Inaugurated on this day 54 years ago, in 1970, Earth Day is an annual event on April 22 to demonstrate support for environmental protection, Today it includes a wide range of events coordinated globally by Earthday.org including one billion people in more than 193 countries. The official theme for Earth Day 2024 is "Planet vs. Plastics."
For that first Earth Day, legendary American cartoonist Walt Kelly – creator of the beloved comic-strip about Pogo Possum that resident philosopher of Okefenokee Swamp – produced an Earth Day poster showing Pogo surveying the mess of garbage littering his swamp homeland and carried the slogan "We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us.”
Kelly was re-working a comment made by American Naval Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, who – on September 10, 1813 – having trounced the British Navy at the Battle of Lake Erie, reported to Major General William Henry Harrison, “We have met the enemy and they are ours. Two ships, two brigs, one schooner and one sloop.”
Kelly’s variation on this famous battle report, had a different intent: to remind us that humankind has a way of being its own worst enemy – specifically that we have only ourselves to blame for the conditions that are polluting our environment and threatening the future of human life on earth.
A year after Kelly's poster appeared, he created a special comic strip for Earth Day 1971 featuring Pogo and his friend Porky Pine that restated his earlier warning against the self-destructive course which we were (and are still) blindly pursuing...
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