In 1970, Earth Day was established by former Wisconsin governor and senator Gaylord Nelson in an effort to focus his country's attention on environmental issues and on the possible solutions to environmental problems.

His efforts rallied more than 20 million Americans that year -- the largest grassroots mobilisation in US history -- and resulted in the first environmental legislation, the US Clean Air and Water acts.

Nowadays, Earth Day has become, as a result of the efforts of hundreds of local organisers, an anticipated annual event, with more than 200 million people in 141 countries celebrating Earth Day during its 20th anniversary in 1990.

In Bermuda, a special committee has been established to mark Earth Day's 25th anniversary, which kicks off on Saturday.

Among the dozens of businesses and organisations that will be participating is the Bermuda Aquarium, Museum and Zoo, which tries with such programmes as its wildlife rehabilitation scheme to implement the principles of Earth Day on a daily basis.

Last week, we paid a visit to the programme.

"You may have noticed that there were an awful lot of people in the room who didn't seem to be doing anything,'' Ms Jennifer Gray, a marine biologist at the Bermuda Aquarium, Museum and Zoo who is responsible for the marine life and sea bird division of the facility's wildlife rehabilitation programme, says a few minutes after a delicate operation on a large sea turtle.

And indeed, there did appear to be a small army of hangers-on in the tiny aquarium shed as the sickly loggerhead turtle, its eyeballs collapsed and covered with a cheesy plaque, and its shell badly bruised after weeks of being tangled in high seas nylon netting, was fed a nutritional supplement through a long rubber tube.

The hangers-on, of course, weren't there to get in the way -- some of them, in fact, helped out by holding the turtle in position and documenting the procedure with a camera -- but because they had a professional attachment to and emotional interest in the animal's recovery.

"It's very much a give-and-take,'' head zookeeper Mr. James Conyers, who was also present at the turtle's feeding, says of the relationships between the various members of the Aquarium's animal husbandry team.

"A lot of them (workers and volunteers) will come in after hours (to care for a sick or injured animal). Many will hit the books on their own.

Basically, every animal in the wildlife rehabilitation programme will have at least one individual of their own to look after them.'' Adds Ms Gray, who was trained in the rehabilitation of turtles in Baltimore and at the New England Aquarium: "There is nothing more valuable to a recovering animal than a keeper who really cares.'' It is this type of commitment, it seems, that defines the Aquarium's wildlife rehabilitation programme.

Included in the facility's original mandate but only officially set down as policy in 1978, the programme, which had a success rate last year of approximately 58 percent, saw more than 100 sick and injured animals among its patients in 1994.

Of those animals, most were injured sea creatures that were tossed onto Bermuda's coastlines by wayward ocean currents or migratory birds that were buffeted by high winds or thrown into poles and other obstacles while passing.

Occasionally, programme staffers -- "basically everyone who works in animal husbandry is considered a member of the rehabilitation programme,'' Ms Gray explains -- will have to treat some rare specimen that a careless or unthinking traveller has brought back to Bermuda.

Whatever the case may be, though, the animals that come into the zoo workers' care are usually grievously ill.

"The 58-percent success rate may not sound like such a great number,'' Mr.

Conyers says as he sits in his cluttered office, "but most of the animals we see are literally on death's doorstep.'' Indeed, the creatures that are currently in the process of rehabilitation at the aquarium seem impossibly afflicted during a recent tour of the facility.

Two juvenile loggerheads, for example, are badly mutilated -- one is missing a limb and the other had a great bite taken out of it by some larger predatory fish -- while a merlin falcon that most likely hit a cable sits quietly in a cage, its left wing shattered and in a sling.

And then, of course, there's the adult loggerhead, which is sick, emaciated and possibly blind.

"He is one of those really sad cases,'' Ms Gray says of the reptile, "that has been caught up in ocean pollution.'' In addition to actually nursing such animals back to their former health, the Aquarium staffers hope that the programme, which has generated a great deal of favourable public feedback and is especially popular with local schoolchildren, will work to educate the public on the threats that wildlife faces and the environment in general.

On that score they feel that organised rituals like Earth Day are valuable because, as Ms Gray points out, they increase awareness and put "people's thoughts where they should be.'' "We get very compartmentalised in terms of mindset,'' says Mr. Conyers. "Our addresses, for example, are very specific -- such and such a street in such and such a country. We don't often think of ourselves as living on planet Earth.'' Even so, Mr. Conyers and his colleagues continue to remind visitors and the public of that very fact.

For a brief moment in an aquarium shed that doubles as a turtle feeding centre, they also prove it.

(See `Anniversary' on Page 24.) GIVE AND TAKE -- Head zookeeper Mr. James Conyers, seen here with his lemur friends, says workers, volunteers and animals have a "give and take'' relationship.