According to my loosely followed schedule today I am due to post a “philosophical” thought or two on this blog. But where to start? Given the unexpected death of yet another celebrity musician/artist yesterday, with the untimely demise of Prince, I could perhaps ramble on about how we are losing so many celebrities this year, but I already did that a few months ago (which perhaps proves a point?!). Instead, I will witter on for a short while about Earth Day, for that is today’s designation.

According to the Earth Day Network the concept of Earth Day emerged from a growing awareness of humanity’s impact on the world through Rachel Carson’s seminal work, “Silent Spring,” in conjunction with the hippy movement that channeled a more introspective viewpoint on the world. This was a fairly slow grass-roots (pardon the pun) movement which became much more active following a particularly bad oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California in 1969 that fueled (I promise that’s the last pun) Sen. Gaylord Nelson to found an environmental movement in 1970, that is still going strong.

I will admit, that I am not generally a great fan of these “(Inter)national days” that seem to be thrust on us from all sides almost every day, and have been largely denigrated by crap like “national chocolate covered cashews day”, “national get to know your customers day” (both yesterday) or “national jellybean day” (today) and “national hanging out day” (tomorrow). Yes, really! However, I do think that Earth Day is special.

Although we should always be cognizant of our environment, and the impact we make on it; whether it be the human environment, natural environment and, yes, even the office environment; how often do we really do this? Personally, I do make the effort to turn off lights (sometimes), re-use and recycle (when I remember), walk instead of drive (when I can be bothered), but I still waste a heck of a lot of resources in my daily life. In fact, more than many people on this spherical rock even start out their day with.

So, perhaps having one day set aside to actually focus on something as important as the planet upon which we live is not a bad thing. Today I will try my fallible best to do something, however small,  “for Mother Nature” and I hope you will too.

By way of celebrating the day I also offer up the Flag of Earth, created by Illinois farmer, James Cadle, in the wake of the moon landing and unveiled the same year that Earth Day was started. It was designed to represent us all as passengers aboard the earth as a spaceship.

What a fitting way to consider our relationship with our home planet!

~Richard