Earth Day 2026 :: Our Power • Our Planet

Earth Day 2026 • Our Power • Our Planet

• suntreeriver design

April 2025 Highlights

• Urban Wilderness City Paradise Lectionary Project for April

• Wednesday 02 April • Another Trip to Torrance. I collaged the Stained Glass Windows I thought to capture this time. Have I mentioned google AI makes some really good collages, and has different options for us to make our own?

• Monday 07 April • Ground cover daisies. I don't know how many pics I've taken of ground cover at commercial sites. It's always fun and lively and even encouraging.

• Thursday 17 April • Florist Shop Easter Flowers in a collage by google AI.

• Saturday 19 April • My first time back in town in four years. Here are snacks from the annual Holy Saturday Easter workday; with covid and other disruptions I'm not sure when my last one was.

• Sunday 20 April • Easter Day, the Festival of Resurrection, Queen of Feasts. Lunch on the lawn included Persian Food for the end of Nowruz, the Persian New Year.

• Tuesday 22 April • doubles for Earth Day! I designed a poster for 2025 and my blog linked to six faves from previous years.

• Serendipitously, Earth Day also was the Fourth Tuesday Santa Monica Lunch Brunch I enjoyed for a second time. I collaged the lunch venue and some outside foliage.

Earth Day 2025

Our Power, Our Planet

From previous Earth Days:

• 2023 Invest In Our Planet

• 2020 50 Years :: #ClimateAction

• 2019 #ProtectOurSpecies

• 2018 #EndPlasticPollution

• 2015 #GreenCities

• 2008 Urban Oasis

April 2023

• Peach Blossoms
• Golden Poppies
• Succulents
• Roxy in Easter Egg Bandana she won from a twitter friend

• Triduum Act 1: Maundy Thursday in North Hollywood 06 April

• Triduum Act 2: Good Friday in North Hollywood. What a Night! 07 April

• Crucifixion by He Qi is a separate line item. He Qi Art website

• Triduum Act 3: Resurrection – font and flowers 09 April

• Statice and Golden Poppies. The world in spring bloom!

• Too funny! I was so intent on publishing this April rundown before midnight, and I knew I'd carefully included all the highlights… but I ended up spacing Earth Day! Here's a Monday morning edit and addition. I trust you'll always #InvestInOurPlanet.

• Very early April peach blossoms turned into very late April peaches

Earth Day 2023

Earth Day 2023: Invest In Our Planet

Flowery clip art with legal reuse rights is from Creative Market several years ago. When or if I find the artist name, I'll add it here and link to their CM or other online presence.

• Earth Day Official Website

Earth Day 2021

Earth Day 2021—half a century plus 1. For almost two decades I've designed for Earth Day with quite different styles for very different years. Some of the results have been real "wows" and included a first place Blue Ribbon at the County Fair. Others? Somewhere between not so much and not at all. What could I do for this COVID-19 Earth Day II?

In January 2020 I declared 2020 my year of Living Local. Very early in January 2020 before COVID was even a whisper most places, when a pandemic was something in the history books. I began Living Local because all life really is local and can't be anywhere else. Late Boston Great Tip O'Neill who famously served many times as Speaker of the US House of Representatives constantly reminded us "All Politics Is local." As a voter or as an elected official your heart and your hopes may reside in the Mayor, City Council, or Town Meeting because you know government needs to be as physically close to the people as possible; but as you've likely observed, decisions at the State Capital and on Capitol Hill inevitably end up right here as they impact you and me.

During those innocent pre-COVID times, my main rant was how Amazon cardboard packaging had become more than I could bear, despite my no longer being a Vine reviewer and receiving almost none. I realize many small entrepreneurs and artisans sell on Amazon, but aside from how much "stuff" does anyone need, other factors had become beside the point.

"Living Local"? All these pictures are from West Los Angeles. More on Saturday about being local, earth day, stewardship, restoring our earth, and cities on my lectionary blog!

PS: We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors—we borrow it from our children was one of my themes for Earth Day 2010; it seemed exactly right for this year, too.

# # #

Earth Day 50 Years

Deuteronomy 8

⁷For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, ⁸a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, ⁹a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper. ¹⁰You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land that he has given you.

¹¹Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you today. ¹²When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, ¹³and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, ¹⁴then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

Earth Day 2019 :: Protect Our Species

Earth Day 2018

#EarthDay2018 #EndPlasticPollution

Earth Day 2017

"environmental and climate literacy"

#trees4earth • #earthday2016

My class notes on urban wilderness from Earth Day 2016 | Easter 5 for this morning.

