporation) sponsored Earth Day Celebration.
Today is Earth Day. A day set aside to remind us to take care of our big blue marble. But nearly halfway through 2014, do we still need a reminder? Or do we need a slap in the face?
Fracking chemicals are destroying groundwater, radiation from Fukushima is infecting the ocean, and greenhouse gases continue depleting the ozone.
There is something in our ocean that is actually named the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Wen Stephenson nails it in his Earth Day article Let This Year's Be The Lastthis morning, “The question is not whether we’re going to 'stop' global warming, or 'solve' the climate crisis; it is whether humanity will act quickly and decisively enough now to save civilization itself—in any form worth saving. Whether any kind of stable, humane and just future—any kind of just society—is still possible.”
But what I find really shocking, on top of everything, is that there are still great numbers of people that don’t believe it is happening. According to a recent AP-GfK poll of Americans, when asked if “the average temperature of the world is rising, mostly because of man-made heat-trapping greenhouse gases," only 33% of respondents indicated that they were either confident or extremely confident in this statement.
And the fossil-fuel industry works very hard to make sure that this number stays low.
