Today, April 22, 2021, is Earth Day; the world’s largest secular observance, with a billion people in 192 countries taking time to recognize the importance of protecting the earth’s natural resources and pledge support for environmental protection. The theme of Earth Day 2021 is: “Restore Our Earth”. In other words – not only do we need to clean up the mess we’ve made, but spruce the place up a bit.

If you’ve searched anything on Google today you may have noticed the Earth Day Doodle. (watch it here).

It depicts generations of people passing by with the time lapsed growth of seeds into trees. Each person grows old with their tree and then shares that trees’ seed with a new generation, who keep the cycle going. It fits nicely with one of the many earthday.org campaigns, The Canopy Project  , which improves our shared environment by planting trees across the globe. But it also got me thinking about a) how quickly our time here on Earth passes and b) how we need a framework, like earthday.org, to bring people together as a global community and more importantly, stay there as others come and (gulp) “go”.

I once wrote a piece titled “Net…Work Already” (read the whole thing here) where I express dismay that “the best tool we may have at our disposable for education, collaboration and communication on a large scale – is the internet. It just feels so underutilized at the moment, doesn’t it??” That was back in 2017. It’s only gotten worse.

Unless you are one of the handful of tech giants that have hijacked the web, the internet has been a complete bust. We need to all get on the same page, quickly. Since the dawn of modern Homo sapiens, 108 Billion of us have come and gone and our presence is accelerating exponentially. According to the United Nations “it took 127 years for the world population to double from one billion to two. By contrast, it took only 47 years, from 1927 to 1974, to double from two billion to four. Since 1960, world population has grown by about one billion every 13 years.” We’re on a runaway train and if Earth is the track, we’re running out of it.

So “Help” Facebook! “Help” Alphabet! “Help” Amazon! “Help” Microsoft and Apple! You sold us the techno-utopian dream of what a massive global social movement around cyberspace could make possible.

What are you waiting for?

Suggested Hashtags to share this to:
#RestoreOurEarth #EarthDay #earthdayeveryday #plasticpollution #climateliteracy  #takeaction #Farmers4Earth