Join hosts Seth Larson and Hayley Lawton in this special Earth Day episode of Nature Breaking. Discover how simple actions can make a big impact on our planet.

TRANSCRIPT:

Seth Larson: Welcome to Nature Breaking a World Wildlife Fund podcast focused on the news and trends affecting our natural world and the people and species who call it home. I’m Seth Larson, and today I’ll be joined once again by Hayley Lawton for another edition of our Headlines and Trendlines series where we just quickly touch on a few topics that are front of mind in the conservation world right now.

For today’s conversation, we’ll be talking about Earth Day or more properly Earth Month. Earth Day was created in 1970 to raise awareness about the importance of conserving nature. It’s celebrated each year on April 22nd, typically through educational efforts or volunteer opportunities. I bet most of us planted a tree as part of a school project for Earth Day when we were kids, right?

And more recently environmentalists have taken to celebrating Earth Month throughout the whole month of April. As part of that, WWF is asking people this year to “Give an Hour for Earth” during Earth Month. In other words, find an hour in your life to do something positive for our planet.

That could be anything from planting a pollinator garden or organizing a nature cleanup in your community to taking public transportation or creating environmentally themed art. For today’s episode, Hayley and I each chose one activity to take part in ourselves, and we’ll talk about how it went. We’ll also share some ideas about how you can get involved and Give an Hour for Earth before the month is out.

WWF has set a goal of reaching 125,000 hours banked by April 30th, and we need everyone’s help to get there. With that, here’s my co-host, Hayley Lawton.

Hayley, welcome back to Nature Breaking and welcome to the new podcast studio.

Hayley Lawton: Yes, this is so amazing. I love it, it feels very homey.

Seth Larson: Yeah, it’s like home. And I think more importantly than the studio itself, it’s just nice to be in the same room with you for once cause all the

Hayley Lawton: I know.

Seth Larson: We’ve done have been, remote, virtual over a computer. So super cool to be with you in the same room together today at WWF headquarters and excited to record this conversation together. And to get us started, I wanted to just ask about your relationship with Earth Day, and if you have any fond memories of participating in Earth Day activities as a kid.

Hayley Lawton: So, I have two things. I remember in fourth grade we would plant lima beans. I think we did that on a Friday and not by the following Monday, but a few days afterwards, we saw the sprouts come out, so that was really fun. And we had our own containers, and we put the soil on there and we’d water it. But then also my grandfather was a big gardener, and so we would plant all sorts of fruits and vegetables. That was really nice.

Seth Larson: That’s great. Did he have a home garden that he sorts of replanted every year and you got to help him with?

Hayley Lawton: Mm-hmm.

Seth Larson: So, did you have any favorite crops to harvest from your grandfather’s garden?

Hayley Lawton: Yes, I did. I had two, I had tomatoes and a watermelon.

Seth Larson: Ah, those are awesome.

Hayley Lawton: And whenever they were in season, they just tasted the best.

Seth Larson: Yeah, and so much better than whatever you’re going to get from the grocery store, right? Straight from the ground.

Hayley Lawton: Exactly. What about you, Seth? Do you remember anything specifically from Earth Day as a kid?

Seth Larson: Yeah, so I definitely have a vague memory of planting a tree in the yard outside of our elementary school. That must have been in like third or fourth grade, give or take. I don’t know what that tree looks like now. I hope it’s big and tall and beautiful. I’ll have to stop by my old elementary school sometime when I’m back in Rhode Island. I also remember when I was a little bit older in junior high, my science teacher took our class on a walk around the school and we were in a pretty rural area, so once you got past the parking lot, it was a lot of trees and sort of wooded areas and there was a little pond.

And so, I think we went to sort of see what kind of creatures might be living there for Earth Day. And those are two things I specifically remember from my school years. I definitely didn’t really gain a good appreciation of Earth Day and how important the environment is until I got a little bit older. I moved to DC, spent a lot of time in an urban area with lots of streets and sidewalks and there, that’s great too, for different reasons, but I think I much more deeply appreciate what the value of nature is now and why Earth Day is so important.

