World Environment Day 2016: Go Wild for Life

Every year June 5th is observed as World Environment Day (WED). The Day aims to motivate more people than ever before to take action to prevent the growing strain on planet Earth’s natural systems from reaching the breaking point. It helps to promote the ways to improve the environment. This year United Nation (UN) calls for a worldwide campaign to take a strong action to curb the illegal trade of wildlife products that are threatening the biodiversity of our home planet.

“On this World Environment Day, I urge people and governments everywhere to overcome indifference, combat greed and act to preserve our natural heritage for the benefit of this and future generations.” — Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon

The 2016 theme highlights the fight against the illegal trade in wildlife, which erodes precious biodiversity and threatens the survival of elephants, rhinos and tigers, as well as many other species. It also undermines our economies, communities and security. This year’s slogan “Go Wild for Life“ encourages you to spread the word about wildlife crime and the damage it does, and to challenge all those around you to do what they can to prevent it.

We won’t have a society if we destroy the #environment – Margaret Mead Click To Tweet

WED 2016 Theme: Zero tolerance for the illegal trade in wildlife

The booming illegal trade in wildlife products is eroding Earth’s precious biodiversity, robbing us of our natural heritage and driving whole species to the brink of extinction. The killing and smuggling is also undermining economies and ecoystems, fuelling organized crime, and feeding corruption and insecurity across the globe.

Wildlife crime endangers iconic elephants, rhinos, tigers, gorillas and sea turtles. In 2011, a subspecies of Javan rhino went extinct in Vietnam, while the last western black rhinos vanished from Cameroon the same year. Great apes have disappeared from Gambia, Burkina Faso, Benin and Togo, and other countries could quickly follow. Lesser-known victims include helmeted hornbills and pangolins as well as wild orchids and timbers like Rosewood – flowers and timber are also considered wildlife!

Huge efforts to counter the illicit trade – including stronger policies, awareness campaigns and investments in community conservation and law enforcement – have scored some great successes. However, many species remain at risk and it will take a dedicated and sustained effort by each and every one of us to turn the tide.

How can we do it?

All of you need to understand the damage this illicit business is doing to our environment, livelihoods, communities and security. We must change our habits and behaviour so that demand for illegal wildlife products falls. More awareness and action pushes governments and international bodies to introduce and enforce tougher laws and combat those still willing to break them.

Here are some pics that show the effects of the illegal trade in wildlife:

 

A wildlife department official holds a rescued Malayan sun bear in Kuala Lumpur, March 24, 2015. (Reuters photo)

 

Protected Areas and Wildlife Bureau personnel inspect preserved green turtles and hawksbill turtles. (Reuters photo)

 

Man pulls a seal into his boat after shooting it in a fjord south of Tasiilaq in eastern Greenland. (Reuters photo) 

 

 

A trained, chained monkey in eastern Jakarta. (Reuters photo)

 

 

Host Country: Angola

This year’s World Environment Day celebrations are hosted by Angola, a country seeking to restore its elephant herds, conserve Africa’s biodiversity-rich wildlife, and safeguard the environment as it continues to rebuild after more than a quarter-century of civil war.

“Angola is delighted to host World Environment Day, which will focus on an issue close to our hearts,” said Angolan Environment Minister Maria de Fatima Jardim. “The illegal wildlife trade, particularly the trade in ivory and rhino horn, is a major problem across our continent. By hosting this day of celebration and awareness-raising, we aim to send a clear message that such practices will soon be eradicated.”

How did it started?

World environment day was first established to be celebrated every year by running some effective campaigns by the United Nations General Assembly and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in the conference on Human Environment held in Stockholm, Sweden in 1972. It was first time celebrated in 1973 with the particular theme “Only one Earth”. Since 1974, the celebration campaign of the world environment day is hosted in different cities of the world.

Why World Environment Day is Celebrated?

World environment day annual celebration campaign was started to address the environmental issues like wastage and losses of food, deforestation, increasing global warming and so many. Every year celebration is planned according to the particular theme and slogan of the year to bring effectiveness in the campaign all over the world.

Some of the objectives of the world environment day are:

• To make people aware about the environmental issues
• Encourage common people to actively participate in developing environmental safety measures
• Encourage people to make their nearby surroundings safe and clean to enjoy safer, cleaner and more prosperous future.

Symbols Associated With UN World Environment Day

The main symbols of this celebration are natural colors. These colors depict nature, the earth, and the natural resources that are found therein. More often, some of these colors are blue, green, and natural brown. Images that depict natural earth are unpolluted rivers, clean beaches, snowy mountains, natural flora and fauna and many more.  One or several of these images can be used to promote campaigns that support the day.

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land – Aldo Leopold Click To Tweet

World Environment Day Quotes

Some of the famous quotes on WED are mentioned below:

• “The environment is everything that isn’t me”. – Albert Einstein
• “God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools”. – John Muir
• “Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth”. – Henry David Thoreau
• “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has”. – Margaret Mead
• “We won’t have a society if we destroy the environment”. – Margaret Mead
• “It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment”. – Ansel Adams
• “I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend”? – Robert Redford
• “Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you”. – John Muir
• “Birds are indicators of the environment. If they are in trouble, we know we’ll soon be in trouble”. – Roger Tory Peterson
• “By polluting clear water with slime you will never find good drinking water”. – Aeschylus
• “If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either”. – Joseph Wood Krutch
• “They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse”. – Sitting Bull
• “Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land”. – Aldo Leopold
• “After all, sustainability means running the global environment – Earth Inc. – like a corporation: with depreciation, amortization and maintenance accounts. In other words, keeping the asset whole, rather than undermining your natural capital”. – Maurice Strong
• “Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left”. – Aldo Leopold
• “You will die but the carbon will not; its career does not end with you. It will return to the soil, and there a plant may take it up again in time, sending it once more on a cycle of plant and animal life”. –Jacob Bronowski
• “People blame their environment. There is only one person to blame – and only one – themselves”. – Robert Collier
• “I can find God in nature, in animals, in birds and the environment”. – Pat Buckley
• “We must return to nature and nature’s god”. – Luther Burbank
• “The only way forward, if we are going to improve the quality of the environment, is to get everybody involved”. – Richard Rogers
• “Journey with me to a true commitment to our environment. Journey with me to the serenity of leaving to our children a planet in equilibrium”. – Paul Tsongas
• “Environmental degradation, overpopulation, refugees, narcotics, terrorism, world crime movements, and organized crime are worldwide problems that don’t stop at a nation’s borders”. – Warren Christopher
• “I think the government has to reposition environment on top of their national and international priorities”. – Brian Mulroney
• “Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art”. – Barry Commoner
• “Earth Day 1970 was irrefutable evidence that the American people understood the environmental threat and wanted action to resolve it”. – Barry Commoner
• “The government should set a goal for a clean environment but not mandate how that goal should be implemented”. – Dixie Lee Ray
• “Why has it seemed that the only way to protect the environment is with heavy-handed government regulation”? – Gale Norton
• “The most important environmental issue is one that is rarely mentioned, and that is the lack of a conservation ethic in our culture”. – Gaylord Nelson
• “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed”. – Mahatma Gandhi
• “What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another”. – Mahatma Gandhi

Whoever you are, and wherever you live, show zero-tolerance for the illegal trade in wildlife in word and deed, and make a difference!