Created by Wisconsin U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson in 1970, Earth Day activists sponsor an annual event on April 22 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. First held on April 22, 1970, it now includes a wide range of events coordinated globally by EARTHDAY.ORG, including 1.0 billion people in more than 193 countries. The official theme for 2023 is: Invest in Our Planet.
Unfortunately, in 2023 some 53 years after the original Earth Day celebration that I celebrated in my senior year of college, the planet staggers forward having jumped from 3.5 billion humans to 8.0 billion humans with an added 4.5 billion more people since 1970, hundreds of millions of cars, boats, planes and motors of all kinds""spewing carbon by the billions of tons into our biosphere 24/7.
Humans were burning 50 million barrels of oil 24/7 in 1970. Today, humans burn 100 million barrels of oil, daily. Have you ever wondered who thought that was a good idea?
"The next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we're used to. Humanity is consuming 175 percent of what the earth can regenerate. Our current way of life is unsustainable." Paul Ehrlich, population expert. Thousands of scientists agree with him.
Remember Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate"? One of his buddies said, "Your future is in plastics!" Today, our current reality of 5.5 trillion pieces of plastic floating on the surface or sunk below the waves of all the oceans of the world""makes anyone sick to their stomach. Additionally, humans toss another 8,000,000 pieces of plastics into the oceans every single day of the year. Millions of avian and marine lives die because they swallow plastics or get caught in drift nets. Essentially, we're killing the oceans. Why haven't the leaders of Earth Day promoted a 50-cent or even $1.00 international deposit-return law for all plastic containers as well as all metal and glass containers? Who thinks we can continue trashing the planet like this?
Special note: within America, only 30 percent of Americans recycle regularly. Seventy percent of Americans toss millions of their cans, bottles, plastics, cars, trucks, tractors, motor homes, cars, trailers, construction materials, and more, into the wilderness. Why haven't we created collection sites for all our heavy metal waste? Who are we fooling on Earth Day?
With all that carbon being dumped into the biosphere, it always falls into our oceans. It's changing the alkaline-acidity PH of our oceans. It's killing our reefs. It's killing the marine life on the reefs. I've scuba dived all over the world since 1963. We humans have brought devastation to our oceans with our 84,000 chemical poisons, our plastics, our carbon footprint, our human waste pumped by the quad-trillions into our oceans. The beaches off Rio de Janeiro are brown with human waste. Signs read: Poison water. I witnessed it.
"We've poured our poisons into the world as though it were a bottomless pit"and we go on gobbling them up. It's hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse, but nobody's really doing anything about it." Daniel Quinn
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