Today is eco-awareness time! Yes people, it is once again Earth Day. So who is up to what? Here are some of the stories that have caught our collective eye.
CNN says one billion people will celebrate Earth Day, although it’s not clear where that figure came from.
NASA has a whole Earth Day Page, complete with images of our fair planet (including the photo used right) and features on the space agency’s green work.
American politicians are getting on the bandwagon too. President Obama is visiting a facility in Iowa that manufactures towers for wind power generation (Christian Science Monitor).
And the Boston Globe notes:
As President Obama marks Earth Day today by visiting a converted Maytag plant in Iowa to tout his clean energy agenda, his Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis sought to spread the word in an op-ed piece published in a half-dozen regional newspapers.
“This focus on jump-starting the creation of an American clean energy sector will be the foundation of the president’s energy policy,” they wrote. “With the depletion of the world’s oil reserves and the growing disruption of our climate, the development of clean, renewable sources of energy is the growth industry of the 21st century.
In the LA Times, Laura Huggins, of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, cites Henry David Thoreau when she calls for us to “celebrate the environmental entrepreneurs and the people making decisions on the ground rather than Big Brother from Washington”.
The New York Times rounds up ED photo competitions on its gadget blog.
In Canada, The Gazette says:
Earth Day is now marked in very many countries, which reminds us that the pace of climate change can be slowed only by worldwide efforts. This is the biggest challenge of co-ordination the human race has ever faced; lethargy might be less than in 1970, but the problem is bigger and more pressing.
In the UK Sky news sent a group of frogmen to march through London topromote their business celebrate this joyous day.
If this is all too much for you, Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, writes in The Detroit News that “Earth Day is not really pro-Earth, but anti-human achievement”.
Image top: NASA