Thousands of people (estimated at over 10,000) gathered at the SM Mall of Asia (MOA) by the Bay to celebrate Earth Day on April 23, 2016. The Earthday Jam is actually "the most important, longest running, biggest free environmental music event in the history of the world". It has been running for the past 16 years and held in different venues every year.

The Earthday Jam Foundation, Inc. organizes this event in cooperation with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR). The Earthday Network arm in the Philippines also supports this activity, which celebrates international Earth Day through an eight-hour musical marathon is interspersed with interviews about environmental issues. 

The founder of Earthday Jam and President of the Foundation is Ms. Lou Bonnevie, who is a famous rockstar in the Philippines.  She invites other concert artists and environmentalist to perform and speak at the Earthday Jam.  By participating in the event, the guests and performers are able to help in "promoting environmental awareness down to the people who know nothing about global warming and environmental issues."

Like last year, I was invited to be one of the youth speakers at the 2016 Earthday Jam.  One of the questions during the interview portion was on how we are able to spread the word about environmental protection.  My friend, Jekk Paderes got interviewed first and he said that we young people are able to use social media as platform to promote environmental awareness. I then followed up and said that aside from the use of social media, we should also ?walk the talk? and actually do actions that will protect our environment. They don?t necessarily have to be big organized activities, but it can start with little acts like not littering or participating in clean-ups.

One of the speakers was Monsignor Jerry Bitoon of the Catholic Church, who told the crowd that the encyclical of Pope Francis was came about because he saw for himself the effects of Global Warming when he visited Tacloban in the Philippines which was badly hit by Typhoon Haiyan.  The Monsignor challenged the audience to do their part in protecting the environment by starting with making sure the concert grounds would be clean when the activity is finished.