Japanese Peace Bell and its pagoda at United Nations Headquarters, NYC
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Dear Friends,
We are pleased to invite you to the upcoming March Equinox Celebration, a day for honoring the Earth and highlighting the economics for peace principles and policies originally envisioned in 1968 by John McConnell, the founder and creator of Earth Day. This event has been celebrated annually at the United Nations since 1971.
People will join together at the UN and around the world to acknowledge the exact moment of the March Equinox (3/19/24, 11:06 pm EST) when the ceremonial ringing of the UN Peace Bell takes place honoring world peace and earth rights justice. The Equinox is the time of year when the planet is in equipoise of equal day and night representing worldwide balance and harmony.
John McConnell was an idealist, a visionary and a peacemaker, who coined the term Earth Day. He proposed its celebration be on the March equinox to the City of San Francisco in October, 1969 and announced it in November at a UNESCO Conference. San Francisco hosted the first Earth Day on March 21, 1970.
Since then the Earth Society Foundation, which McConnell co-founded with Margaret Mead, has hosted the annual event where the UN Peace Bell is rung followed by prayer, music and meditation. Margaret Mead, UN Secretary-General U Thant, President Ford, and thirty-three Nobel laureates supported Earth Day. In addition thirty-six worldwide dignitaries signed McConnell's Earth Day Proclamation, supporting Earth Day on the March Equinox as an annual planetary holiday linking people everywhere without regard to politics, culture, national borders or religion.
The theme for the March 2024 Earth Day celebration is The Earth Belongs to Everyone: Building a Culture and Economics of Peace. This focus draws upon McConnell's thoughts, work and writings about EARTH RIGHTS. In 1968 McConnell wrote his "Planetary Inheritance Declaration" concerning the "rights and responsibilities of all people with respect to Earth's land, sea, minerals, oil and other natural resources". He urged the UN to establish a "Natural Resources Royalties Pool" that would collect money from any individual, corporation or country that might take an excess of their rightful portion, then distribute those funds to all of Earth's people which would help to eliminate many economic sources of discord that lead to war.
The Henry George Institute welcomed McConnell's message at a May 1996 seminar stating that "Mr. McConnell has long shared Henry George's vision of the Earth as the common heritage of all people and he advocates the public collection of land rent as a way to actualize this all-important relationship." The seminar honored McConnell's co-authorship, with UN NGO Representative Alanna Hartzok of a paper titled Pennsylvania's Success with Local Tax Reform that described the success this "earth rights" tax reform has had in Hartzok's home state of Pennsylvania.
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