Everyday is Earth Day

Earth day is my fave holiday, other than my bday of course. Tomorrow I will be not wearing shoes, showering, using electricity, eating, driving, consuming, or stepping on any grass(some of those are false.)
Today in my science class we talked about Earth day and my prof gave us a sheet with some random/awesome facts on them. It was the first class I've paid attention all semsester! That's bc I do not care about how many drops of water a penny can hold but I do care very much about our atmosphere, our water, and our mother. It's only a matter of time before I have a recycling tattoo.
Here's some sweet facts.

Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to watch a TV for three hours - it's equivalent to half a gallon of gasoline.

April 22 is the first official day of Spring in the Northern hemisphere and of Fall in the Southern hemisphere and was chosen to be Earth Day for this reason.

Earth Day is a relatively new holiday and was first celebrated on April 22 in 1970. More than 20 million Americans participated in this first Earth Day celebration

Earth Day was founded by a senator of Wisconsin and the day is credited for creating the environmentalism movement.

Never underestimate the importance of recycling: if every newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year. Unfortunately only 27% of all American newspapers are recycled.

More than 20,000,000 Hershey's Kisses are wrapped each day, using 133 square miles of tinfoil. All that foil is recyclable, but not many people realize it.

Only 11% of the earth's surface is used to grow food.

The world's first national park was started in 1872 at Yellowstone National Park in the US.

The first major international conference on environmental issues was held in Sweden in 1972 and was sponsored by the United Nations.

The first wildlife refuge was formed on Pelican Island Florida in 1903.

The patron Saint of ecologists is St. Francis and the first proclamation of Earth Day was made by the mayor of San Francisco in 1970.

These are things that happen 365 days a year: (he had these on a power point and it's the first time I took notes all semester! aka don't tell Kyle.)

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. 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.⁸

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. This will result in the publication of 1,900 science and engineering articles and granting of 150 patents.

4000 books will be published.

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.

Happy Earth Day to my fellow hippie freaks!