The celebration of World Environment Day started during the height of the Cold War. In a fragmented world, thousands of environmental activists envisioned the struggle for "Only One Earth"; to save the ecology of the planet we call home. The organisation Green Crusaders, founded on one such World Environment Day in the year 1995, took up a similar cause, if not a broader one. Since then, it has been trying to align the environmental movement with other progressive social movements and thereby create socio-ecologically aware spaces; the only way to consolidate its progress. Since then, the celebration of this day serves the dual purpose of reorienting our struggle according to the vision of the world environmental struggle and at the same time reiterating our commitment to the improvement of our immediate localities, namely in West Bengal. In this context, World Environment Day 2021 was significant.

The chosen theme was 'Reimagine. Recreate. Restore.' It is based on the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. It is a 10-year plan to prevent further environmental degradation. Because the pandemic has exposed new vulnerabilities of the world's population. As a result, Green Crusaders decided to 'reimagine' our celebration in a way to avoid spreading the Covid virus. Each of our members created their own celebratory space in their home or their localities. They planted a sapling, picked up plastic or considered other small steps towards 'restoration'. Apart from Kolkata and the Sundarban, this year we were privileged to get SBW Berlin on board our celebration, and a beautiful fig tree was planted in their premises in Berlin, Germany. To sum it up, we took little steps and held hands with our friends afar to 'recreate' a cleaner, greener future."