Hayley Lawton: Yeah, I’ll have to agree with you there. I think probably within the last five to ten years is when I really started appreciating Earth Day.

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Hayley Lawton: Because we would participate as children, but we understand it more now.

Seth Larson: Yeah, exactly. So, as I said in my intro, WWF is leveraging this moment around Earth Day and Earth Month to do this thing called Give an Hour for Earth and that’s what we’re really here to talk about today. We’ve got a webpage with lots of different ideas for how people can get involved in giving an hour for Earth and making a difference this month. And you and I each decided to pick something from the list, and to get involved we and to do one of those activities. So, we’re here to talk about what we did and how it went. And I wanted to ask you first, what activity did you do to Give an Hour to Earth?

Hayley Lawton: So, for my hour on Earth, I have been jogging and walking outside. This year I have taken my fitness journey a little bit more seriously, and I like running outside instead of running inside on a treadmill more. One because I’m scared that I may fall and two, I like just looking at the scenery and listening to sounds nature around me.

Seth Larson: And you’re doing this in, oh, you, you spend your time sort of split between Maryland and Houston these days, right? So, talk to me about the places you’re running and getting that exercise in. What kinds of surroundings are you in?

Hayley Lawton: So, whenever I’m back home, I’ll run in my neighborhood. There’s a trail around, so that’s really nice to go to. And there’s a small lake around there and then whenever I’m in Maryland, I’ll run also around the neighborhood, but also, it’s like a shopping center but with a big lake. And so that’s really nice to run around.

Seth Larson: Yeah. Has there been a day in the last few months where you’ve been doing this and you really felt like a deeper connection with nature? Was there may be like a rainy day where the rain stopped and the birds were coming out or, anything like that? we’re coming out winter still pretty recently, so nature around, around these parts is pretty quiet in the colder months. Back in Texas I’m sure that’s not the case, but…

Hayley Lawton: Yeah. I think this weekend, actually on Saturday, the day started off a little cold, but then it warmed up. It was like maybe 78 degrees. So, I think that’s been my favorite day this year so far. Running, running in the cold, not my favorite.

Seth Larson: It’s tough. Yeah, you really got to be committed.

Hayley Lawton: You do. You do.

Seth Larson: I started running 10 years ago for fitness and during the pan I used to run a lot on a treadmill. During the pandemic, I really was running outside and that first winter, I bought myself all the winter running gear and really tried to get through it. But once it gets below, like 35 degrees, 32 degrees for sure. I’m like, I don’t know.

Hayley Lawton: Yeah…

Seth Larson: I don’t know.

Hayley Lawton: Stay inside for that one. Seth, what did you do for your hour?

Seth Larson: So, I went through the whole list of activities that was on the WWF website, and I picked out creating a “use it up” shelf in my pantry to help avoid food waste. This is honestly something I needed to do anyways; it gave me a great excuse to clean out my pantry and just get it reorganized because we cook a lot at home.

If I don’t know if your pantry is like this, I’m sure it’s true for a lot of people. You pull stuff out, you throw stuff back in you, you get it organized at one point, but over the months and years, things get rearranged and it’s just a mess and you don’t know what’s in there. And inevitably one of the things that happens to all of us is you forget about a can of beans or a box of pasta or can of cream of mushroom soup or whatever that gets shoved to the back and you forget about it. And three years go by, and you look at it and you realize, oh, the expiration date was a year and a half ago and I probably shouldn’t use this at this point. I followed the instructions for the activity from the WWF website, and I basically, I cleaned out my whole pantry, pulled everything out, rearranged everything in a way that was a little more easy to access and easy to figure out where things were that I needed.

But I also took one shelf in particular, and I’ll throw a picture up for the folks watching the video. You can see I picked out one shelf, I put up some painter’s tape to just mark half the shelf off, and I created a section on one shelf with all the items I found that I really want to make sure I use up soon.

