Earth Day Is Every Day at the Garden

Posted in Programs and Events on April 22 2009, by Plant Talk

Daniel Avery is Sustainability and Climate Change Program Manager at The New York Botanical Garden.

As an institution devoted to the celebration of Earth’s plant life—to the beauty and diversity and ecological importance of plants, to the role that plants play in making all life on Earth possible, to the million ways plants contribute to human health and happiness—The New York Botanical Garden is dedicated to the conservation of plants and the systems on which they rely. So nowhere is the cliché “every day is Earth Day” truer than here at the Garden. Our core institutional missions of education, horticulture, and science are, through the plant world, directly tied to a functioning and protected environment. This is why we strive to improve our own environmental performance (to be more sustainable, if you will) and to teach others how to do so as well.

For those who visit the Garden to enjoy, say, the Holiday Train Show or the explosion of floral magnificence known as spring or some other such event, this broader perspective can be easy to miss. For that matter, even those of us who work at the Garden can slip easily enough into our individual niches and lose sight of the Garden’s broader environmental role—that, for example, our 250 acres of gardens, forest, wetlands, and green spaces nestled into a spectacularly urban setting provide many important environmental services we don’t always think about. Or that our scientists are contributing to conservation around the world. Or that our educators are spreading the word far and wide, including to the next generation of leaders, about the importance of understanding and protecting the world in which we live.

Earth Day should remind us of all this, of the ongoing and critical relationship between each of us (as people, as institutions) and our environment. It should remind us of what we do right, where we can improve, and, not least of all, why we care. There is no better place than The New York Botanical Garden to come and renew one’s love of Mother Earth on Earth Day. The Garden—indeed, any garden—thrives in that space where the natural world of soil, water, sun, and plants intersects with the human environment. And that, from an environmental and human perspective, is the intersection that matters.

So, here at the Garden we have decided to celebrate Earth Month, to give ourselves a little more time to linger over the relationship we share with the natural world. And we invite you all to join us to hear what we have to say and to share with us your thoughts on this most important of topics.