by Mark Hewitt
Earth Day Coopertisim
April 22nd 2010 On this auspicious 40th anniversary of Earth Day I would like to take a moment and reflect not only on how important Earth Day is to our growing awareness of how important Mother Earth is to our quality of life but also to reflect on our own evolution and perhaps even speculate on what one possible future may bring.
Earth Day did not just happen, it was an eight year journey seeded in the grass root movements growing from the Viet Nam war and the clash of the Industrialists and Bankers with a generation awakening to new possibilities and how futile a future would be as nations squabble over limited resources, oil, water, food, land.
While I hear often about the superiority of Man to the animal world it is quite apparent that we have only just begun to mature as a species, and while Man is not the first animal to use tools, we are the first to learn to cultivate. (See the evolution of Neolithic man) I would note for those of us who love dogs that the original Grey Wolf that gave birth to Man’s best friend the Canis Familiaris roughly 12 to 15 thousand years ago – also coincides with the first period of Neolithic man. This is the period where man started the earliest form of agriculture – it is this point in which I would like to reference the formation of Earth Day to current man.
You see in the moment we began to realize our Earth has only limited resources and regardless of how powerful our war machines are that mankind could never survive within a closed system; we would eventually just run out of energy, food, water.
1970 was the year of my High School graduation and I remember clearly helping to organize our first Earth Day event in Fairbanks Alaska – we got the Mayor, and several business and political leaders all to come and speak. It set a tone for our generation to begin the task of taking the reins on our political, government, business, and leadership roles being handed to us from our previous generation, we put men on the moon, we finally realized the Universe did not originate from a single “Big Bang”, that we are in fact but a small grain of sand in a much larger and infinite Universe; of sorts Mankind has finally discovered that we are just part of a virtually limitless Universe. You would be hard pressed to speak with anyone with a background in Physics to tell you otherwise.
What does this all mean?
In the late 90’s I learned about a financial development method called the Keiretsu, a form of cooperative capitalism that was used to help rebuild the Japanese economy following WWII. The concept that working together would build stronger business has become the solution for world leaders and has become the next stage of Man Kind.
Only through “Cooperatizim” (and yes I invented a new word here) will we succeed in breaching the problems of limited sources of energy, food, water; and only through our future generations, education, and support for innovation will we achieve these goals.