By: Eric Gundersen
“How will Mapbox react towards employees participating in the climate strike?”
Starting today there are more than 5,000 Climate Strike events in more than 150 countries and every continent, and it’s an honor to map all of them for Climate Strike.
But don’t just protest. Saying what is not working is easy. There is a growing fallacy that standing up and “taking action” today is based on what we should not be doing. Take the time today and say what we need to be doing. And what you are going to do. Do something. Keep doing it. It’s not just the mentality: We all need to fix root problems. The day in, day out grind is rewarding when we’re building something — doing something.
Society is always going to have enormous changes — economical, ecological, and technological. You don’t get progress just by protesting, you have to build the tools that bit by bit make things a little better — tools for visualizing the location of clean (and conventional) energy projects, to education and mobilization, disaster response, tracking active storms and measuring their intensity with AI, and defeating oil extraction in court to protect indigenous forests.
A few months after the 2002 protests, Ian Ward and I tried to do something, started mapping, and setup Development Seed — and a few years later, we started an internal project to open our mapping tools to the world and bought the domain mapbox.com.
I added in that Slack thread: “People should give their team a heads up so folks can adjust plans sooner than later. Can’t wait to see the pictures. And who knows, you might find some of these shots 17 years later, and be proud about what you stood for and who you stood with.”
Eric Gundersen - CEO - Mapbox | LinkedIn
Climate Strike: Be loud, be seen, do something was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.