I have my good friend Alba to thank for reminding me, via her stunning blog photography, that last Saturday was Earth Day. Click here to visit her blog and see what I mean!

OK, so I’m late, blame thirty years of running railways on that habit!

Earth Day is an annual event celebrated on 22nd April. Worldwide, people come together to demonstrate support for environmental protection. It was first celebrated in 1970 and today Earth Day events in more than 193 countries are coordinated globally by the Earth Day Network.

In 1969 at a UNESCO Conference in San Francisco, peace activist John McConnell proposed a day to honor the Earth and the concept of peace, to first be celebrated on March 21, 1970, the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere. This day of equinox was later sanctioned in a proclamation written by McConnell and signed by Secretary General U Thant at the United Nations. A month later a separate Earth Day was founded by United States Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in first held on April 22, 1970. Nelson was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom award in recognition of his work. While the 22nd April Earth Day was focused on the United States, by 1990 it had spread to an international event involving 141 nations.

UN Secretary-General U Thant supported McConnell’s global initiative to celebrate this annual event; and on February 26, 1971, he signed a proclamation to that effect, saying:

“May there be only peaceful and cheerful Earth Days to come for our beautiful Spaceship Earth as it continues to spin and circle in frigid space with its warm and fragile cargo of animate life.”

A beautiful sunset at Dookes H.Q. in Cornwall on Earth Day 2017.

On Earth Day 2016, Paris Agreement on Climate Change was signed by the United States, China, and some 120 other countries. This signing satisfied a key requirement for the entry into law of the historic draft climate protection treaty adopted by consensus of the 195 nations present at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris.

By Earth Day 2017, the new President of The United States had turned his back on the treaty. It appears to me that short-term profit and political appeasement are seemingly more important to him than the future existence of our Planet as a viable place to support life.

Wake up and get real people.

We only have one planet, isn’t it time that we started looking after it a bit more?

“We’re killing everything that’s alive
And anyone who tries to deny it
Wears a tie
And gets paid to lie.” Joe Walsh

Catch you soon.

Dookes

“Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone,
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” Joni Mitchell