With industries shut down and people locked inside their houses, the environment seems to be reviving itself during the lockdown imposed in the wake of coronavirus. Pollution levels have gown down, skies are more clear and rivers are cleaning themselves. The constant flurry of human activities led to encroachment of spaces reserved for other living beings. With time, we forgot the importance of nature and started taking it for granted. We still do.

World Environment Day 2020 History and Significance

When we complain of scorching heat, we don’t remember the trees that have been chopped. When we complain of air pollution, we don’t remember the hazardous gases and particulate matter that our vehicles emit. To remind us that nature is a blessing to us all, every year on June 5, World Environment Day is celebrated.

World Environment Day is one of the biggest annual events of the United Nations. The event which is celebrated worldwide aims to raise awareness among masses. The day was first celebrated in the year 1974  in Spokane, USA with the theme “Only One Earth”. World Environment Day was first established in 1972 by the United Nations General Assembly on the first day of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment.

As per the United Nations, “The celebration of this day provides us with an opportunity to broaden the basis for an enlightened opinion and responsible conduct by individuals, enterprises, and communities in preserving and enhancing the environment.” 

World Environment Day 2020 Theme

This year World Environment Day celebration will be hosted in Colombia, in partnership with Germany. This year’s theme is biodiversity. Biodiversity simply means that humans can’t live in isolation, we depend on small and big living beings. We all are a part of this ecosystem and together we form a giant network of diverse life forms of Earth.

United Nations in a statement said, “This year, the theme is biodiversity – a concern that is both urgent and existential. Recent events, from bushfires in Brazil, the United States, and Australia to locust infestations across East Africa – and now, a global disease pandemic – demonstrate the interdependence of humans and the webs of life, in which they exist”.

Quotes on Environment

“Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth”. – Henry David Thoreau

 

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has”. – Margaret Mead
 

“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment”. – Ansel Adams
 

“Birds are indicators of the environment. If they are in trouble, we know we’ll soon be in trouble”. – Roger Tory Peterson
 

“Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land”. – Aldo Leopold
 

“What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another” – Mahatma Gandhi
 

“The environment is everything that isn’t me”. – Albert Einstein

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