Earth Day has been celebrated since about 1970. There's a well worn cliché that "Every day is earth day". Well maybe, maybe not. It depends on what you mean by Earth Day. It's been a good tool to raise awareness over the years, but one thing is clear. Spending one of every 365.25 days on a ritual celebration of our relationship to the earth, often with plenty of green washing corporate sponsorship, has not been sufficient to awaken most people to the urgency of our current situation.

It took thousands of years of civilization, but here at the end of the first decade of the 21st century A.D. we find ourselves in the impressive, albeit not enviable, position of having tinkered with things so drastically that we are teetering on the absolute brink of destroying the ability of the planet to sustain our species, along with a lot of innocent bystander species. These are the days. These are the days when we can no longer hem and haw and hope smarter people than us will figure a way out of this mess. There are no smarter people coming. We need to use the ones we have. And they are telling us to get deadly serious about slowing the impacts of global warming right here, right now.

This is the century that will make or break the human race as we know it. We didn't all intend to break the systems down so badly, we just mostly didn't think about it very much for the past few hundred centuries. Although to be fair to our pre-industrial revolution ancestors, we've really only gotten serious about mucking it up in the past few hundred years. But now we're very good at damaging the environment on a massive scale and we are sadly inexperienced in the fix the damage department. This is the century where we need to wise up or let our children pay the consequences. And I say children in the literal sense, not as a metaphor. We can't get away with that metaphor anymore, reality caught up to us.

This is the century, this is the time in the century, where we must repay our ancestors for the damage we've done and make a pledge of serious accountability to our descendants. This is the Earth Century. Earth Day is just one day.