The year was 1969, at a conference of UNESCO in San Francisco, a man who loved peace; John McConnell proposed an idea to honor the Earth and spread peace everywhere. He wrote a proclamation about this at the United Nations. Earlier Gaylord Nelson set forth an idea to hold a nationwide environmental teach-in on April 22, 1970, and he named the event “EARTH DAY”. On that day, over 20 million people gathered on the streets and marched, and made a history of the largest single-day congregation. The theme of the first earth day was “We only have one earth, so we need to take care of her”.

However, it took several decades to introduce this beautiful way to celebrate mother nature to the world. Whichever the year it may be, the central idea of earth day is to save earth from the pathetic situations created by us, HUMANS. We are treating her as ‘it’. We are using her love indiscriminatingly. We are cutting woods, killing biodiversity, bringing fossil fuels to the border of exhaustibility, etc. Indirectly, we are killing our own house and ourselves. Actually, the Earth doesn’t belong to us, we belong to her. We are here for not so long but the earth will remain after us. So this should not be continued, we should take a step toward change, to change the thinking that nature is a free gift from those who made this world, to change our way of life, to change how we see our earth, and a step towards humanity. As we have only one earth, we need to save and take care of her diligently.

We don’t have to do much for this, we just have to tell the people, especially youth that our mother is dying because of us. To save her we should plant trees, minimize the extra use of fossil fuels, and should adapt the alternative resources of energy that don’t harm our environment, avoiding the use of plastic and conserving biodiversity. For it we may follow the 5 R’s i.e. Reduce, refuse, re-use, re-cycle & re-create/ re-generate. A society is defined not only by what it creates but by what it REFUSES to destroy; because we may have plan B for everything but no Planet B at all.