Earth Day is the one day each year where people come together to celebrate the Earth and all that it has to offer.

“Invest in our planet. What will you do?” is the theme for Earth Day 2022. The theme was decided by earthday.org, the global organizer for Earth Day events. This theme was created to call for change among people and our environment.

Despite the uplifting motto, many people don’t know what to do when it comes to our planet.

The first Earth Day was held in April 1970 before the Environmental Protection Agency,  Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act existed. Despite the lack of these organizations, people still had concern for our environment, but it seems that we need to be concerned now more than ever.

Earth Day itself is a campaign run by several organizations around the world that work on initiatives such as global cleanup efforts, sustainable fashion, climate education, and conservation efforts. Despite the prevalence of this organization and others like it, global climate change continues to persist.

Climate change is becoming more prominent as time goes on. Weather patterns are continuing to break records worldwide, but in a detrimental way.

Many people think of climate change as “global warming,” but climate change is far more than that. Although we are seeing rising temperatures during normally warmer months, we are also seeing more extreme winters in areas that normally get little to no snow or winter weather patterns.

One example of this is the winter storm that hit Texas in February 2021. This storm caused considerable damage, including power loss, and even death, for citizens that had never seen patterns like what occurred during that weather event. 

Additionally, we are facing drastic weather conditions in Kentucky.  The EF4 tornado that hit our state in December 2021 broke records for being the longest-running tornado in history. Aside from the record-breaking tornado, more than 50 other tornadoes hit our state and many others over the course of the night.

Unfortunately, we are not safe from the impact of climate change in our community of Murray. The city of Mayfield is less than 25 miles from our town, and we could have been the unfortunate victims of the underlying impact of climate change.

Climate scientists work to study the impacts of climate change and how to “reverse” it. According to the United Nations website, we are reaching a point of no return. Reversing it may no longer be possible, but we could at least learn to live with it or manage it in new ways.

At The News, we believe many citizens and scientists alike think the threat is not imminent and is not going to cause issues right now. Unfortunately, the threat of climate change has many impacts that aren’t being seen, but are being felt.

One issue is the presence of flooding in major cities. Flooding can lead to disease spread in many ecosystems and major loss of crucial land for farming and other infrastructures. Additionally, climate change is leading to a decline in health among our population because of lack of food availability and resources in poverty-stricken areas.

Another impact, of the exact opposite nature of flooding, is drought. Drought contributes to a major loss in food sources and often leads to lack of clean water.

Droughts impact the ecosystems surrounding human life as well. Many animals will lose access to food sources and habitat land since humans will begin taking those over.

Although humans continue to have a massive impact on climate change, we can take steps to work toward a positive future.

One way to positively impact this is to consume less meat. Beef production alone requires 145,000 gallons of water per ton, and pork production requires around 121,000 gallons of water per ton. These are just some of the meats produced that require more water than some people will ever have access to.

As citizens, we can also push for cleaner energy. Corporations like ExxonMobil seem to have a global impact on production, but this global impact can also be felt in a negative way. Oil spills and explosions from Exxon and other oil companies can be detrimental to our environment and ecosystems.

We have to work toward a goal of knowing how to live with the effects and improve in newer ways.

A focus on our carbon footprints will be the a large impactor.  Switching to sustainable products will aid this dilemma.

Most importantly, companies willing to focus on their environmental impact rather than the cost of necessary changes are companies that should be supported.

At the point we are at, we have to consider the idea that we may not be able to reverse climate change in time, and research needs to be done about how to live with drastically changed climate.

We might not be able to fight the changes, but we can have the ability to control how we respond to the changes.