Earth Day, Every Day: change starts with you!

52 years ago today, the first Earth Day was marked in the US as a peaceful call for environmental reform, following a massive oil spill off the coast of California. More than half a century later, this annual day unites millions across the globe in support of the environment, drawing attention to the huge challenges facing our planet.

This year more than ever, Earth Day offers an opportunity for us all to slow down and to reflect upon our relationship with the planet, especially when many of our daily activities and routines have been temporarily affected by the global pandemic here in Shanghai. It is a time when the health of the planet and its people has never been so important. And it is high time to be reminded of what an extraordinarily beautiful world we're fighting to protect, and how we affect it.

Invest In Our Planet

A snapshot of our blue planet taken one day before the Earth Day in 2020, by Japan’s Himawari 8 weather satellite, from a geostationary orbit, about 22,240 miles above the Pacific Ocean.

On the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, a Pace College student in a gas mask “smells” a magnolia blossom in City Hall Park in New York.

A Victoria crowned pigeon is seen in Jurong Bird Park in Singapore on January 21, 2015. The park was unveiling its latest aviary, Wings of Asia, featuring some of the continent’s rarest and most endangered birds.

Snow and desert sand may seem an unusual contrast, but the native chiru are very familiar with the high-altitude conditions of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Photographer Shangzhan Fan captured this herd of males as they made for the relative warmth of the Kumukuli Desert.

A plastic bag floats in the Mediterranean Sea, near divers off the coast of Samandağ, Turkey, on December 6, 2018, during a dive to call attention to plastic pollution affecting wildlife and the environment.

Emirati men walk with their camels across the Liwa desert, 250 kilometers west of Abu Dhabi, during the Liwa Moreeb Dune Festival on January 6, 2017.

A tour boat is seen near a glacier’s terminus in Alaska’s Kenai Fjords National Park on September 6, 2019.

Photographer Georgina Steytler had been on the lookout for birds by a waterhole in Western Australia, but her attention was drawn this industrious duo at the water's edge.

The full moon rises behind burning moorland as a large wildfire sweeps across the moors between Dovestones and Buckton Vale in Stalybridge, Greater Manchester, England, on June 26, 2018.

In this photograph taken on July 8, 2017, an Indian Hindu devotee prays among foam in the polluted Yamuna River in New Delhi.

Boy coping with drought in his farmland, a depiction of climate sustainability being critical for the preservation of future generations.

An endangered black rhino, photographed at a watering hole at night, in Etosha National Park, Namibia, in June of 2017

An iceberg floats in Disko Bay behind houses during unseasonably warm weather in Ilulissat, Greenland, on July 30, 2019.

Invest In Our Planet

From left: Sheila Bailey, Judy Brady, and clinical director Cheyne Flanagan tend to a koala named Paul from Lake Innes Nature Reserve as he recovers from burns at the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital on November 29, 2019, in Port Macquarie, Australia.

A male Grauer’s gorilla, a critically endangered species, rests in the forest of Kahuzi-Biega National Park in northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, on September 30, 2019. Since the summer of 2018, some local communities have started logging in this protected area, threatening gorilla habitat.

Elephants eating plastic from an open garbage dump along the coast of Eastern Sri Lanka, travelling large distances looking for food in order to survive.

Franz Josef Land is a group of 191 islands in the Arctic Ocean that have recently been incorporated into the Russian Arctic National Park. Polar bears depend on the fragile Arctic wilderness, but natural and anthropogenic changes to their habitat has left them vulnerable.

As the first beams of daylight hit Denmark's Dryehaven Park, photographer Pierre Vernay watched a stag emerge from below a huge oak tree and roar out into the wilderness. The rival stag that had strayed too close vanished, clearly getting the message.

In 2020 the sea ice formed earlier than usual and did not fully disappear until late July. Martin watched the bears powerfully swimming away from the last of the ice.

A group of visitors watch and take photos as a young elephant performs underwater at a zoo in Thailand.

Earth Day, Every Day: change starts with you!

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