Make like a tree and leave…some space on your calendar for Arbor Day

By Emily Hines

Arbor Day is another Earth Day-type of holiday in the month of April. It isn’t as well known as Earth Day but is just as important. In fact, not many people know it exists, and if they do, they don’t know why we celebrate it when we celebrate Earth Day just a few days before.

Earth Day is a day of celebrating our earth and doing activities such as recycling, choosing to walk rather than drive, plant a garden, or finding another way to protect and revive our earth. Arbor Day encourages Earth Day also, but specifically encourages the planting of trees and taking care of them.

Arbor Day is a nationally- celebrated observance that encourages tree planting and care. J. Sterling Morton founded Arbor Day in 1872. He was a journalist and in his later years became the editor of the state of Nebraska’s first newspaper. He spread agricultural information in his articles and his love for nature. His strong stance in needing more trees on the Earth soon became evident as Morton wrote more articles. He encouraged civic organizations and groups to join him in planned tree plating events. On January 4, 1872, Morton proposed a tree-planting holiday to be called “Arbor Day” to the State Board of Agriculture. The Board thought it was a great idea and it became a national holiday.

As well as Earth Day, Arbor Day may not be very important to some people because they do not feel like the absence of trees on our earth affects them because we can never run out of trees, right? The truth is that they are needed and every tree lost makes a big difference. Freshman Aaron Skursky sees the importance of Arbor Day. “Trees help provide oxygen. More plants means more homes for animals. There’s no sense in growing more trees, though, if they’re just going to cut them down,” Aaron stated.

An Evergreen State College student did a project using NASA satellites to estimate the number of trees per person on Earth. With this student’s estimation being 61 trees per person on this Earth, it may seem like enough for each, but it isn’t. With that in mind and thinking about how many things trees are used for like furniture, home building, or paper your “section” of trees easily disappears. This example gives us a clear view of why protecting our trees and our environment is important. “Arbor Day is very important. You have different civilizations around the world that are deforesting their jungles and so forth; like down in the Amazon. We need to make up for that,” shared band teacher Mr. Spitler

Taking care of our Earth means more than just having views of beautiful trees. They are very important to life on Earth.