3 minute music video by Phil Jones - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKA2ruedu7A

Pssst! You! Yeah, you... are a passenger on a planet... on a blue-green planet that's orbiting a golden star. And right now we are traveling through the ONLY place in our yearly orbit where we honor the planet that we're riding on. Yes, we're celebrating Earth Day April 22nd. We're paying homage to a great lady who is so comfortable with her own contradictions that she is both our Spaceship Earth AND our Mother Earth.

At her core she is one hot gal - almost 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. On her frigid surfaces she can go as low as 130 degrees below zero. Her body is rocky, dirty, muddy, slimey, sandy and dusty. Her surface is pitted with caves and ravines, raging with rivers, oceans and hurricanes. She erupts with volcanos, earthquakes and tsunamis. She's also teeming with life, crawling and buzzing with critters, including some critters that have no wings, only two legs, and are listening to this radio station.

All the while, Earth is spinning and orbiting through the silence of space with a mathematical precision that has given us clocks and calendars. We keep track of her spins with clocks, and we keep track of her orbits with calendars - as she transports us through the cosmos with the predictable grace of a celestial being. Yes, our Mother Earth is also our Spaceship Earth. And this - along with a conspiracy that she's harboring - is what we calebrate on April 22nd.

The date: 3 billion years ago. The place: third planet out from the sun. The characters: Sunlight, water and blue-green algae. Blue-green algae discovers how to manufacture food out of sunlight and water. This manufacturing process generates a waste product which the blue-green algae exhales. The waste is oxygen. The date: 2.2 billion years ago. The level of oxygen waste is so high now that it is pollution. But... some creative creature discovers how to render the oxygen harmless and actually use it as fuel. These waste-eating creatures become so prosperous that they have many descendants - including us. We breathe in what plants breathe out. Plants breathe in what we breathe out.

Now, breathe in Latin is "spirare." And we can hear spirare in our words respiration, inspiration, spirit and con-spiracy. Con means "with," so conspiring is breathing with, breathing together. And life on Earth is a conspiracy!

Now, as we're traveling through the place in our yearly orbit that we call April 22nd - Earth Day - I'm paying attention to my breathing. Each time I breathe in I re-enact an event 2.2 billion years ago when my ancestors transformed pollution into fuel!

Harriet Witt - harriet@passengerplanet.com