Excerpts:

Every day is Earth Day, but on Friday 22 April we celebrated the 46^th official formal Earth Day. The Earth Day theme this year is #Trees4Earth that relates closely to #FaceofClimate for 2013 and #GreenCities for both 2014 and 2015. Trees and forests are earth's respiratory system, this planet's lungs.

from "Let us Talents and Tongue Employ"

Jesus lives again
earth can breath again
pass the word around
loaves abound!

Fred Kaan, 1975

For Easter 5 and Earth Day we mainly discussed Revelation 21:1-6, and also considered creation-themed Psalm 96, Psalm 98, and Psalm 148, as well as the beginning of James Weldon Johnson's poem, The Creation. All this poetry is about a God so in love with Creation that God chooses to make a home on earth in the midst of creation.

Sacraments depend upon a healthy creation.

Very briefly from last week: the book of Revelation shows us how empires everywhere operate; it provides not quite a road map, but at least a guide book for living baptized in the context of empire. This week and next week the passages from Revelation especially show us ways to live baptized into the new creation.

More discussion of how physical, earthbound, and incarnational Christianity is. God so in love with creation God chose and still chooses to make a home on earth in a body formed from the stuff of creation.

earth day 2015

Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Seek the wellbeing of the city where I have sent you, for as it prospers, you too will prosper. Jeremiah 29:5,7


This is the original version of Bloom Where You Are Planted, and a perfect text for any celebration of Earth Day―maybe especially Earth Day 2015, since this is the second year of the #GreenCities initiative. Many people love to seize and claim verse 11, "I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord… to give you a future with hope." But holding onto that verse without the full context omits the condition of God's promise: obedience. As Walter Brueggemann points out in Out of Babylon, "this text urges coming to terms with the empire as the unavoidable matrix for Jewish well-being. [page 8] and "…it is Babylon that becomes (for now) a venue for shalom." [page 9] We know Jeremiah lived deeply informed by and responsive to the tradition of Deuteronomy with its demands of hospitality and care for all, of covenantal obedience—its emphasis on forgiveness, grace, and newness.

Our contemporary situation in the USA closely parallels the exiles in Babylon (faithful in Rome, Spain, Great Britain…) as accretions, outrages, attractions, and demands of empire surround and often seem to overwhelm us. Truly we cannot escape to some ideal oblivion, an unknown nowhere – remember erewhon? – and in the power of the Spirit we need to create local, covenantal life where we are—in spite of empire. And then, there's another condition: God's overwhelming response of grace when humans don't quite measure up to the standards of the commands.

Earth Day 2014 #greencities

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life,
flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb,
through the middle of the street of the city.
On either side of the river is the tree of life,
and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
Revelation 22:1-2

earth day 2013

from the deuteronomic historian we constantly hear the refrain, "into the land, into the land, into the land..." Deuteronomy 28:1-3 cautions and promises:

Now it shall be, if you diligently obey the LORD your God, being careful to do all his commandments which I command you today, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. All these blessings will come upon you and overtake you if you obey the LORD your God: Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the country.

eve of easter 3 / eve of earth day 2012

I've posted my Earth Day 2012 poster design on my Facebook page, on one of my design blogs and on my urban blog; I've added it to the sidebar of this blog and now I'm including it in this post.

Tomorrow morning I'll celebrate eucharist, the ultimate earth day festival, and then go to Big Municipal Park for EarthFair 2012, "the largest free annual environmental fair in the world!" My sketchbook, markers, pencils and eraser are ready to go and so are my bright new business cards—you never know who you might meet. I never can tell who might be there at the fair…

Meanwhile, I need to put together what I want and need out of life, out of this world, out of this town and out of the church. As Neil Brown commented at a choir party sometime before his passing, "I have gifts, skills, and education I need to use if I'm to be whole, and that's not vanity!"

So often I don't quite trust my own perceptions and convictions and his words still ring very true to me; they soothe me some, as well.

Happy Earth Day, World!

PS My life still cries out for resurrection!!!

Earth Day 2011: Leviticus 25

Earth Day 2011 • A Billion Acts of Green

²³The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine;
you are but aliens and sojourners with me.
²⁴You shall grant redemption of all the land of your possession.

Leviticus 25:23-24

earth day 2010: 40 years!

Earth Day Prayer: illustrated!

Earth Day 2009: Deuteronomy 8

Earth Day 2009 • Every Day • Earth Day

⁷For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, ⁸a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey...

¹¹Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes.

¹⁴The Lord your God brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. ¹⁸Remember the Lord your God!

Deuteronomy 8

Earth Day 2008