Did you know that every year people gather to celebrate World Environment Day? And that it has been going on since 1974 when it was first carried out in Spokane in the United States?
But what exactly is World Environment Day? Let’s take a closer look.
World Environment Day Is A United Nations Environment Programme
The idea of a World Environment Day was first proposed and confirmed in 1972 at the UN Conference on the Human Environment.
It took two years for the first World Environment Day event to come to fruition and the host country was the United States and the host city was Spokane, Washington.
The theme of the first event was “Only One Earth” and future events have tried to raise awareness of global warming, how to combat climate change, how to beat air pollution, plastic pollution, and the severe environmental consequences of human behavior on the planet.
It is, perhaps, an event that really helped to formalize the idea of a “green economy”. The United Nations continues to give the event its strong backing too.
In 2008, the United Nations General Assembly declared Michael Jackson’s hit Earth Song to be the theme tune of the day moving forward and it remains the song of World Environment Day today.
World Environment Day Celebrated On June 5th Every Year
World Environment Day is held every year on June 5th. Many different countries have hosted the day but Bangladesh has hosted 10 events making it the world leader in hosting the event.
Mostly, the hosts are chosen with the theme in mind so, for example, China in 2019 had “Beat Air Pollution” as its theme, and Barbados, in 2014, had “not the sea level”.
One of the most touching events was held in Rwanda where they focused on “Many Species. One Planet. One Future.” This was especially moving given Rwanda’s recent dark past and shows that it is possible to bring people together no matter what their differences to make a positive difference for the planet.
Thousands of activities took place worldwide in concert with the Rwanda event and there were beach clean-ups, fundraising gigs, film festivals, etc, in nearly every city on Earth.
In 2021, the nation of Pakistan was proud to host the vitally important theme of “Ecosystem restoration”. Sadly, much of this event was overshadowed by the impact of the coronavirus on our lives but it also marked the start of the decade of ecosystem restoration too and we hope to see huge leaps forward with this concept in the near future.
Mother Nature needs us to pay attention to the ecology around us and work at undoing some of the worst harm that we have wrought.
We Have Only One Earth
Now we have come full circle for World Environment Day and Sweden will hold its event on the Only One Earth principle.
We hope to see that this will push forward the idea that if we continue to harm Gaia – there may be no future for any of us. We really do only have a single Earth to share, the more we damage it, the more we damage ourselves, and eventually, it will be simply too late to put that right.
We have some great ideas of our own for how to protect Mother Earth that everyone can get involved in.
We love World Environment Day and we think it’s an important step in making everyone aware of how tenuous our stay on this planet might be if we don’t start taking better care of it.
So, mark June 5th in your diary and get involved with events near you!