June 5, every year is celebrated as World Environment Day or WED. The day is set aside to encourage awareness and action to protect the natural environment. It draws attention to environmental issues such as marine pollution, air pollution, deforestation, and wildlife crime such as poaching.

Each year, WED has a new theme that major corporations, communities, governments, and celebrities adopt to advocate environmental causes.

If Earth’s history is compared to a calendar year: Modern human has existed for about 37 minutes. One-third of Earth’s natural resources have been consumed in the last 0.2 seconds (by modern humans).

“The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.” – Ernest Hemingway
“The Earth is what we all have in common.” – Wendell Berry

“One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken.” – Leo Tolstoy

1972 was a significant year for creating a movement to sustain and protect the natural environment. That year, the United Nations, met in Sweden to rally the world to support environmental issues. Two years later, the first World Environment day was held in 1974.

Even though WED celebrations have been held annually since 1974, in 1987 the idea for rotating the center of these activities through selecting different host countries began.

Here are some environmental facts that you need to know.

• Human consumption of Earth’s natural resources more than tripled between 1970 and 2015.
• If current patterns continue, we will have emptied the world’s oceans for seafood by 2050.
• The world population is 215,000 people larger today than it was yesterday.
• 27,000 trees are cut down each day so we can have Toilet Paper.
• Aluminum can be recycled continuously, as in forever. Recycling 1 aluminum can save enough energy to run our TVs for at least 3 hours. 80 trillion aluminum cans are used by humans every year.
• When you throw plastic bags and other plastic materials in the ocean, it kills as many as 1 million sea creatures annually.
• A glass bottle made in our time will take more than 4,000 years to decompose.
• Only 1% of our planet’s water supply can be used. 97% is ocean water and 2% is frozen solid in the Arctic, for now.
• Landfills are composed of 35% packaging materials.