Climate change. Sea level rise. Red tides. Pesticides versus organic farming. Water quality. Air pollution. Plastic pollution. Textile pollution. Bee populations. Landfills. Deforestation. Species extinction. The list goes on.
So many environmental issues. But, what can we do?
How many of these things do you truly understand? How many of them actually have anything to do with you, anyway?
Truthfully, all of these things impact us, whether we know it or not, and whether we see it in our lives or not. We live on planet earth, and it should be important to all of us that our planet is healthy and thriving.
Our team at The Doral Yard knows that it’s really hard to know exactly where to find information and resources related to environmental topics. The internet is oversaturated with information, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed sifting through it all.
That’s exactly why we CELEBRATE Earth Day the way we do at The Yard.
We love our Mother Earth, and we aim to celebrate our awesome planet while offering our community a fun, interactive, interesting way to learn about environmental issues.
We bring together organizations that help you understand the information in a digestible, un-intimidating way, and get you excited and inspired to get involved in your community.
Earth Day, which takes place annually on April 22nd, and is celebrated around the third weekend in April, is a time to talk, ask questions, and get hands-on with activities that are fun, educational, and make a positive impact on our local and global environment.
We sing, we dance, we get dirty with seed planting and composting. We eat farm-to-table foods and drink locally brewed beers, spirits and kombucha.
Earth Day at The Yard is an engaging, exciting day of celebration for all ages to enjoy.
These are a few of the ways we celebrate.
Organizations like VolunteerCleanUp.Org, Miami Waterkeeper, Surfrider, UNICEF, Recycle Across America and many others host informational booths and share what’s happening and you can get involved in our local community.
Experts speak on a moderated panel, discussing ways that we can all make an impact. That could pertain to small, daily actions we take in our own homes, like reducing single use plastic or planting trees around our neighborhood. Or, it could mean becoming an activist at a local or national level.
We learn how seemingly simple things, like composting our food scraps and up-cycling our fabrics, actually play an important role in the environment.
Choosing restaurants that use eco-friendly packaging like that of Lean Orb is something all of us can do to make a difference.
We get hands-on and interactive, even wearing some of our new eco-fashion home after the event!
Colleen Coughlin of The Full Edit teaches kids and adults how to create hip, new accessories using old denim jeans.
We celebrate local food and drink.
We drink local beer from klean kanteen reusable cups. Saltwater Brewing, pictured, is one of our annual Earth Day sponsors, and takes extra measures to keep plastic out of our oceans. The cups are co-branded with our community clean-up partner’s logo, Debris Free Oceans.
We cook together, and learn how our sourcing and cooking choices play a role in the environment. We even make trail mix with Whole Foods Market, storing our mixes in recycled #5 plastics as part of Whole Foods’ “Gimme 5” program.
Consuming a more plant-based diet is definitely a great way to become more environmentally active. Learn more about plant-based cooking with vegan chef demos and samplings.
If vegan food isn’t your cup-of-tea, learn how tip-to-tail cooking, in which the whole animal is honored and fully utilized, might be more up your alley.
Get the kids in the garden for a harvest, then into a hands-on healthy-cooking session.
We sing and dance. We yoga. We connect.
“This land is your land, this land is my land, from California, to the New York Islands,” croons Keith Johns on the stage, singing songs that gets the audience swinging and singing, connecting us to our planet through song.
If you’re lucky, you might even get to dance with some bumble bees.
We learn how to work with nature.
We make herbal remedies. We garden. We compost. We learn how to create natural dyes.
Nature offers us a plethora of amazing materials to work with to help us live our best lives. But we are so far removed from nature, we forget that we are so intertwined and that it can give us what we need to thrive.
We conserve resources.
No matter where you are in the world, the trash you create matters. Plastic waste will outlive you and your grandchildren. Learn what kind of products you can buy to reduce your single-use plastic waste.
We use reusable everything as much as possible around these parts. We go the extra mile to recycle, reduce waste, reuse materials, and choose wisely and with deliberate awareness to our impact.
We rethink the way we do things and the way we think of things.
Organizations like Respect the Fin make us look at things from a fresh perspective, and consider how our preconceived notions are serving us and the planet.
We pick up trash around the neighborhood.
We clean as a community as not only public service, but to remind ourselves to not be trashy!
We need to pick up after ourselves, refrain from littering (that includes cigarette butts), and be conscious that every bit of trash we create doesn’t go away. It goes to landfills, oceans, waterways, and sometimes even gets shipped to other countries for them to deal with it. But it never ever goes away.
We do not inherit the planet from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children.
We celebrate global consciousness at the yard, and we hope that you will join us in this mission.
Come, celebrate this Earth Day with us at The Yard, and learn what you can do in big and small ways to make a positive impact.