Celebrate Humanity Day October 26!
To create a flourishing future
On Earth Day, in 1970, I was 14 and didn’t see why we needed a day to celebrate the Earth and honor our relationship to it. The Earth is here and so are we. What’s the big deal?
I was resigned about the future, with no idea that I was. I lived in Washington D.C. not far from the Potomac River, which always had a layer of dangerous muck on it. My friends and I would play on the rocks at Great Falls, 15 miles upriver, where the river was cleaner. Nevertheless if I slipped in, I’d take a shower as soon as I got home. The river had been polluted my whole short life, and that’s the only future I could imagine.
Today the Potomac is basically clean and safe. In retrospect that’s a miracle. In 1970 I never imagined it was possible; I never even thought it might be desirable, just like today I don’t ask if reducing gravity might be desirable. Gravity is the way it is, and pollution was the way it was.
Thanks, Earth Day
In 1969, some bold people had a vision of cleaning up our environment. They started a movement, a way of thinking that has grown over 50 years and led to the cleanup of major areas of our planet. Today our rivers and air are vastly cleaner. Of course many areas are suffering as our growing population chops down rainforests, transforms wetlands into housing subdivision, and turns farms into industrial parks. Nevertheless, many parts of the world are cleaner and greener than they were, and countries in both global North and South benefit from growing environmental movements.
Enter Humanity Day
A few years ago, I co-founded I AM HUMANITY with colleagues to reflect on how to ensure humanity's flourishing for millennia to come. Were we to restore the climate, but not our relationships with each other...well, just turn on the news for a reminder.
Humanity Day is I AM HUMANITY's flagship program. Six months from Earth Day, it gathers people from around the world to reflect, imagine, and start creating a future we want. Our six-hour program features amazing speakers, starting with best-selling author and spiritual leader
. Sessions range from participatory inquiries to inspiring talks to dance, music, and art videos celebrating humanity. I invite you to experience it with family, friends, and popcorn!
Your mission, should you choose to accept it…
Today it’s up to us to actively restore the ecosystems of the last 10 millennia in which we developed agriculture and civilization. Otherwise the momentum of global warming will leave our planet too hot to sustain either humanity or the ecosystems that support us and we love. Today, we have ten times the population our planet has ever sustained long-term, and global warming is taking us to temperatures last seen ten million years before even the first humanoid species evolved.
Yes, it’s hard to imagine, but we can do this
Restoring a safe climate and a sustainable population—both seem far too difficult for mere mortals to achieve. Yet they’re not. Actually, they’re pretty easy—yet almost impossible to imagine, much as cleaning up the Potomac River was inconceivable for me as an adolescent in 1970. As my friend
said recently, “We’re not spiritually prepared for being the gods that we are.”Similarly, much of the climate community assumes that restoring the climate is impossible—so they’re neither talking about nor searching for the solutions in plain sight. Yet the solutions are in plain sight: Nature has used them for millions of years. Replicating these proven remedies for out-of-control CO2 can and will give our children a safe climate.
Humanity Day challenges us to think the previously unthinkable:
We have an active role to play in ensuring that humanity flourishes.
Earth Day was essential by 1970, as industrial and population growth far outpaced culture’s ability to evolve and adapt: We needed to intentionally remember our relationship to the rest of the living world. It wasn’t actually so hard to clean up the Potomac River: Stop pouring pollutants into it! Still, it took millions of people and highly committed policymakers to make that happen. But it happened.
Simply stopping CO2 pollution won’t clean up the atmosphere. We also need to pull a trillion tons of CO2 out, while earth systems are intact enough to manage it. However, this, too may not be so difficult, as we have an experienced guide. Nature cools our planet before ice ages. She boosts photosynthesis in the oceans by blowing iron-rich dust into areas of the ocean where it provides the missing micronutrient for plant growth, iron. Replicating and optimizing this natural process appears to be straightforward, low cost and rapid, and to involve less than one percent of the ocean. Yet virtually no environmental groups or government policies promote it. Yet.
Similarly, restoring a sustainable population is inevitable. Intentionally or not, as carrying capacity catches up with all species. Fortunately women around the world today are choosing on their own to have fewer children, so global population could recover to sustainable levels within a century.
Like Earth Day in 1979, Humanity Day is needed now, when global warming, unsustainable population, and rapidly collapsing ecosystems put humanity’s survival in serious doubt.
Join us October 26
Let’s come together October 26, celebrate and support each other so that we can collectively imagine humanity flourishing for millennia to come.
Groups around the world are hosting local events. You can also join from your living room, preferably with friends and family. Catch original programming from 9am - 3 pm PT; 12-6pm ET. For our African and other international friends, the event repeats— see full invite for timing.