Nature
World Water Day
In June 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development convened in Rio de Janeiro, the gathering remembered simply as the Earth …
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Nature
Days dedicated to the natural world — the environment, the climate and the planet we all depend on.
20 articles
Nature
World Soil Day
The date of 5 December was not chosen at random. It is the birthday of Vasily Vasilyevich Dokuchaev, the Russian geologist who, in the 1880s, did …
Nature
World Oceans Day
The idea of a day for the oceans was tabled in 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, by two Canadian bodies: the International Centre for Ocean …
Nature
World Environment Day
In June 1972, delegates from 113 nations gathered in Stockholm for the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment — the first time the …
Nature
World Bee Day
On 20 May 1734, in the hamlet of Breznica in what is now Slovenia, a child named Anton Janša was born into a family of beekeepers. He would grow up to …
Nature
Winter Solstice
On the longest night of the year, when the sun traces its lowest, briefest arc across the southern sky and darkness presses in early, the Northern …
Nature
Weathermans day
On 7 January 1785, a Boston-born physician named John Jeffries climbed into a hydrogen balloon at Dover with the French aeronaut Jean-Pierre Blanchard …
Nature
US National Watermelon Day
In 2021 a team of geneticists publishing through Washington University in St. Louis sequenced the genome of a little-known Sudanese plant, the …
Nature
US National Moonshine Day
In the summer of 1794, several thousand armed farmers in western Pennsylvania were prepared to fight the United States government over the right to …
Nature
Mitten Tree Day
In 1949, the children of the Primary Department of St Luke’s Lutheran Church clipped mittens and gloves to the branches of their Christmas tree. …
Nature
International Street Childrens Day
In 2011 a London-based network called the Consortium for Street Children launched a single, deliberately simple idea: a day on which the world’s …
Nature
International Observe the Moon Night
In June 2009, a single Atlas V rocket carried two NASA spacecraft towards the Moon, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and its companion, the Lunar …
Nature
International Mountain Day
In 2002, delegates filing through conferences from Kyrgyzstan to Quito found themselves talking, often for the first time, about the same problem: the …
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International Day of the Tropics
Here is a single statistic to sit with: the tropics cover roughly 40 per cent of the Earth’s surface yet hold about 80 per cent of its living …
Nature
International Asteroid Day
At around seven in the morning on 30 June 1908, an object roughly the size of a building entered the atmosphere over a remote stretch of Siberia and …
Nature
Houseplant Appreciation Day
The Christmas tree has been hauled out to the kerb, the tinsel is back in its box, and the corner where the lights once twinkled looks suddenly bare. …
Nature
Find a rainbow day
In 1637, working alone with a glass globe of water held up to the sun, René Descartes finally explained why a rainbow always appears where it does. He …
Nature
Earth Hour Day
At 7.30 on the evening of Saturday 31 March 2007, the floodlights on the Sydney Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge went dark, and they stayed …
Nature
Earth Day
On 22 April 1970, an estimated 20 million Americans, roughly a tenth of the country’s population, took to streets, campuses and parks for …
Nature
Autumn Equinox
Twice each year, at the great stepped pyramid of Kukulkan at Chichén Itzá in Mexico, the late-afternoon sun catches the terraced edges of the …