David Houle - The Five Contexts of the Shift Age (Entering the Shift Age, eBook 3)

The first large context through which we must view the Shift Age is that the twenty-first century is the Earth Century.

Humanity has entered the twenty-first century with a rapidly growing awareness that it is having a significant effect on Earth. Environmental awareness, climate change, drought, record heat, and extreme weather are all showing us that something dire is going on with our planet.

And there is increasing evidence that we are causing this adverse effect on Earth. This understanding will shape a great deal of the change we experience in the Shift Age.

A Quick Look Back

Earth Day was first celebrated in 1970. This event, to some degree, was a result of the question Stewart Brand asked in the late 1960s: Why havent we seen a picture of the whole earth? Then we had the classic earthrise photo taken from an Apollo spacecraft in 1968. What we all saw stunned us. There, in the midst of infinite blackness, was this beautiful blue and green planet we call home. It looked so finite, and indeed fragile, that we understood the name Spaceship Earth. Alone in the midst of infinite space was our home, our only home.

This photo arguably launched the environmental movement, with Earth Day 1970 being a formal beginning. This environmental mindset took a while to take off, however.

Then, in the 1990s and into this century, environmental consciousness exploded. As a Baby Boomer parent, I marveled at the commitment my young son had to recycling. It showed me that a new generation was being raised with embedded environmental awareness that was far more fully developed than any I had known prior to the first Earth Day.

When Al Gore came out with his Inconvenient Truth presentation and film in 2006, it was clear that this awareness had gone beyond the new younger generation, the hardcore environmental movement, and a growing body of scientists. While this event, and to some degree Mr. Gore himself, triggered a backlash, the direction was clear.

All of us, to a greater or lesser degree, were now living in both the conversation about mans effect on Earth and that developing reality.

Helping to Shape the Thinking

In early 2006, I started my blog Evolutionshift, with the tag line A Future Look at Today. In the first two to three years I wrote a lot about energy, alternative energy, climate change, and other environmental issues. I became known early on as a thought shaper regarding such topics, which led to invitations to attend conferences and to speak. A few years later, when blogs had truly gone mainstream, I started to get lots of in-bound solicitations to write about this new green product or that new LEED certified building, to review a new book on some environmental subject, or perhaps to interview a scientist or environmental entrepreneur. In other words, I had gotten on the larger PR radar as someone with an audience who should be pitched stories and interviews.

A thought shaper is a person who creates, shapes and drives the perspectives and discussions surrounding various ideas and thoughts.

In 2011, all of this simply became too much. Though Earth Day was in late April, I started to get pitched story ideas for columns around Earth Day starting in early March. By early April there were half a dozen inbound solicitations every day. All of these folks seemed to think that their product was a great green product and that Earth Day was a great marketing hook or tent pole. Earth Day was perceived as a marketing event. This prompted a strong reaction in me.

In my Earth Day column that year, I spoke of my disgust with this view and said that Earth Day was not a marketing event, that it was no longer an Earth Day, an Earth Month, or even an Earth Year. While Earth Decade was somewhat more palatable, I basically said that we all had to think differently and that what we really needed to do was to think of the twenty-first century as the Earth Century, thereby coining a phrase I have used ever since. In that column I wrote:

The twenty-first 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.