Max Gladwell

Celebrating Earth Day and the honorary date of Max Gladwell’s birth.

First, we want to thank everyone across the Max Gladwell network for their warm wishes. Today is Earth Day, a global celebration of the environmental ethos. Not coincidentally, it is also Max Gladwell’s symbolic (some might say spiritual) birthday.

As most hopefully realize, Max Gladwell is a brand. It’s a persona. It represents an ideal and a worldview. This unique positioning was driven in part by the nature of social media and the need for Max Gladwell to engage on that level. We’ve always maintained full transparency on this, though it’s understandable some could be mistaken. (Truth be told, it lets us know which PR flaks don’t actually read the blog when they address their e-mail pitches to Max.)

When we launched MaxGladwell.com on April 2nd, 2008, we built out a network of profiles across the social web including Facebook, MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon, and many (many) more. These profiles often require specific demographic information as part of the terms of service (not to mention ad targeting). You often don’t have the choice but to enter a date of birth. And while we could have chosen any Earth Day for Max Gladwell’s honorary birthday, the inaugural made sense for a several reasons (none of which include appearing young, of course).

It was a conscious choice to position Max Gladwell at the heart of Generation X, which is often defined as those born between 1961 and 1981. This generation came of age during the rise and peak of what we call Environment 1.0. It would also witness its downfall.

The first version of environmentalism was launched on April 22nd, 1970, when 20 million people celebrated the first Earth Day. The environmental movement transitioned out of beta, if you will.

We lived through the founding and creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the extension of the Clean Air Act. Environmental nonprofits quickly proliferated, taking strong positions against the Man as well as the Machine. The overall sentiment was opposition: anti-business and anti-government but also anti-person. This followed in the spirit of the ’60s counterculture and protests against the Vietnam war. That was how things were done. It was how the youth at the time was trained to deal with things that seemed wrong and out of their control. Except that the problem they saw was not an unjust war or civil rights. It was us. We were the problem.

To wit, see this poster from the first Earth Day:

(Pogo via Walt Kelley and Red Green and Blue)

There was clearly some tremendous guilt and self-loathing going on, which can never be productive. And this carried on for the better part of four decades.

The launch of Environment 2.0 occurred sometime toward the middle of this decade. We give partial credit to Adam Werbach, who gave a speech on December 8th, 2004, where he proclaimed that environmentalism was dead. In hindsight, it was just down for maintenance while the new version was being released.

This corresponded with the time when we began to get a true sense for the problems of energy and global warming. We started to grapple with the carbon problem, and we started looking for solutions. We looked to technology and innovation, whether through hard science or information technology, to address these issues. We looked to the market mechanisms of supply and demand, scarcity and abundance, investment and return. The problem was not people. It was carbon. The problem was that we relied on unsustainable systems and that we were allowing pollution to compromise our vital ecosystems. Sure, humans were responsible for all of it. But we weren’t the problem. In fact, we’re the solution.

Generation X (along with the Baby Boomers) has had to go through the process of upgrading their environmental firmware to this next version. For the Millennial Generation, however, it’s their native environment. They are coming of age in Environment 2.0, where people are the solution. Where the virtues of collaboration, transparency, partnerships, and ingenuity are written into the program and where they are more connected to one another (via social media) than any previous generation.

So while Max Gladwell represents Generation X and all we’ve been through, our sensibilities with respect to media and the environment lean much more Millennial.

This is the story behind Max Gladwell’s (B)Earth Day, and we look forward to celebrating it with you every year. Thanks again for your warm wishes. Please know that we appreciate them and that they were not sent in vain.

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