Happy Earth Day! Five Reasons to be Grateful Today

Of course Sustainable Spring has to say HAPPY EARTH DAY!

I hope you’ll get out and enjoy the day and give, at the very least, a moment of appreciation to the mind bogglingly complex biosphere that our human family is a part of.

Whether it be during a service work project, a moment at work, or a walk in the woods, I hope you’ll be outside for at least a moment, regardless of whether it’s raining or sunny.

During your time outside, I hope you’ll take a deep breath and think about how we are each on a very short ride on a very incredible planet, in a very lucky time of general abundance – most of us have plenty of clean air, water and healthy food options. This is not the case for everyone on the planet, and it will not be the case for even more in the future, but for today we can be grateful for what we do have as a human family.

Five things Earth has that we can be grateful for today:

1. Around 400 billion trees (from NPR)
2. About 326 million trillion gallons of water, with thousands of trillions of accessible fresh water (from How Stuff Works)
3. About 8.7 million species on the planet (ones with cells, or eukaryotes, from Discovery.com in 2011)
4. Only about 7.2 billion people on the planet (this is expected to go up to 9.7 billion in 2050. From PewResearch.org)
5. About 7000 national parks in the world (in 2011, according to the International Union of Conservation of Nature)

Things are changing fast, but today we can be grateful for the bounty we have, as well as the phenomenal forces that came together on this planet, in this universe, to allow you to read these words.

If you’re looking for some fun ways to get out and participate in Earth Day events on the Kitsap Peninsula, check out the calendar at Sustainable Bainbridge. If you don’t live on the Kitsap Peninsula, just about every community has Earth Day activities, so a quick internet search should turn up something.

Now get out, breathe some fresh air and say thank you!

xo,

Sustainable Spring