Earth Day Reflections

People tell me I’m loud. I’ll get passionate about an idea, and my volume starts increasing. As Microsoft’s Chief Environmental Officer, I do what I’m passionate about: working to protect and sustain Earth’s natural systems.

So, it might seem strange that on April 22 – Earth Day – I tend to go quiet. A day dedicated to conversation around what I’m most passionate about. On Earth Day I stop, step back, and reflect on what has come before and what needs to come next.

I will (mostly) put my laptop away, walk in the woods with my family, and spend the day reminding myself why I do all this in the first place. I’ll be trying, as hard as I can, to see the world with the same eyes I did when I was a kid wandering around outside, wondering how nature worked.

I know a bit more now than I did then, but I still have a lot to learn.

I’ll be spending time looking back at the past year at Microsoft – a year unlike any other, in which we accelerated Microsoft’s ambitions and goals and defined our company commitments to operate as a carbon negative, water positive, zero waste company protecting more land than it uses and operating the infrastructure of a planetary computer, all by 2030.

More importantly, I’ll be helping plan for how we deliver on these commitments. We have already started making progress on our carbon, water, and waste goals, and just last week shared a small glimpse of what we have been developing with our Planetary Computer platform. But we have so much work ahead – maturing markets, progressing policy, digitizing data, recognizing risk, setting standards, and investing in innovation. Ensuring those enabling conditions exist by 2030 is a core requirement for Microsoft, and the world, to meet its goals.

I’ll also be listening and learning that day by engaging with the growing Worldwide Sustainability employee community within Microsoft and taking a virtual tour of Sustainability City in Minecraft with the Xbox team.

And, with this post, I’ll be asking as many people as possible to do one simple thing: to find the reason that engaging is important to you and organize your actions around it. I work to understand nature because I’m curious, and I work to protect it because I care. I care about making the world a better place. I care about people – my family as well as people whom I’ve never met. And so, I care for our planet.

Our environmental crisis is terrifying, but solvable. Climate change threatens the very premise of modern society – the human ability to make long-term predictions about our environment – and will impact every individual and organization on earth. The world is getting a late start on doing anything about it. But we have the knowledge, we have the ability, and now we just need the willpower. I ask you to find the reason you care because willpower is only sustainable if it’s deeply internalized.

On April 22, I hope you will join me, if just for a minute, in some quiet reflection. And on April 23, in embarking on another 364 days of action.