Every meaningful gathering benefits from gentle guidance—someone to call the group together, set the tone, and help navigate the journey from ordinary time into a space of reflection and back again.  This role of celebration Leader is not about authority or expertise, but about service: creating a container within which your family and friends can encounter these powerful texts and ideas together.  Think of yourself less as a teacher and more as a facilitator, helping to orchestrate an experience that allows everyone present to engage with America’s founding documents and ongoing story.

The concept of liturgical leadership has deep roots across human cultures.  From the ancient symposium to the Passover seder, from Quaker meetings to town halls, communities have long recognized that structured gatherings with designated facilitators help create “liminal space”—a threshold moment set apart from everyday life where transformation and deeper understanding become possible.  By taking on this role, you’re not imposing artificial formality but rather tapping into a fundamental human practice: marking significant moments through deliberate, communal action.

If this feels awkward or pretentious at first, you’re not alone.  Many Americans are unaccustomed to bringing ceremonial structure to secular holidays beyond saying grace at Thanksgiving.  You might worry about seeming preachy or overly formal, especially with teenagers rolling their eyes or relatives who “just want to eat already.”

But consider this: we readily accept structure in other contexts—wedding toasts, birthday songs, even the seventh-inning stretch. What we’re proposing here is simply extending that same intentionality to holidays that celebrate our shared civic life.  Start small if needed—perhaps just reading a single paragraph of the Declaration before your Fourth of July barbecue—and build from there.  The simple act of pausing together, even briefly, to acknowledge why we’ve gathered can transform a meal into a memory and a holiday into a tradition.

The Leader will gather the people together, saying:

Dear Friends, [Please stand.] We are gathered here to celebrate Earth Day by

[enjoying a song by legendary musician Marvin Gaye which celebrates environmentalism and the beauty of unspoiled nature]

[or a poem by Pulitzer prizewinner poet Mary Oliver which connects our human experience to the beauty of nature.]

Please turn to [page xxx of your reader/on the printout on the table/by Googling xxx]. Let us go clockwise around [the table, the circle] starting with [xxx/the youngest/the guest], taking turns each person reading one sentence.

After the reading, the Leader may ask the group one or more of the following questions:

The Leader may conclude the celebration by saying:

Thank you for joining together to celebrate Earth Day. Let’s continue to reflect on the words we’ve heard, take them into our hearts and minds, and use them to become better friends, better coworkers and students, and better citizens and members of our nation.

Discussion Questions for Earth Day:

• Consider all the pleasures you drew from nature in the past year.  Share one experience that stands out.  Describe for us what features of the environment—what plants, what animals, what features of the land or the sky or the water—made this experience special.
• Share one new thing you learned about nature this year.
• What aspect of our natural heritage as Americans have you felt particularly proud of or attached to lately?  What has been its history through the generations?
• What environmental changes have you observed in our neighborhood, our state, or our country over the years?  How do different members of our community or country experience these changes differently?”
• Should environmental goals ever be sacrificed to promote economic development and job growth?
• Share an example of good environmental stewardship you’ve seen—for instance, from a property owner, farmer, rancher, business owner, or sportsperson.  What motivated their actions?
• What responsibility do we have as a family or a community, given who we are as individuals and who we are together as a group, towards protecting the environment and working towards a sustainable future for the planet?
• Are there actionable steps we might commit to this coming year to protect our environment and to work towards a more sustainable lifestyle?

Readings:

• A Primer of Forestry, Gifford Pinchot (1903, 1905)
• Silent Spring, Rachel Carson (1962)
• A Land Remembered, Patrick D. Smith (1984)
• Changes in Latitudes, Will Hobbs (2004)
• Life as We Knew It, Susan Beth Pfeffer (2008)
• Pinhook, Janisse Ray (2005)
• The Green Crusade, Charles T. Rubin (1998)
• The Population Bomb, Paul R. Ehrlich (1968)
• The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet, Heidi Cullen (2010)
• The World Without Us, Alan Weisman (2007)
• The Windward Road, Archie Carr (1957)
• State of Fear, Michael Crichton (2004)
• Zodiac, Neal Stephenson (1988)
• The Clean Tech Revolution: The Next Big Growth and Investment Opportunity, Ron Pernick & Clint Wilder (2007)
• Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation, Tammy Horn (2006)

Songs:

• Big Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell (1970)
• Roll on, Columbia, Roll On, Woody Guthrie (1941)
• Don’t Go Near the Water, Johnny Cash (1974)
• Nothing But Flowers, The Talking Heads (1988)
• Traffic Jam, James Taylor (1977)
• Earth Song, Michael Jackson (1989)
• Monkey Gone to Heaven, The Pixies (1997)

Poems:

• When White Hawks Come, dg nanouk okpik
• The Humble-Bee, Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Birches, Robert Frost
• Summer Shower, Emily Dickinson
• Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009) (edited by Camille T. Dungy)

Film:

• Avator, James Cameron (2009)
• Mia and the Migoo, Jacques-Remy Girerd (2008)
• The Waste Land, Deborah Warner (1996)
• Let’s Pollute, Geefwee Boedoe (2009)
• Saving Pelican 895, Taylor Brodsky (2011)
• Into the Cold: A Journey of the Soul, Sebastian Copeland (2010)
• Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest, Bill Kroyer (1992)
• Armageddon, Michael Bay (1998)
• Deep Impact, Mimi Leder (1998)
• Erin Brockovich, Steven Soderbergh (2000)
• The Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich (2004)
• March of the Penguins, Luc Jacquet (2005)
• Into the Wild, Sean Penn (2007)
• Wall-E, Andrew Stanton (2008)
• Earth, Alastair Fothergill & Mark Linfield (2009)
• Oceans, Jacques Cluzaud & Jacques Perrin (2010)

For children:

• Earth Day: Keeping Our Planet Clean, Elaine Landau (2002)
• The Lorax, Dr. Seuss (1971)
• Planet Earth, Kathleen Reilly (2008)
• It’s Earth Day!, Mercer Mayer (2008)
• Earth Day, Trudi Strain Trueit (2006)

Share Your Earth Day Traditions

A community space for celebrating how Americans honor this day

Every family and community celebrates Earth Day in their own unique way. We invite you to share your traditions, photos, videos, recipes, and reflections with fellow Americans. Your contribution helps build a richer understanding of how we come together as a nation to mark this important day.