Direct Line is celebrating Earth Day 2024 with three efforts to support the environment:
- Environmental clean-up efforts at seven of our key sites
- Ashburn, VA – Monday, April 22 – Claude Moore Park (Eric Allgaier)
- Fremont, CA – Saturday, April 20, and Monday, April 22 – Coyote Hills Park & Fremont Blvd. (Chris Julien & Jason Teo)
- Boydton, VA – Thursday, April 18 – Washington St. (Noel Corpus)
- Los Lunas, NM – Monday, April 22 – Daniel Fernandez Park (Ruben Moore)
- Forest City, NC – Friday, April 19 – road outside South Gate (Joyce Tallent)
- Gallatin, TN – Monday Friday, April 22 – Bledsoe Creek State Park (Jason Smith)
- Phoenix, AZ – Friday, April 19 (Spencer Manquero)
- Earth Day Photo Contest
As part of Direct Line’s Earth Day efforts, we are planning a return of our successful Earth Day Photo Contest from last year.
Employees can send one photo of a nature/earth scheme to [email protected] with a caption.
Photos must be of sufficient quality so that they can be enlarged.
We have developed a section on our “Safety & Health Documents” shared drive, where these will be posted with titles (without names):
Z:\Shared\Safety & Health Documents\Earth Day Photos
After Earth Day, a team of executives will select the winning photos.
There will be a Grand Prize, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places, and up to two Honorable Mentions (depending on how many entries and the quality of the submittals).
Winners will be announced at our Town Hall and on social media.
Winners will be awarded prizes.
- Educate employees on environmental/sustainability topics
- Developing additional “Environmental Moments” like our current “Safety Moments”
- We are also adding some environmental quizzes.
- We plan to continue to add to these throughout the year.
- Environmental Moments and environmental quizzes are located on the Shared Drive:
Z:\Shared\Safety & Health Documents\Environmental Moments
THE FIRST EARTH DAY
Every year on April 22, Earth Day marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970.
ORIGINS OF EARTH DAY
In the decades leading up to the first Earth Day, Americans were consuming vast amounts of leaded gas through massive and inefficient automobiles. Industry belched out smoke and sludge with little fear of the consequences from either the law or bad press. Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity. Until this point, mainstream America remained largely oblivious to environmental concerns and how a polluted environment threatens human health.
However, the stage was set for change with the publication of Rachel Carson’s New York Times bestseller Silent Spring in 1962. The book represented a watershed moment, selling more than 500,000 copies in 24 countries as it raised public awareness and concern for living organisms, the environment, and the inextricable links between pollution and public health.
Earth Day 1970 would come to provide a voice to this emerging environmental consciousness and put environmental concerns on the front page.
Earth Day inspired 20 million Americans in 1970 — at the time, 10% of the total population of the United States — to take to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate against the impacts of 150 years of industrial development which had left a growing legacy of serious human health impacts. Thousands of colleges and universities organized protests against the deterioration of the environment, and there were massive coast-to-coast rallies in cities, towns, and communities.
1990: EARTH DAY GOES GLOBAL
In the late 1980s, a group of environmental leaders approached Denis Hayes to organize another major campaign once again for the planet. This time, Earth Day went global, mobilizing 200 million people in 141 countries, and lifting environmental issues onto the world stage. Earth Day 1990 gave a huge boost to recycling efforts worldwide and helped pave the way for the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
EARTH DAY TODAY
Today, Earth Day is widely recognized as the largest secular observance in the world, marked by more than a billion people every year as a day of action to change human behavior and create global, national, and local policy changes.
Now, the fight for a clean environment continues with increasing urgency, as the ravages of climate change become more and more apparent every day.
As the awareness of our climate crisis grows, so does civil society mobilization, which is reaching a fever pitch across the globe today. Disillusioned by the low level of ambition following the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015, and frustrated with international environmental lethargy, citizens of the world are rising to demand far greater action for our planet and its people.
Direct Line has developed several Environmental Moments to help bring more awareness to important environmental topics and will continue to add to these.
These Environmental Moments can be found on the Shared Drive:
Z:\Shared\Safety & Health Documents\Environmental Moments
BOTH ON AND OFF THE JOB
YOU ARE AN IMPORTANT PART OF DIRECT LINE
