Earth Day is held on April 22 with this year’s being the 55th anniversary of the first in 1970. It began during a time of great public protest in this country due to the Vietnam War, the Nixon Presidency, and increasing fears of pollution and climate change.
Earth Day offers us a time to stop and think of our impacts on the planet as a species and as an individual. Everything we do has some effect on the planet and leads to some consumption of its resources. The key is to not over-consume as to have something left for our successors in the future to enjoy. While it’s hard to feel you can make a difference and even harder to actually change your habits, it is important at the very least to think about it and be aware of the fragility of our beautiful home.
This year, we are again confronted with the time for thought and discussion. Ultimately, it comes down to “is this planet worth saving?” The obvious answer is “yes!” So then, how will we preserve it?
In 1994, the astrophysicist, author, and TV presenter Carl Sagan wrote the “Pale Blue Dot,” a book inspired by and discussing the intense feelings of looking at Earth through the “eyes” of the Voyager I probe about 4,000,000,000 miles away. The picture shows Earth as less than a pixel. A small, seemingly unremarkable blue-ish pinprick. In this book lies possibly Sagan’s most profound statement:
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. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
A happy 55th Earth Day to you. To channel the energy of those tree-hugging hippies we have to thank for this day, remember to always thank your trees.
By Sam Bishop