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I think the media should start capitalizing the word “Earth” whenever the word is used to refer to our planet Earth. At the moment, most media outlets lowercase it as “earth” even when writing about climate activists who want to protect the Earth from future global warming impact events. According to the style books and standards editors at most media outlets in the English-speaking world. the house rule for copy editors is to lowercase “earth” and only capitalize it as “Earth when referring to it as a planet revolving in space in relation to other planets or celestial bodies. But on earth, earth gets the lowercase treatment, sad to day, and I think this is wrong.

So I would like to use this space here to gently and politely lobby newspaper editors and copy desk chieftains at the New York Times and the Associated Press and Reuters and all English language media on Earth — notice I did not lowercase it but wrote it as ”Earth”, and here’s why: we all need to stand up for our Earth and ask newspaper and magazine editors to rethink the old rules and wake up to the fact that by showing more respect for our Earth by capping the first letter of the word in all instances, except when speaking of things like “down to earth” or “between heaven and earth.”

Many old sayings use the lowercase and that is okay when they are speaking of dirt and soil and the surface of the Earth but Earth itself our home planet and as such should always be capitalized. We
capitalize the word ”God’,’ even though there is no scientific proof that God exists. Yet we lowercase Earth as “earth” when in fact we know the Earth does exist and it is our sacred home.

I feel that the Earth is our home and we need to stand up in terms of punctuation and spelling and lowercase uppercase rules and start upper casing the word in all references that speak of the Earth as the place we call home and which environmentalists want to protect. So how about it, newspaper and magazine editors in the USA, Canada, UK and Australia and New Zealand?

The Earth is our home. If we lived on Mars, our newspapers would not call Mars as “mars” (lowercase), would they? No way. So our newspapers here on Earth need to start capping first initial Earth from now on. Example, on Dec. 17, 2011, reporter Leslie Kaufman at the New York Times was forced to write by her editors: “The earth is warming, perhaps catastrophically….” when, of course, she wanted to write
“The Earth is warming…” but she was not allowed to do that by her copy desk.

So we need to ask the Times editors: Please stand up for our Earth, please start capping the word Earth as “Earth,” starting with tomorrow’s newspaper.

Capitalize Earth and see what a difference the new way of writing it online and in print newspapers and magazines will make.