Earth Day 2020 is being widely and rightly celebrated around the world as I type. This is good, this is great! But its not nearly enough. One could argue that ‘Earth Day‘ is redundant, for the simple reason that every day should be Earth Day. In the same way that every day should be Mother’s Day or Children’s Day.
If what we aim to achieve with Earth Day is for a lot of people to remember the fragility of the Earth’s ecosystems and their wild inhabitants, reflect on fact that humanity is but a guest of Mother Earth, not her master, and feel inspired by the transcendental beauty of Nature, then Earth Day really should be every day.
However, us humans live in an age of movement. Not least the movement of information, at a rate unprecedented in all of our short history. So we can be excused when we say that feeling awe and concern for the natural world competes with many other important things in our daily attention span. Several hundred tweets have no doubt been posted on all sorts of subjects since I wrote the first word of this blog, about 4 minutes ago.
Thing is though, the planet is a mess, its all our fault, and we have A LOT of work to do to set it right.
In this sense, Earth Day serves an important purpose. It provides a large number of humans, even if its only the environmentally aware humans, with an opportunity for much-needed focus on planet Earth, and planet Earth only, for 24 hours. A lot can be done in that time.
To celebrate Earth Day 2020 in my own way, I’d like to share an author insight from my educational comic book about climate change, The Adventures of Polo the Bear. I think Earth Day is a good moment to think about climate solutions, especially those that we can individually work on, right from home.
Click the link below to join Polo the Bear on an apartment block rooftop in Cairo, Egypt, and meet Leila and her grandma. What do you think of their climate solution?