A snapshot of our blue planet taken yesterday, April 21, 2020, by Japan’s Himawari 8 weather satellite, from a geostationary orbit, about 22,240 miles above the Pacific Ocean. #

Original caption from April 22, 1970: “New York City—Fifth Avenue, reminiscent of some European promenade, is filled with thousands of people just after the fashionable street was closed to motor traffic at noon on Earth Day. Conceived as a national teach-in, patterned after the Vietnam teach-ins held on hundreds of campuses in the Spring of 1965, Earth Day is a nationwide demonstration of concern for the planet and all forms of life—not only man—who live on it.” #

A Victoria crowned pigeon is seen in Jurong Bird Park in Singapore on January 21, 2015. The park was unveiling its latest aviary, Wings of Asia, featuring some of the continent’s rarest and most endangered birds. #

This picture taken on May 31, 2018, shows a villager walking between abandoned houses covered with overgrown vegetation in Houtouwan on Shengshan Island, China’s eastern Zhejiang province. Houtouwan was a thriving fishing community of sturdy brick homes that climb up steep hills, but is now abandoned. #

A plastic bag floats in the Mediterranean Sea, near divers off the coast of Samandağ, Turkey, on December 6, 2018, during a dive to call attention to plastic pollution affecting wildlife and the environment. #

A farmer looks back as she walks through swarms of desert locusts feeding on her crops, in Katitika village, Kitui county, Kenya, on January 24, 2020. Desert locusts swarmed into Kenya by the hundreds of millions from Somalia and Ethiopia, countries that haven’t seen such numbers in a quarter century, destroying farmland and threatening an already-vulnerable region. #

Sunlight is reflected by more than 50,000 computer-controlled mirrors (heliostats), focusing the sun’s energy on the top of the solar tower at Ashalim Power Station, near the southern Israeli kibbutz of Ashalim, in the Negev desert, on April 28, 2019. #

A fire rages in Bobin, Australia, on November 9, 2019, as firefighters try to contain dozens of blazes that were raging in the state of New South Wales. Catastrophic fires in Australia burned tens of millions of acres and destroyed thousands of buildings during the 2019–20 bushfire season. #

From left: Sheila Bailey, Judy Brady, and clinical director Cheyne Flanagan tend to a koala named Paul from Lake Innes Nature Reserve as he recovers from burns at the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital on November 29, 2019, in Port Macquarie, Australia. #

A male Grauer’s gorilla, a critically endangered species, rests in the forest of Kahuzi-Biega National Park in northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, on September 30, 2019. Since the summer of 2018, some local communities have started logging in this protected area, threatening gorilla habitat. #

On March 15, 2019, students take part in a climate protest in London, England. Thousands of pupils from schools, colleges, and universities across the U.K. walked out in a major strike against climate-change inaction. #

“Skyscraper,” an installation made of five tons of plastic waste pulled from the Pacific Ocean, shaped like a breaching whale, is displayed in Bruges, Belgium, on July 14, 2018, for the 2018 Bruges Triennial. #

The full moon rises behind burning moorland as a large wildfire sweeps across the moors between Dovestones and Buckton Vale in Stalybridge, Greater Manchester, England, on June 26, 2018. #

A “super bloom” of wild poppies blankets the hills of Walker Canyon, near Lake Elsinore, California, on March 12, 2019. Heavier-than-normal winter rains in the state caused the widespread blooming of wildflowers in various locales. #

Forest rangers and wardens perch on top of a hill to look for tamaraws, or Mindoro dwarf buffaloes, in Mansalay, Mindoro province, Philippines, on October 17, 2018. Tamaraws are one of the most critically endangered animal species in the country, as a result of a rinderpest outbreak in the 1930s that was allegedly brought by cattle farming and poaching—only about 500 tamaraws are known to exist in the wild today. A team of ragtag but dedicated rangers, armed with makeshift equipment, monitor the buffaloes’ activity and numbers, and use homemade shotguns to ward off illegal hunters and poachers. #