Hi.
You're listening to Cultivate Curiosity, a
podcast.
That inspires the next generation to stay
curious.
Cultivate Curiosity is brought to you by
the Emerald Coast Science Center, a
nonprofit.
Interactive science museum and STEAM
educational facility in Fort Walton Beach,
Florida.
This podcast is perfect for anyone curious
about the world we live in, because.
You never know what we'll talk about
next.
Hi, my name is Harley and I'm
an educator in the community affairs
coordinator here at the Emerald Coast
Science Center.
Hi, I'm Diane, and I'm the director
here.
And hi, I'm Jacie, and I'm the
social media coordinator here at the
Science Center. And for this episode,
we're going to be talking all about
Earth Day. Earth Day is a special
day in the history of science because
it marks the beginning of people all
over the world taking care of our
planet. On April 22 of every year,
we celebrate Earth Day. The first Earth
Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970.
During the 1970s, our country had a
booming economy with factories, cars,
chemical plants, and oil industries. With
all this production going on, it led
to the production of air pollution and
environmental waste on the planet. At this
time, small groups of individuals began to
raise awareness about the effects this
pollution has on our environment and
planet. Calling for action, the first
Earth Day event was organized by Wisconsin
Senator Galore Nelson to celebrate the
importance of protecting the planet. On
this historic day, 20 million Americans
worked together to pick up their towns
to demonstrate their desire for a clean
planet. After this event, the United
States Congress authorized the
Environmental Protection Agency to tackle
environmental issues on our planet to keep
it clean and healthy. To this day,
researchers continue to find new ways to
protect our environment.
So why do we celebrate this? We
celebrate this day because we can give
back to our planet every year. Earth
Day is a constant reminder of how
important our planet is to us and
that we should protect it. With every
celebration each year, we are able to
raise awareness of how important it is
to protect our planet, not only for
us, but also for all the future
generations to come. Earth Day also serves
as a day where people within our
communities can go out and make a
difference. No matter if that difference
is big or if it's small, everything
that we can change will help protect
our planet. Now, we're going to talk
a little bit about climate change because
it's a thing. Earth's climate has changed
a lot in the past 100 years.
In fact, global temperatures have raised
one degrees in Fahrenheit since the 19th
century, and by the year 2050, they
will almost have raised two degrees. This
is due to the increasing release of
greenhouse gases into the air. Climate
change basically refers to the increasing
changes in the measures of climate over
a long period of time. This includes
precipitation, temperature and wind
patterns.
So let's talk about the r's that
are associated with Earth Day. When
thinking about Earth Day, there are many
different ways in our everyday life that
we can be more sustainable and help
reduce the effects of climate change. One
guideline that we can follow is to
be kind to our earth is known
as the R's. Some of you may
already know a couple of them, but
here's a couple more for you guys
to think about refuse where you simply
ask if you need an item or
if you could do without it. Reduce
can you use something less often, drive
less, wash less, wear clothing more often?
And can you plan ahead for events
or activities and research? If there are
ways to host your event with less
waste, planning ahead is key. Reducing is
about minimizing the amount of waste we
produce in our everyday activities. Reuse
here is where you can think about
the longevity of items. Reusing is about
looking for ways to use materials again.
Can you bring a refillable water bottle
instead of using plastic water bottles? Or
how many reusable grocery bags can you
keep in your car? Glass containers,
plastic bottles, and cloth bags are all
reusable materials. Can you use cloth
napkins instead of paper napkins? Refill
there are more opportunities than ever to
refill containers with bulk products
instead of buying items with new
packaging. Lots of us already have a
bathroom hand soap pump that we can
refill. What if you could refill your
shampoo, your conditioner, and your body
wash? Also, it's a great idea to
buy bulk products instead of buying
individual items so we can refill. I've
noticed one thing recently when I've
checked into hotels that they no longer
give out the little tiny bottles of
the shampoo. That what I've been seeing
recently is they'll have larger bottles
that are stuck on the wall in
the shower and then they just refill
those instead of having all of this
plastic waste of these teeny tiny bottles
that you can only get like half
of the shampoo or conditioner out of
anyway. So it's not just you and
your personal life, but we also are
looking for corporations and other
entities and businesses to put these
practices into place as well.
A couple more r's that are a
little bit different than the ones you
probably know. One is repair. Think about
if you can give electronics, appliances,
tools, fixtures, and other things another
life. Have you seen all of the
incredible repair or fix it videos on
YouTube? We definitely have.
We use them a lot.
Another one is rot. Rot, also known
as composting, is the act of turning
food waste and other organics back into
nutrient rich soil. In a dream world,
all used materials stay in a loop
and not in a straight line or
path to the landfill. All that would
ever come out of the system would
be compost. Everything else will just
stay. Nothing is burned in an incinerator
or stored in a landfill because landfills
release greenhouse gases and contribute to
climate change. There's also restore. The
extraction of resources affects the
planet's system. Whether restoring means
creating a field of beef friendly flowers
in your urban community or corporations,
restoring toxic industry grounds, this
takes expertise and resources. Whatever we
directly or indirectly might extract, we
need to be respectful of the boundaries
of the planet and restore whatever we
might have destroyed in the past and
make sure we don't create new sites
that will need restoration in the future.
