Facts About Earth Day - strangefacts

• Annually, April 22 is a day set aside to honor the Earth. But every day is Earth Day, and some of the things that will happen 365 times in a year are listed below

• In 1969, Nelson, considered one of the leaders of the modern environmental movement, developed the idea for Earth Day after being inspired by the anti-Vietnam War "teach-ins" that were taking place on college campuses around the United States

• According to Nelson, he envisioned a large-scale, grassroots environmental demonstration "to shake up the political establishment and force this issue onto the national agenda."

• Nelson announced the Earth Day concept at a conference in Seattle in the fall of 1969 and invited the entire nation to get involved

• A highlight of the United Nations' Earth Day celebration in New York City is the ringing of the Peace Bell, a gift from Japan, at the exact moment of the vernal equinox

• Earth Day Networks estimates that 500 million people from 4,500 organizations in 180 countries will participate in Earth Day events during the month of April

• Earth Day is big with schools. On many school calendars, it is the third most activity-inspiring holiday, after Christmas and Halloween

• Companies have even gotten into Earth Day. Last year, office supply store Staples introduced office paper made entirely without new trees

• As part of the celebration, some communities make Earth Day a "Car-Free Day"

• Earth will travel 1.6 million miles in its annual journey around the Sun, the 4.6-billionth such round-trip. It will rotate about its axis exactly once
• The Sun will travel 13.5 million miles around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy

• The Sun will fuse 51.8 billion tons of hydrogen into 51.5 billion tons of helium. (Lest you worry, it will have the capacity to do this for another 5 billion years or so.) The other 0.3 billion tons will be released as energy (Einstein's E = mc2). The energy poured forth in all directions each day is 10 trillion trillion kilowatt-hours. The fraction of this energy that bathes the Earth powers nearly everything that lives there

• The fraction of the sun's energy intercepted by the Earth at the top of its atmosphere is 6000 trillion kilowatt-hours, about 600,000 times the quantity Americans consume in a day

• The population of the world will grow by 211,000 people.3 A new Akron, Ohio will be added every day

• 40,000 acres of land, an area about the size of Boise, Idaho will be converted to desert

• 200 million tons of topsoil will be lost through erosion from croplands

• 50,000 acres of forest will be eliminated

• Between 20 and 500 species will disappear from the planet forever.We know so little about the family of life to which we belong that we cannot quantify the damage we are inflicting upon it. We do know that extinctions are occurring 100 to 1,000 times faster than the normal background rate

• People will consume more than 3 billion gallons of oil

• Burning the oil and other fossil fuels will release 70 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, slowly but surely nudging the planet's temperature upward

• 3 million tons of iron ore, 575 thousand tons of tin, 330 thousand tons of bauxite (for aluminum), and 34 thousand tons of copper will be ripped from the Earth

• 800 million people will go to bed hungry and awake too weak to lead productive lives

• 18,000 children will die from chronic hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases

• The world will spend $3 billion on military expenditures, half by one country

• $2 billion will be invested in research and development.15 This will result in the publication of 1,900 science and engineering articles16 and granting of 150 patents

• 1.3 billion children will be educated in pre-primary, primary, and secondary schools

• 97 billion e-mail messages will be sent, more than 40 billion of which will be spam