World Environment Day 2009
Each year on June 5, the United Nations commemorates World Environment Day to inspire “worldwide awareness of the environment and enhances political attention and action.” It was first established in 1972 to “mark the opening of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment.” This year’s theme is “Your Planet Needs You-UNite to Combat Climate Change.” In honor of the 36th annual World Environment Day, the GEG project has unearthed an article recognizing the first World Environment Day that was published in UNEP’s Environment in 1973.
UNEP’s Executive Director at the time, Maurice F. Strong, stated, “what gives us hope for the future is that, in looking back on the Stockholm Conference today, we can clearly see that the ferment it stimulated throughout the world continues unabated, that people and governments are responding to problems that have become complex and interrelated – that perhaps, above all, Stockholm was most important for the demonstration it provided that unity of purpose…can, indeed, be a powerful, creative, and unifying force in the affairs of nations.” Read the article here.
Dear Supporters of Environmental Health and Long-term Human Wellbeing,
Thanks for being there, for your humanity, for your fidelity to science, and for all the great work you are doing.
It appears the human community cannot keep growing in the unbridled ways we are now because the gigantic current scale and rapid expansion of distinctly human overpopulation, overconsumption and overproduction activities in the wondrous, finite world we are blessed to inhabit could become unsustainable soon. What worries me most is that many people in the human family do not yet even see what we have before us as a formidable predicament, let alone its forbidding and growing magnitude. From my humble vantage point, many too many pathologically arrogant and greedy leaders {aka, self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe} who do see the huge global challenges {climate destabilization is one of them} that could soon be confronted by the family of humanity have chosen not to speak of them, but to remain electively mute and in denial. Come what may for our children and coming generations.
Although I am an ageing old worry-wart whose sight is failing and faculties are diminishing, it is necessary now for me to fulfill a “duty to warn†by reporting loudly, clearly and often that I see the potential for a colossal, human-induced ecological wreckage looming on the horizon. Hopefully, I am mistaken.
Perhaps the necessary changes such as you are advocating are in the offing.
Godspeed,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
Steve, thank for your thoughtful post. You might also be interested in joining us on Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Global-Environmental-Governance-Project/101493064262