Celebrate Earth Day 2009

Celebrate Earth Day 2009

Earth Day is a great day to celebrate our planet, reflect on new ways to protect it - and widen your planetary perspective as well.

To mark the occasion, you can download the latest goodies from the Hubble Space Telescope, send out personalized postcards of our home planet and catch one of the season's best sky shows.

It turns out that the 40th annual observance of Earth Day on April 22 is just one reason to celebrate: Wednesday also marks the peak of the spring season's best-known meteor shower, the Lyrids. Then, on Friday, Hubble officially turns 19 years old - and that's why so many treats from outer space are being made available this week.

People across the world have been celebrating Earth Day since 1969, when plastic factory worker John McConnell, proposed the idea. Now, 175 countries - over one billion people - are thinking green thoughts each April 22.

In 1970, angered by an oil spill, Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WI) asked Congress to make Earth Day official.

Today, the organizers of Earth Day, Earth Day Network, have launched a new campaign to create a “Green Generation,” asking people to create a billion acts of grees, be it recycling, planting a tree, changing out lightbulbs, or any action taken to better the earth.

As President Obama marks Earth Day today by visiting a converted Maytag plant in Iowa to tout his clean energy agenda, his Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis sought to spread the word in an op-ed piece published in a half-dozen regional newspapers.

"This focus on jump-starting the creation of an American clean energy sector will be the foundation of the president’s energy policy," they wrote. "With the depletion of the world’s oil reserves and the growing disruption of our climate, the development of clean, renewable sources of energy is the growth industry of the 21st century.

"As part of this comprehensive policy, we must crack down on the corporations that pollute the water we drink and the air we breathe," they added. "Cracking down on these polluters in a real way will mean that we can finally tackle global warming and its potentially catastrophic effects – because ultimately, our approach to energy policy and combating the effects of global warming are two sides of the same coin."