Reflections on Earth Day

The arrival of another Earth Day gives us an opportunity to reflect on what has happened on/to our planet since the inaugural event back on April 22nd 1970. Earth Day originally emerged from the stirring environmental consciousness of the sixties; the awe inspired by Earthrise, the image of fragile Earth – our only home – emerging from behind the Moon, captured from lunar orbit by astronaut William Anders on the Apollo 8 Moon mission; the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill which killed countless dolphins, seabirds, seals and other marine life; the dawning understanding that there might actually be material limits to the exponential growth demanded by the increasingly dominant western economic system, and even the desire in some parts of the counter culture to embrace lifestyles of voluntary simplicity, going “back to the land”. As can be gleaned from voices of the time, awareness of the threat of man-made climate change might have been only embryonic back then, but the wider issue of pollution and environmental degradation was well known and a resistance movement was flowering.

So what has changed since then? As industrial civilisation has globalised, carbon emissions have escalated inexorably, despite 29 COPs attempting to turn the tide. In 1970 there was 325ppm CO2 in our atmosphere (already rising above pre-industrial levels of 280ppm). By April 2025 this has risen to 430ppm. Wildlife populations globally have declined by 73% between 1970 and 2020. Some people are calling this the sixth mass extinction; others, recognising that this terminology could be misleadingly benign, call it an annihilation. The assault on indigenous communities has been relentless; languages become extinct as native peoples are afforded the benefits of “development”. We lose a language – and all its inherent wisdom – every 40 days. We have seen the rise of the internet, social media and, most recently, AI. Our relationship with time has been captured by the attention economy, demanding constant engagement in ways that would be unfathomable to our ancestors. The industrial revolution ripped us away from cyclical, seasonal time into the subservience of linear time; now our technologies demand complete immediacy and we have become their content providers.

All these patterns have led us to the point of polycrisis. Our global food system has been hollowed out and captured by a tiny number of corporations, so that shocks from extreme weather events could easily destabilise the whole system. Our economic systems are revealed to create growing inequality, across classes and generations. The myth of progress has been brutally exposed. Our technologies are leading us towards a cognitive collapse, as our brains are rewired. And we just don’t know how many tipping points we may have already transgressed.

The environmental movement has changed dramatically since those early days too. Once unequivocally seeking to protect the natural world, we have seen the emergence (and indeed the domination) of the neo-environmentalists. The aspiration to protect nature is seemingly no longer the main goal. Supporting new industries to protect our energy intensive lifestyles has taken precedence. Fragile ecosystems are expendable if we need a shiny new solar farm, or rare earth minerals for our EV batteries.

Whilst it is important to acknowledge and celebrate the many conservation successes that are a counterpoint to this overarching trajectory, this is clearly not the report card we had hoped for. The good news is that the delusions of modernity cannot hold; business as usual is now visibly creaking, as we hit the buffers of planetary limits. As we go forward, we can refuse to prop up the status quo through our own choices, gently walking modernity into obsolescence. How we live and make community together can contribute to emergent, wakeful societies. Through the cracks in the pavements of industrial civilisation, the sacred world can shine through unbowed.

Gregory Webster
EcoDharma Doula, Year of the Wood Snake