Photo Essay: For Community Organization 'Got Green,' Earth Day is Every Day

by Susan Fried

It was a perfect day to celebrate Earth Day on Thursday April 22, and Got Green, an organization that has been fighting for climate justice in its own unique way since its inception in 2008, celebrated by organizing a full day of events. The day included a garden work party with Nurturing Roots, canvassing Beacon Hill and Rainier Beach, holding a virtual event with WA BLOC for 300 Rainier Beach High School Students, and having a community dialogue with Got Green and the Duwamish River Clean-up Coalition.

Dozens of volunteers showed up to the garden work party at Nurturing Roots Farm. Emily Chan, a staff member with Got Green, said that Earth Day was especially significant for the POC community because "Our communities have been hit really hard with environmental injustice, like air pollution and water pollution, and so Earth Day is special in that it is an opportunity for us to to connect with the earth and remember why we are all doing this (working for environmental justice)."

Volunteer E.N. West added, "… our communities … being communities of color, Black and Indigenous communities, have been separated from the land, whether its from our homelands originally, whether it was from slavery, or through forced migration from war and famine and poverty and things of that nature. So now we're on this land and displacement is happening here too, in the South End, so a moment like this when you get to put your hands in the soil and be like, 'this is the land that I'm stewarding,' that's a really powerful thing — and just in general as human beings we have been deeply disconnected from the land that we are on, so this is a moment to literally ground ourselves in what we're fighting for."

Featured image by Susan Fried.