How does United States mark Environment Days?
Earth Day
- Local date
- April 22, 2027
Earth Day in the United States is 22 April, as the Environmental Protection Agency's own page states. It is not a federal holiday: 5 U.S.C. §6103 lists eleven legal public holidays — New Year's Day, the Birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., Washington's Birthday, Memorial Day, Juneteenth, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas — and Earth Day is not among them. The sharper measure is chapter 1 of title 36, the permanent list of patriotic and national observances Congress has designated: forty-eight of them, sections 101 through 148, and Earth Day is absent there too. What is present is §104, Carl Garner Federal Lands Cleanup Day (the first Saturday after Labor Day), and §123, National Forest Products Week (the week beginning the third Sunday in October). Earth Day itself began in the spring of 1970, created by Senator Gaylord Nelson; twenty million Americans demonstrated, and in December of that year Congress authorised the creation of the EPA.
What is this topic?
Environment days almost never come with a day off. Across these seven countries there is exactly one exception, and it exists by accident: 4 May in Japan, Midori no Hi, is a statutory public holiday under article 2 of the Act on National Holidays. It began as the Showa Emperor's birthday on 29 April; when the throne passed in 1989 the birthday moved to December and the empty 29 April was renamed Greenery Day so the day off would survive, then shifted again to 4 May in 2007. Everywhere else the environment day is written into a statute, a decree or an assembly resolution — and the same instrument says nobody stops working.
Sources and dates
Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.