Every year Earth Day is observed religiously with a promise to safeguard the depleting environment and planting more trees to keep the green cover intact. The event held worldwide to celebrate support for protection of the environment has continuously drawn more and more people in each subsequent year. The way urbanisation and concretisation is spreading the just holding of an event having ceremonial values looks hypocritical and everyone knows how far the same can save the environment. In this direction the Jammu and Kashmir Government’s move to plant around 40,000 Chinar saplings across Jammu region during the monsoon season too is quite a hypocritical one which hardly can save the environment. How could this tree help in understanding climate change and its effect in the State is the question one would be trying to find an answer to? Earth Day brings attention to a large number of issues in requirement such as growing pollution in cities and water bodies, debris left over on land, climate change, conservation of the Earth’s ecosystems, energy conservation, soil corruption, corrosion, overpopulation, nuclear issues, the depletion of the ozone layer, the depletion of the Earth’s natural resources, the introduction of wastes and toxicants into the wilderness and the seas, nanotechnology and the deforestation of rain forests. Earth Day was founded by United States Senator Gaylord Nelson on 22nd April, 1970 to focus on issues related to environment. 22nd April was chosen because it did not conflict with any religious holidays, and was on a week where students were free from exams and were more likely to be in class. Each major event has also hosted a high number of increasingly thrilling activities, throughout Earth Day’s forty year history. Today when one sees the changing climate and environment one is unable to understand why is it despite the efforts to save earth for the last over four decades it has not brought the expected results and still life sustains on tenterhooks with calamities looming large whether it is in Udhmapur village cloud burst few years back wiping out whole of a village from the map of the country, Uttarakhand’s cloud burst or the floods in Kashmir, Chennai and Mumbai.
