Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 85

22 March 1915—

Father of Earth Day

When John McConnell saw the first color photos of planet earth taken from outer space on the cover of Life magazine, he was speechless. The beauty of the planet’s blues and greens swathed in white clouds convinced him that the same concern for peace among people that he’d championed his entire adult life needed to be extended to the planet itself. So he pitched an idea to the 1969 National UNESCO Conference: that the United Nations proclaim that a day be set aside each year to celebrate the earth and encourage responsible stewardship of it. He proposed the vernal equinox, the twenty-four-hour period in the spring evenly divided between night and day, as an appropriate date for the celebration. The vernal equinox is a period of equilibrium that McConnell hoped would serve as a symbolic reminder of the importance of harmony between humans and the environment.

The city of San Francisco, host to the UNESCO conference, enthusiastically endorsed the idea, as did U Thant, Secretary-General of the UN, and the first Earth Day was observed in 1970. In the United States, it’s now generally celebrated on 22 April rather than the vernal equinox. But the spirit of harmony with the earth remains the same.

McConnell’s concern for the environment was sparked in 1939, long before ecological sensibilities were on the map. While working in a plastics factory, he grew worried about the threat of pollution posed by nonbiodegradable plastics. World War II and the Cold War that followed it pushed McConnell’s environmentalism to the background. During those years, his primary focus was on doing something to ameliorate world hunger and militaristic buildup. But the 1969 Life cover reawakened his awe for the planet and reminded him that the welfare of “earthlings” was necessarily bound up with the health of the planet itself.

In June 1970, McConnell wrote and published the “Earth Day Proclamation,” a document that outlined the importance and purpose of the annual observation. In it, true to his conviction that human welfare is bound up with planetary welfare, he argued that the same economic and political institutions that create poverty and oppression also harm the environment. He laid out three goals, which he intended Earth Day celebrations to remind people of each year: to “peacefully end the scourge of war”; to “provide an opportunity for the children of the disinherited poor to obtain their rightful inheritance in the Earth”; and to “redirect the energies of industry and society from progress through products to progress through harmony with Earth’s natural systems for improving the quality of life.” McConnell’s inspiration for Earth Day, celebrated internationally each year, has awakened millions of people to the need to cherish and protect both earthlings and the “beautiful Spaceship Earth,” as U Thant put it when the United Nations endorsed Earth Day, that we earthlings call home.