Earth Day is a chance to celebrate the environment, teach children, visit special places

Around the country Monday people will be celebrating Earth Day. Some will discuss such topics as teaching children to be environmentally-friendly; others will travel around the country to visit seven beautiful tourist destinations that benefited from the environmental movement.

Food Tank, an organization founded to find ways to better feed the world, has compiled a list of things anyone can do, including planning a vacation to a farm, where they can learn about farm living while helping around the farm in exchange for free food or lodging. Other ways to help are to eat more colorful foods, buy food with less packaging, choose seasonal produce, invest in perennial crops, reclaim abandoned spaces in the community, build local and global food communities, cook in batches and freeze foods, and create do-it-yourself food projects. The Food Tank release is here.

Paula Antolini for the Catersville Patch, a daily newspaper in a town of 20,000 north of Atlanta, writes that every day is Earth Day and it's important for parents to teach children about the environment and making the world a better place. "Love begins in the home and so does the love for our earth," she writes. "If you teach your children to respect the earth on every level, they will continue to realize the global impact of environmentalism when they become adults. This is important for the sustainability of life as we know it." She suggests a series of earth-friendly activities to do with your children, including planting a tree or garden, picking up roadside trash, visiting parks, or joining a group that supports Earth Day's issues. (Read more)

While some people are looking at ways to improve their own lives and the lives of others, Jennifer Weeks of Slate takes a look at seven places open to the public that were saved by the environmental movement.

They include Dinosaur National Monument (National Park Service photo) in Colorado and Utah; Storm King Mountain, New York; the San Francisco Bay area; Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge in Florida; the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Texas; Horicorn Marsh in Wisconsin; and the C&O Canal in Maryland and Washington, D.C. (Read more)