Arbor Day, 2025
Earth Day (April 22) and Arbor Day (April 25) are coming up!
Rather than mash the two together, celebrate each with distinct and impactful action.
This Arbor Day Great Idea comes from climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe.
In her Talking Climate blog, Hayhoe writes:
‘April 25 is Arbor Day, reminding us to celebrate those amazing organisms, trees! I often talk about how much good trees do in cities, from filtering pollution to reducing flooding to providing habitat for biodiversity to keeping us cool during heat waves.’
The highlights a Quebec town that has incentivized trees by imposing a $200 tax on any property that does not cantain at least one ‘”leafy, deciduous tree” in their front yard’.
Hayhoe urges us to ‘think about where you could plant a tree‘ and reminds us that we don’t need to own property to act. She offers the UK organization Trees for Streets as inspiration for sponsoring a tree on a street or in a park near you.
And she suggests Ecosia (which has planted 228,000,000 trees so far!) as a search engine that helps folx find tree sponsoring opportunities in your area.
This is a great opportunity to nurture a culture of creation care in your congregation: do something big on Earth Day (April 22) (see our Chysalis Toolkit for some ideas), invite folx to keep up the momentum on April 23-24, and offer another big event on Arbor Day with tree planting or tree sponsorship – or ideally, both: local, able-bodied, in-person participants can plant trees while home-bound and further flung folx can sponsor a regional tree planting event.
Honor both forms of participation in worship!!
Read all of Hayhoe’s post here.
This Easter Season, focus on climate care every day. We’ll continue to post throughout the Season of Easter, in the meantime, here are some other recent Creation Care-based Great Ideas:
