22nd April 2021:  51st Earth Day - International Mother Earth Day

Every year the world collectively celebrates this day - 22nd April, as the Earth Day, which the United Nations calls it as the “International Mother Earth Day”.  Each Earth Day is assigned a different theme and this year’s theme is “Restore Our Earth.”

In its inimitable style, the Google Doodle highlights ‘how everyone can plant the seed to a brighter future—one sapling at a time’, to help restore our Earth. In the unending cosmos in which our planet earth is an infinitesimally small dot, yet, it is perhaps the only place in the universe, which harbours life in all its diverse and beautiful forms that inspire wonder. Our Mother Earth and its environment - a nature’s miracle, works very hard to sustain us and this mandates that we play our constructive part to sustain a fine balance that our planet  has to play in providing for the needs of the people as against our unending greed, which is majorly impacting our very survival. A time comes when even the Mother Earth has to take a call for how long she can sustain the unending greeds of human beings. Today’s video Doodle shows how we can collectively help restore our earth by planting a variety of trees within our natural habitats. This is one of the many ways we can help our Earth and play our constructive part to keep our Earth healthy for future generations. 

We are also passing through the worst of times when the whole world is plagued by the Covid pandemic and we in India are passing through the deadly second phase of this pandemic. While continuing to be a responsible citizen in contributing to the efforts of the highly stressed, yet more determined, health workers to help us all tide over this pandemic situation, let us all pledge that we will individually be fully and completely responsible in following all the mandated Covid appropriate behaviour and so also to motivate and encourage everyone to find one small act each of us can do to combat the Covid pandemic and so also to help our Earth. This one small step of our individual commitment is definitely bound to take a firm root, which can blossom as a collective mass movement, which will ensure that Covid becomes a thing of the past. This being a Earth Day, we must also commit ourselves to caring for nature, plants, and our environment, which are integral to our own health and that individual responsibility lies with each of us. Each of us collectively can help Earth blossoms into a more beautiful place for all of us to be proud of. 

This year's theme -  Restore Our Earth, takes me back by few years when we celebrated the World Environment day at our centre with tens of hundreds of children taking part in a series of events and programmes which we organised at our centre. The start attraction for the children and the media of course was our chief guest for the day  Mr. Shyam Sunder Paliwal, social campaigner and ex-sarpanch of Piplantri. The Piplantri village in the Rajsamand district of Rajasthan, India, has been a proud advocate and ambassador of eco-feminism. The villagers of Piplantri plant 111 trees every time a girl child is born. The community ensures these trees survive and grow as do the girls. This extraordinary social movement with an even more extraordinary benefit for the planet earth, was initiated by Shri. Shyam Sunder Paliwal ji. He was kind enough to accept our invitation to be with us and to lead a movement of massive plantation in our campus which was graciously supported by many stake holders including the Rotary Clubs. 

One of the best ways to ‘Restore our Earth’ is to plant trees and we planted a very large number of trees on that day and we are so proud that most of them have survived and are so very healthily growing taller and taller. Plantation of trees is among the most effective strategies for climate change mitigation. A recent study in Science has shown that ‘there is room for an extra 0.9 billion hectares of canopy cover, which could store 205 gigatonnes of carbon in areas that would naturally support woodlands and forests’. This highlights global tree restoration as one of the most effective carbon drawdown solutions to date. The study has shown results, which highlight the ‘opportunity of climate change mitigation through global tree restoration and also the urgent need for action’.

So let us love our trees, which capture carbon that we majorly emit, they cool overheated places, benefit agriculture, support pollinators, reduce the risk of disease transmission, and boost local economies. Let us pledge to ‘Restore our Earth’.

 Last year, on the occasion of the Golden Jubilee of Earth Day, I had written a blog on the significance and history of the Earth Day. For those who may be interested, here is a link to that blog. 

https://khened.blogspot.com/2020/04/22nd-april-2020-golden-jubilee-of-world.html