Are we any closer to saving planet earth, despite increasing environmental awareness? It didn’t seem way on June 5th, when World Environment Day (WED) 2009 was commemorated to promote more environmental awareness. The economic doldrums that the entire world is still experienced seems to have taken center stage, although a number of activities took place on this day, that was founded a more than 35 years ago by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) to make the world more aware of environmental mess that the world’s human population has caused, especially pollution and global warming.
This year’s theme was “Your planet needs you! Unite to combat climate change”. And a number of climate problems were discussed in order to urge the world community to agree to a new deal involving climate change, due to be dealt with in December.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon spoke on the need to do more for helping combat global warming and climate change by doing a number of environmental friendly activities such as planting trees, riding bicycles more, and turning out unnecessary lights to save electricity usage.
Events to commemorate the day were held in various places, including Mexico the host country for this year’s WED; where a number of dignitaries including California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger participated in a conference held in Mexico’s Yucatan Province, located directly south of California.
Despite everything, a number of environmental “heroes” were noted, including:
The current, ongoing UN tree planting campaign was also noted, in which more than 4 billion trees of a planned 7 billion have already been planted around the world during this campaign, scheduled to end in December, 2009.
A number of countries around the world scheduled projects, including Afghanistan, where clean up projects of schools and mosques in the major cities were scheduled.
WED has been commemorated since 1972, and obviously, the world was in much better shape then than it is today. “For one thing, you could walk to North Pole without worrying about falling through a crack or fissure (in the polar ice cap) into the Arctic Ocean” a UN official noted.
And we’re sure that “plastic garbage patch” in the Pacific Ocean was much smaller in 1972 for sure.
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