EARTH Day is an annual day on which events are held worldwide to demonstrate support for environmental protection, reports the free encyclopaedia website Wikipedia.

Earth Day is observed on April 22 each year, designated as International Mother Earth Day by a consensus resolution adopted by the United Nations in 2009.

Earth Day is now coordinated globally by the Earth Day Network, and is celebrated in more than 192 countries every year.

The name and concept of Earth Day was pioneered by John McConnell in 1969 at a UNESCO Conference in San Francisco.

He proposed March 21, 1970, the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere. It was later sanctioned in a Proclamation signed by Secretary General U Thant at the United Nations.

A month later a separate Earth Day was founded by United States Senator Gaylord Nelson on April 22, 1970.

While this April 22 Earth Day was focused on the United States, an organisation launched by Denis Hayes, who was the original national coordinator in 1970, took it international in 1990 and organised events in 141 nations.

The first April 22 Earth Day had participants and celebrants in two thousand colleges and universities, roughly ten thousand primary and secondary schools, and hundreds of communities across the United States.

It reportedly brought 20 million Americans out into the spring sunshine for peaceful demonstrations in favor of environmental reform.

Nelson said that Earth Day “worked” because of the response at the grassroots level.

Twenty-million demonstrators and thousands of schools and local communities participated.

It now is observed in 192 countries, and coordinated by the nonprofit Earth Day Network, chaired by the first Earth Day 1970 organiser Denis Hayes, according to whom Earth Day is now “the largest secular holiday in the world, celebrated by more than a billion people every year.”