So, it’s like a box of half empty pasta. I think there were, there was a jar of, like a dip that we needed to use pretty soon. The expiration was coming up in a couple months. So basically, all that stuff that I found that needs to be used sooner than later, more so than some of the other stuff in our pantry. It’s on that shelf, it’s labeled, use it and hopefully my wife and I, when we look at what we’re going to make for dinner, we’ll see that and think about, oh, what can we do with that today so that it doesn’t go to waste.

Hayley Lawton: Yeah, that’s a really smart idea. I need to start doing that. A lot of time, food can go to waste very fast, and you won’t even know it.

Seth Larson: Yeah, exactly. And food waste is such a big issue for the environment because the majority of land conversion, which is when you change like clear a forest or clear a grassland for any purpose. The biggest reason for that is agriculture. So, we are producing all this food in the world. We don’t want any of it to go to waste because producing that food requires a lot of land conversion and land usage and water resources and greenhouse gas emissions that go along with shipping food from one place to another. There’s a lot of environmental impacts from food production, so the more we don’t waste, the better it is. So, before we close out today, I just want to emphasize that giving an hour of your time, it probably doesn’t seem like a lot, what’s an hour? But, when we all pull together, it can really make a big difference. I checked the stats from WWF’s Give an Hour campaign last year. I think this is the second or third year we’ve done this.

So our stats from last year, we had over 90,000 people just in the United States who gave over a hundred thousand hours of their time total to give back to the planet, and it makes a huge difference when we can all pull together and have that kind of collective action. That all actually adds up to 11.4 years of combined action, which is a whole lot for just a month.

Hayley Lawton: Yes, that’s, a lot.

Seth Larson: And it was easier to get involved than I think I even expected it to be. It was really a pleasure to do this over the weekend for myself, and I think it’s probably the same for you doing your runs outside. I’d love Hayley, can you just walk our listeners through some of the specific ideas we’ve got on our website for how they can get involved? I thought there were some really creative options there.

Hayley Lawton: Yes. So right now, there are more than 50 different actions listed on our website, related to food, fitness, entertainment, being outdoors. And some of those examples could be listening to music outside, meditating in nature, or even tuning into our Nature Breaking podcast.

Seth Larson: Please do.

Hayley Lawton: Yes. And one thing to our listeners. Although there is a lot going on in the world right now, and you may feel powerless, you may feel that there isn’t a lot you can do right now, but just by giving one hour, you’re truly doing a lot for the planet and the environment, and that’s something to really feel great about.

Seth Larson: Yeah, I definitely agree. And like you said, there’s stuff that’s a little more passive than even what we did. You know? Yeah, you can rearrange your shelves to avoid food waste, or you can really get out into nature, or you can do a community, trash pickup. But just getting out into nature and listening to music that’s going to improve and increase your appreciation for the beauty of the natural world and just put it front and center in your life. And that’s going to have ripple effects for how you might treat nature in the future. And I think it’s great for folks to even do something as simple as that.

Hayley Lawton: There are just so many simple actions that you can do.

Seth Larson: Yeah. All right, Hayley, well we can wrap it there for today. I think this was a short and sweet one, but I appreciate you being here in person. This is so cool to be talking in the same room. This is a little more personable I think, when we’re here together. Thanks for talking through this and I hope folks will get out there and take some action.

Hayley Lawton: Yes. Thank you, Seth.

Seth Larson: Okay, that’s a wrap for today’s episode. Hayley and I really enjoyed taking part in the Give an Hour for Earth Activities, and I hope you’ll follow our lead in looking into getting involved yourself. Nature, of course, needs our help all year round, but Earth Day and Earth Month give us a moment to really jumpstart those global efforts and make a big impact for the places and species that make our world so special. So please find an hour in the coming days and be sure to log your contribution in WWF’s Hour Bank. It’s a great way to help us build a more sustainable future. Thanks for listening.