We are calling for people to contribute a short (under 3 minute), live (or at least presented in real time) “piece” — to be delivered from your webcam to our live broadcast beginning at noon EDT on Earth Day — dealing with the imagined “meeting” of the coronavirus pandemic with climate change.
Think of them as two waves: a tidal wave we can more or less see on our horizon coming to meet an even larger, slower wave that has been arriving for decades. What happens when the first (which may or may not be a child of the second) meets the second?
And think of ourselves looking back from 50 years on — from the perspective of Earth Day, 2070 (which we are christening Ecotopia Day) — and telling the story of how “everything changed” when this happened.
Coronavirus and climate change do not “meet” in real life, of course. As I’ve argued, the current pandemic is causally related to the human encroachment on wildlife spaces, which itself is part of the mega-wave we call the Anthropocene (the Capitalocene, the Homogenocene, the Plantationocene, et al).
The call is here. EcoCultureLab will string together a schedule of successful proposals into a live event, a “virtual human chain,” that will last (we think) an hour or perhaps two, depending on what happens between now and then. Everyone can join to watch it on Earth Day, beginning at noon Eastern Daylight (New York City) Time / 4 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time. Details on how to watch it will be provided here. Creativity welcome!