This Saturday, April 22, 2023, many people around the nation will be celebrating Earth Day in honor of the achievements of the environmental movement, raising awareness of the need to protect Earth’s natural resources.

The first Earth Day observation was in 1970 when, according to the Library of Congress, an estimated 20 million nationwide attended the inaugural events. Tens of thousands of sites, including schools and various community centers across the United States, hosted events in honor of this special day.

Senator Gaylord Nelson created Earth Day to force this issue onto the national agenda. By December 1970, Congress authorized the creation of a new federal agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, to tackle environmental issues in the United States.

But why choose April 22 to celebrate Earth Day? General consensus believes that the date was selected in part to maximize the number of students that could be reached on university campuses, as this date fell between colleges’ spring break and final exams.

Environmental challenges are not new to anyone. It was surprising to learn, however, that Colorado suffers from one of the highest air quality problems in the nation. Year after year, our beautiful state fails to meet federal standards for air that’s healthy and safe to breathe.

To say this needs to change is an understatement. There’s so much haze over Rocky Mountain National Park, experts believe the air pollution is harming human health and wildlife and damaging national parks.

Rocky Mountain National Park staff are aiming to maintain high standards of air quality. Daily monitoring shows the park’s air quality is affected by air pollution coming from a variety of human-made sources.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials claim that air pollution in the park reduces visibility, increases ozone levels and nitrogen, disrupts terrestrial ecosystems, and can lead to changes in species diversity.

“Nitrogen is transported by wind combined with moisture in the air and then deposited in the park by rain or snow. Pollutant concentrations may reach a tipping point where they begin causing unnatural ecosystem changes,” says the National Park Service.

Though nitrogen is an important part of the park’s ecosystem, excess amounts of nitrogen deposition trigger eutrophication, a process in which the richness of nutrients in bodies of water, frequently due to runoff from the land, causes a dense growth of plant life and death of animal life from lack of oxygen.

Rocky Mountain National Park alone is home to 156 lakes all utilized by more than sixty species of mammals, nearly 300 bird species, and innumerable species of amphibians, reptiles, fish, and insects.

It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to figure out that’s a large number of creatures living in the park. This does not include humans or the millions of trees that benefit from the Rocky Mountains’ natural resources. All of which are suffering from the park’s poor air quality.

The National Park Service, the State of Colorado, and the Environmental Protection Agency collaborated on a Nitrogen Deposition Reduction Plan (NDRP) to reduce nitrogen deposition to tolerable rates by 2032.

In the meantime, what can you do? Simple things like replacing your home’s air filters regularly, using less energy, and choosing efficient appliances and heating systems can all collaboratively have a positive impact on our air.

Earth Day is now a global celebration with several locations extending it into Earth Week, a full seven days of events focused on green living and confronting the climate crisis. What will you do for Colorado during this upcoming Earth Day?

To learn more about the air quality in Rocky Mountain National Park visit https://www.nps.gov/romo/learn/nature/ airquality.htm. To discover more ways you can help, visit https://www.epa.gov/.