I was sitting in a hotel room in Melbourne, Australia. It was March of 2011. This was five years after I had launched the Evolutionshift blog on my website. During those five years I had written a lot about climate change, energy, EVs and the need to face the climate crisis. This means that starting in March - for a late April Earth Day - I was getting pitches asking me if I might want to feature something in my blog around their eco-friendly product.
I lost it!
Here it was March and all these people wanted to tell me about the marketing promotion they were doing around Earth Day. That is when I realized that Earth Day had become a tent-pole day to market “green” products.
So, for the first time, I wrote that it was not Earth Day, Earth Week, Earth Month, Earth Year or even Earth Decade. It was, is and until 2100 will be the Earth Century.
Here is that blog post from 2011
Here is a follow-up blog post from 2012
I took this theme of the Earth Century, expanded upon it, and put it into a couple of my books.
Around Earth Day 2020 I posted a similar message but had a bit more focus on the 2020-2030 decade as the time when a major shift had to occur for humanity to successfully navigate the rest of the Earth Century.
To quote that column:
“Don’t you get it, folks? Step outside your obsessive promotion and your completely antiquated view of Earth Day as a meaningful event. It is no longer about you and the cool stuff you are doing for Earth Day. Earth Day was a brilliant concept to raise awareness about all things environmental. When it first occurred in 1970, I embraced it as a way to highlight the need for us to change our thinking about the environment and the planet. Flowing from the first Whole Earth photograph and the catalogue of the same name, it was a wonderful event to support. However, it is time to retire Earth Day, for it has served its purpose.
Don’t tell me what you are going to do or announce on Earth Day. Commit to doing it every day, every week, every month, and every year. It is no longer a Day. This is Earth Decade, as it will be between now and 2020 when we will either alter our direction or suffer dire consequences. This 10-year period is incredibly critical to changing thinking, behavior, policy and creating breakthrough innovation in the areas of energy and sustainability. Send me a press release on what you are committing to do for the next 10 years. Now that would be something of interest.
All aspects of energy use and resource use will be transformed in this decade. We will also create a new long-term view of human life on Spaceship Earth. In many ways – as I often speak about – 2010-2020 will be the first full decade of human thought about the 21st century, as we have powered into this 21st century with 20th century legacy thinking.
The 21st century will be the Earth Century. It will be during this century that humanity faces the reality of whether it wants to destroy itself and much of what exists on this magnificent planet or not. Assuming we make essential course corrections, future historians will write about the Earth Century as a turning point in human history.
So folks, stop getting excited about Earth Day. Retire that thinking and refocus on the next 80 years of the Earth Century.”
Another way to think about the Earth Century is that it is the time we have to retire the debt that humanity has incurred in the 19th and 20th centuries. In those two centuries, we degraded the planet and poisoned the air, land, and water. It will take us this Earth Century to 2100 to trigger massive regeneration on a planetary-wide basis to retire this debt.