And just a few more R's are
regift. Really? How many bags, containers,
gift boxes and wrapping paper do we
need? Do you have extra toys, appliances,
tools, art or even plants that you
can pass along to brighten other people's
lives? Recycle. This is probably one
almost everyone knows. This is one of
the last steps. Recycle after you have
tried the other six, but make it
count. Redo recyclers list of acceptable
products and check local resources for
recycling opportunities. And then the last
R is repeat. Finally, yes, start the
process all over again.
The biggest thing to think about is
we can't recycle our way out of
helping the Earth. We need to really
try to think about all of these
other R's that are listed here and
also contacting your representatives and
stuff to let them know that things
need to change, we need to help
protect our planet. And what are some
ways that we can do that?
Yeah, and the recycling part of it.
Be sure, as Jacie mentioned, to check
with your local recycling company what
they do and don't. Because a lot
of times if there's too much of
not the right products in the recycling
bin, then they can't recycle anything.
It's like a certain percent of
contamination. And once they reach that
level of contamination, which could be
things like glass when they're not
recycling glasses, or types of plastics
that aren't approved to be recycled. And
also wash your stuff out before you
put it in your recycle bin, that
would be contamination. You could have a
perfectly good can of in our house,
it's dog food that my husband never
remembers to wash out. And so I
always have to go back into my
recycled bin and clean everything out
before I actually put it in the
outside garbage can. Just one good rinse
and then that way you know that
the products that you're getting into your
recycling bin are recyclable and will make
it through that stream, hopefully. So ways
to celebrate Earth Day there are many
ways that you can celebrate Earth Day
and protect the planet within your own
community. Some of the ways that you
can celebrate this day is picking up
trash at the beach or park, planting
trees, recycling repurposing materials and
so much more.
Even filling your holes at the beach.
If you make a big hole that
I saw it this morning. I saw so
many holes, and all the sea turtles
will just get caught in that once
they hatch. So fill your holes and
one Earth.
Day thing that you can do, this year
we will be participating in the Earth
Day Beach Cleanup with the Destin
Fort Walton Beach. And so that's on
Saturday, April 29, from 8:00 to 10:00,
a.m. Destin Fort Walton Beach and other
organizations will have the Earth Day
cleanup event that's perfect for the whole
family. There will be cleanup contests
with fun prizes, free event t-shirts,
and a free post-cleanup breakfast served
at some of our favorite local restaurants.
The locations are The Boardwalk on
Okaloosa Island, the Crab Trap, James Lee
Park, Surf Hut, Norriego Point, Clement
Taylor Park,
and Henderson Beach State Park.
The breakfast locations are the Crab Trap
on Okaloosa Island, the Crab Trap in
Destin, and the Surf Hut in Miramar
Beach.
And don't forget to bring your own
bucket, mesh bag gloves, and trash bag
wrapper. You can also download the Clean
Soul app to document debris you collect
at the cleanup. And we'll be at
the Crab Shop in Desks and helping
with the cleanup that day so you
can come see us.
Yeah. And we're also going to be
bringing a fun little activity that you
can kind of help participate in. And
we will have some grabbers if anybody
needs to borrow grabbers. And some garden
gloves instead of like latex gloves. If
you want to borrow our garden gloves
to pick up trash because some of
the trash is not so clean. So
kind of to go off of more
Earth Day stuff. We do have a
new exhibit that we're working on. It's
actually funded by the TDC, and it's
going to be a plastic pollution exhibit.
We're doing this to just kind of
let people know that there's lots of
plastic out there in the world and
we need to not litter it. We
need to use less. We're going to
have some cool informational signs out
there for people to read. Going to
be building a plastic arch that you
can walk through. We're going to have
a hands-on effect added to it.
We're going to be creating a biodegradable
timeline to allow guests to see if
they can look at an image of
something, say a cigarette butt, and place
it on the timeline where they think
it would biodegrade. Is it going to
be five days? Is it going to
be 400 years? That'll just be something
people can interact with. We're also going
to have a microplastics portion because
there are also lots of microplastics out
in the beach. You don't see them
because they are micro. They're very
small. They will get into the fish
that people can eat. And then we
are essentially just consuming plastics.
So microplastics are really not a good
thing. The goal, ideally, would be to
collect most of this plastic from these
upcoming cleanups that we're doing. We've
reached out to the TDC to see
about what we can do to collect
all of this trash so that we
can incorporate it into the exhibit. We
may even be creating another little piece
of the exhibit outside. We will see
what happens when that time comes. CBA,
the Choctachy Basin Alliance is also
donating this blue crab display that was
created with stuff from the beach that
they found and one of the people
that worked there just said that it's
just been sitting there. So they wanted
to donate it to us so that
we could incorporate that into our exhibit
as well. So it's going to be
very interesting to see. We're hopefully
going to have that up before summer
starts, but we'll see lots of other
little projects in the works.
Yeah, well, I think that's all for
our Earth Day podcast today. We will
be back in two weeks. Bye.
Thanks for listening to this week's
episode of Cultivate Curiosity.
If you have any questions, feel free
to email us at socialmedia@ecscience.org.
Tune in for our next episode in
two weeks!