Feel the Earth on Earth Day
It’s not so hard to put down your phone and connect with your planet
Written in collaboration with Carl Safina
This Earth Day month, Americans did something they don’t usually do: They remembered that we all live on a planet called Earth.
On April 8th from about three pm and for an hour or so, tens of millions of us put down our phones and let a few emails go by, donned special glasses, and craned our heads toward the heavens.
And then we watched as the shadow of a small, lifeless, strangely familiar world passed across the overwhelming glare of our great neighborhood luminary. The cosmic platform had been poised for suspense as the sun cast itself in all its limelight while the moon snuck onto stage unseen before overtaking the literal star of the show to play a cameo that made us rethink our whole existence. A bravado performance. All of us briefly silently suspended in the Zen of a Venn diagram. And over too soon.
Social media purport to link us to one another and lead us to the “awesome.” What we really need is awe.
There was no good answer to the extremely strange coincidence that our little moon, so close, is positioned exactly to cast a patch of…
