The first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, in the United States, is widely regarded as the largest single-day demonstration in human history. Twenty million Americans participated in marches, teach-ins, clean-ups, and rallies from one end of the country to the other.
It ended up being less a protest than a celebration of the possibility of civic action to tackle what were then the nation’s distressing environmental conditions.
Just the prior year, in Southern California, the air was declared unsafe 264 days out of 365, so dirty on 70% of days that school children weren’t allowed outside for recess or sports.
Two months before Earth Day, President Nixon had acknowledged that Lake Erie was so polluted it was effectively “dead” in ecological terms.
On Earth Day #1 in 1970, DDT was still legal and commonly used, there were fewer than 1,000 bald eagles total in the continental US, and the Environmental Protection Agency didn’t yet exist.
This year, on Earth Day #55, the progress has been dramatic.
A new car in 2024 can drive from Orlando to New York and pollute less than a 1970 car would on the drive to school in the morning.
Fifteen percent of the nation’s electricity comes from solar and wind.
The US has doubled food production, tripled the size of its economy, added 130 million new residents, all while reducing use of water.
What’s more, more than 300,000 bald eagles now live here.
That first Earth Day was an electrifying moment. It captured a sense of frustration, then channeled it into decades of effective action. Not just a change in habits or laws, a change in how we think about our relationship to the environment.
There’s been significant progress.
But it isn’t nearly enough.
We need to do even better.
And we need to do it even faster.
WE’VE LEARNED A LOT SINCE that first Earth Day. Today we have tools and insights that could not have been imagined back then.
One of the most important realizations is this: We can help shape the future. Our own future — the future for humanity – but also the future for everything on Earth.
And, crucially, we are shaping the future whether we do it with intentionality, or by indifference.
The accumulated choices of humanity over the last 200 years have created what’s being called the Anthropocene — an era of dominant human influence in the evolution of Earth’s ecosystem.
There’s good news in that phenomenon: We are not yet at the mercy of forces beyond our control. We can design our collective fate. There’s still time.
Yet, we must acknowledge that despite the progress, we have set off a series of changes in the planet that threaten the stability of the natural environment and the viability of human civilization.
We are living recklessly, beyond our means in environmental terms, and beyond the planet’s ability to sustain us, at least the way we are living now.
We are out of balance with the world we depend on.
But this doesn’t need to be the case.
We need to protect our wild lands because they protect us.
We need to de-carbonize the energy we use even faster than we already are.
We need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Create a circular economy that treats waste as a resource. Make sustainable agriculture the standard.
The ribbon of optimism that can pull us along is that we know how to do these things. We know what needs to change and we know how to make that change happen.
We can map out the right course — not just metaphorically, but literally.
The map is a tool that has been radically transformed in the digital age.
Today’s maps are dynamic. They are living “digital twins” of our world, our climate, our society. They are data-rich visualizations of our problems, and of our future possibilities.
They can show you where rooftop solar would be most effective. Or how to reduce heat islands in cities. Or how to plan new development with the least environmental damage.
A digital map can layer in geography, buildings, infrastructure, and the natural world, adding in every kind of environmental, economic, and sociodemographic data.
Today’s digital maps — infused with real-time data from sensors, satellites, and drones — are tools for both storytelling and solution-building. Enriched with artificial intelligence, today’s maps are analytical engines. They reveal patterns of emissions, of development, of communities in danger from sea level rise or wildfires or drought.
Tackling climate change inevitably involves conflict and compromise but today’s maps bring collective understanding. They become a shared space. Businesspeople, scientists, regulators, officials, and citizens can work together, with the same data, the same picture, the same patterns. They can offer a whole array of solutions – which maps let them model in advance.
Modern digital maps possess capabilities that are entirely new. They’ve become a form of “spatial infrastructure,” a way not just to understand the world, but an operating system to imagine and design a better world.
IN SPEECHES ON THAT FIRST Earth Day many leaders predicted that a cleaner environment would require a drastically diminished economy.
In fact, it’s just the opposite.
Collectively, we’ve figured out that we can’t pollute or pave our way to prosperity. We’ve discovered that sustainability — using the fewest resources you need, most efficiently, whether you’re talking about transportation or infrastructure or supply chains — is good for the planet, for people, and for organizations.
We can have sustainability and prosperity. In fact, in the long term, those two things require each other.
Sustainability allows the human world and the natural world to flourish.
On this 55th Earth Day, we’ve arrived at a compelling, but also a worrying, threshold. We know what the state of the world is, and our place in it. We know what we need to do. We have the tools, technologies, and analytics. They get more powerful and more accessible every year. And they are becoming available to everyone and every organization.
We need to choose. As individuals. As leaders. As organizations.
We need to remember just how far we’ve come. Looking back at Earth Day #1 can do two powerful things for us:
Remind us of the leaps we’re capable of.
And reignite the urgency we need now.
