Earth Day was founded to force environmental protection onto the political agenda. The inaugural Earth Day on April 22 in 1970 saw more than 20 million Americans rallying for environmental causes. And Earth Day is as relevant today as it's ever been.
1.This year's Earth Day is focused on ending plastic pollution – a timely topic, considering the giant floating mass of plastic in the Pacific Ocean that's three times the size of France.
2.A study in Nature this week revealed that 30 percent of the Great Barrier Reef's corals were killed in the “catastrophic” coral bleaching episode in 2016.
3.Earth Day is a good time to remember the so-called "overview effect" experienced by astronauts. Recognise that we live on a beautiful, fragile ball of life, protected by a paper-thin atmosphere, with our fate in our own hands. And pause. And be thankful. And try to do good.
Here's a bunch of reasons we need to fix the Earth...
4."Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives." – Carl Sagan
5."Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."
― Henry David Thoreau
6."It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small." ― Neil Armstrong
7."I believe in God, only I spell it Nature." – Frank Lloyd Wright
8.“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
9."The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness." ― John Muir
10."Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans." – Jacques Cousteau
11."Believe me, this planet has put up with much worse than us. It’s been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, solar flares, sun-spots, magnetic storms, pole reversals, planetary floods, worldwide fires, tidal waves, wind and water erosion, cosmic rays, ice ages, and hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets, asteroids, and meteors. And people think a few plastic bags and aluminum cans are going to make a difference?" – George Carlin
12."Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money." – Cree Proverb
13."Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed." – Gandhi
14."To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour." – William Blake
15."When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world." – John Muir.
16."Even with all our technology and the inventions that make modern life so much easier than it once was, it takes just one big natural disaster to wipe all that away and remind us that, here on Earth, we're still at the mercy of nature." – Neil deGrasse Tyson
17."Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts."
― Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder.
18."Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart." – Jim Irwin, Apollo 15
