World Environment Day (June 5) News

World Environment Day, held on June 5, is the United Nation's annual flagship environmental event to raise conservation awareness, holding events in 100+ nations around the globe. WED was established by the UN General Assembly in 1972 and is organized by the UN Environment Programme.

We hardly ever hear about World Environment Day because we have our own Earth Day in April. (And cheez it's not as though the UN is headquartered here in les etats unis or anything...)

London marks Environment Day by airing issues, laundry, in Trafalgar Square
LONDON (AP) - Environmentalists hung more than 34,000 metres of laundry out to dry in Trafalgar Square on Monday, part of a multi-agency effort on UN World Environment Day to protest British reliance on energy-sapping dryers.

"You're looking at the biggest one-line joke in history," the project's supervisor and British comedian Tim FitzHigham said to the assembled crowd.

The all-day demonstration used 4,920 items of washing and 24,600 clothespins.

Boycott dryers, whooohooo! I've already boycotted my iron (not for any environmental reason, I just don't like irons), why not the dryer too? I am predicting total wrinklage in my future.

Also concerning World Environment Day, I ran across this editorial from the Times of Malta online, lamenting Malta's sad political state of environmental affairs, a lamentation that could have come from this pandologist's own blog (except that it's written much more convincingly and ahem better!) ...
In Malta, there has generally been complacency about the environment. Despite governments paying lip service to it, the country continues to fall short in its real commitment to a sustainable environment. The National Commission for Sustainable Development launched its strategy document six weeks ago. Since then, even allowing for bureaucratic inertia, the silence is deafening. Rhetoric continues to prevail over substance.

... and goes on to say, both concisely and precisely, what the larger goal ought to be!
The central idea of a sustainable environment is that all should achieve an acceptable quality of life, where necessary through economic growth, without disinheriting future generations or mortgaging their future. Put at its simplest, sustainability is about ensuring that the activities we have to carry out to meet Malta's range of needs can be continued indefinitely. To do this, we must ensure that these activities, whether they are waste disposal, transportation, construction development or tourism, do not irreversibly damage the environment.

We need to take a balanced view of the need for development, reconciling growth with the requirement to stay within environmental thresholds. There is no future in justifying development purely for short-term economic gains.

Two panda thumbs up!

Happy (Belated) World Environment Day everybody!