Press Release
April 21, 2009

Earth Day is all about grassroots environmental activism -- Loren

Senator Loren Legarda said today that Earth Day celebrations held every April 22 have come a long way in bringing into the world stage environmental issues like global warming, extinction of flora and fauna, and the use of clean energy.

"The first Earth Day celebration in 1970 jumpstarted international grassroots activism on such concerns like oil spills, polluting factories, power plants and toxic dumps, deforestation and the extinction of species, among other issues" said Loren.

"Earth Day 2009 takes an added importance as nations of the world come to grips with the all too-real disastrous effects of climate change that include rising sea levels, the melting of the polar ice caps, floods and droughts, among others."

A laureate of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), Loren said last April 20 in the International Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction and Gender that world leaders have to do more to help preserve the environment and minimize the effects of natural disasters.

The three-day meet that was concluded on April 22, Earth Day, was held in Beijing China. Loren delivered her speech in her capacity as Asia-Pacific Regional Champion for Disaster Risk Reduction and Gender.

"The challenge of the 21st century has never been clearer and more compelling than in the present. We must come to understand that our social vulnerability depends much on the choices we make and the actions we take -- as leaders and decision makers, as planners and builders, and as members of a society and a community. While natural hazards are inherent to our environment and beyond our control, they need not lead to a disaster. They become disastrous only when we are unprepared, when we fail to take action." said Loren.

Loren was chosen by the UN to be its regional disaster reduction champion in the Asia Pacific due to her environmental advocacies as chair and founder of Luntiang Pilipinas and the many landmark environmental laws that she helped pass either as author or sponsor, including the Clean Air Act and the Solid Waste Management Act.

Since its founding in 1998, Loren's Luntiang Pilipinas volunteers from the private and public sectors had already planted over two million trees nationwide.

"The first Earth Day almost four decades ago planted the seed of a global protest movement against environmentally destructive human activities, including wanton mining and deforestation," said Loren.

"But Earth Day did not start big. It had to be nurtured into a self-sustaining movement of the peoples of the world united by a desire to preserve a clean and green Earth for future generations," she stressed.

Loren noted that Earth Day reached a momentous point in 1990 when some 200 million people from 141 countries joined its celebration and paved the way for the 1992 Earth Day Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Earth Day 2000 saw the internet start playing a big role in information dissemination and in linking environmental ecological warriors worldwide, she said.

"Nine years ago, it was no longer enough to protest the use of polluting fossil fuels like oil and coal. Then and now, the focus is for countries to adopt clean energies like solar, wind and hydro power."

The UNEP awardee said in Beijing that "to facilitate proactive action, we need to change our way of thinking and doing - we need a paradigm shift, an overhaul of policies that have become irrelevant and unresponsive to today's complex problems of risk, poverty, gender and climate change."

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