Earth Day is an annual day on which events are held worldwide to increase awareness and appreciation of the Earth‘s natural environment. Earth Day is now coordinated globally by the Earth Day Network,[1] and is celebrated in more than 175 countries every year.[2] In 2009, the United Nations designated April 22 International Mother Earth Day.[3] Earth Day is planned for April 22 in all years at least through 2015.[4]
References
- ^ “Earth Day Network”. Earthday.net. http://www.earthday.net/. Retrieved 2011-04-22.
- ^ [1][dead link]
- ^ “General Assembly Proclaims 22 April ‘International Mother Earth Day’ Adopting By Consensus Bolivia-Led Resolution”. United Nations. 2009-04-22. http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2009/ga10823.doc.htm. Retrieved 2011-04-22.
- ^ “When is Earth Day?”. Apples4theteacher.com. http://www.apples4theteacher.com/holidays/earth-day/when-is-earth-day.html. Retrieved 2012-04-22.
This planet is not terra firma.
It is a delicate flower and it must be cared for.
It’s lonely.
It’s small.
It’s isolated, and there is no resupply.
And we are mistreating it.
It is a delicate flower and it must be cared for.
It’s lonely.
It’s small.
It’s isolated, and there is no resupply.
And we are mistreating it.
– Scott Carpenter, astronaut
Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee.
– Biblical proverb
It is only when we are aware of the earth and of the earth as poetry that we truly live.
– Henry Beston, 1935, Herbs and the Earth
Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places.
– Henry Beston
I conjure you, my brethren, to remain faithful to earth, and do not believe those who speak unto you of superterrestrial hopes! Poisoners they are, whether they know it or not.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Remain true to the earth.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
I thought how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes, barrens, wilds. It still dwarfs, terrifies, crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens, orchards and fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.
– Wallace Stevens, Letters, p. 73
The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit — not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Earth teach me to forget myself
as melted snow forgets its life.
Earth teach me resignation
as the leaves which die in the fall.
Earth teach me courage
as the tree which stands all alone.
Earth teach me regeneration
as the seed which rises in the spring.
as melted snow forgets its life.
Earth teach me resignation
as the leaves which die in the fall.
Earth teach me courage
as the tree which stands all alone.
Earth teach me regeneration
as the seed which rises in the spring.
– William Alexander, A Father’s Book, 1997
Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in Nature — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks. The solid earth!
– Henry David Thoreau
Go where he will, the wise man is at home,
His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.
His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.
– Ralph W. Emerson
The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
– Hannah Arendt
It was not until we saw the picture of the earth, from the moon, that we realized how small and how helpless this planet is — something that we must hold in our arms and care for.
– Margaret Mead
As we begin to comprehend that the earth itself is a kind of manned spaceship hurtling through the infinity of space — it will seem increasingly absurd that we have not better organized the life of the human family.
– Hubert H. Humphrey
Smile O voluptuous coolbreathed earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset!
Earth of the mountains misty-top!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!
Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!
Far-swooping elbowed earth!
Rich apple-blossomed earth!
Smile, for your lover comes!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset!
Earth of the mountains misty-top!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!
Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!
Far-swooping elbowed earth!
Rich apple-blossomed earth!
Smile, for your lover comes!
– Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855, I Celebrate Myself, Line 439
God owns heaven, but He craves the earth.
– Anne Sexton
Gardening is not a rational act. What matters is the immersion of the hands in the earth, that ancient ceremony of which the Pope kissing the tarmac is merely a pallid vestigial remnant.
– Margaret Attwood
I am interested in the way that we look at a given landscape and take possession of it in our blood and brain. None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation is unimaginable. If we are to realize and maintain our humanity, we must come to a moral comprehension of earth and air as it is perceived in the long turn of seasons and of years.
– N. Scott Momaday
To see the earth as we now see it, small and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night — brothers who see now they are truly brothers.
– Archibald MacLeish
The word humility (also human) is derived from the Latin humus, meaning “the soil”. Perhaps this is not simply because it entails stooping and returning to earthly origins, but also because, as we are rooted in this earth of everyday life, we find in it all the vitality and fertility unnoticed by people who merely tramp on across the surface, drawn by distant landscapes.
– Piero Ferrucci, Inevitable Grace
God does not die on that day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reasoning. … When the sense of the earth unites with the sense of one’s body, one becomes earth of the earth, a plant among plants, an animal born from the soil and fertilizing it. In this union, the body is confirmed in its pantheism.
– Dag Hammarskjold
I pledge devotion to the earth, our one and only home, and to the life this earth sustains; one nation, one spirit indivisible, with freedom and fulfillment for all.
– Bruce Hagen, New Pledge of Allegiance, 1983
Potted Plant Society 