A Vision for Earth Day 2030
By: Daniel Nelson
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Covid 19, Wellness, Startup, Sustainability

On January 1st, 2020, we expected to usher in a new decade of global economic prosperity — a modern day version of the roaring 20s that occurred a century earlier. By April 2020, just three months later, this aspiration could not feel more out of touch with reality.

We are currently experiencing a once-in-a-century global health pandemic: COVID-19 is wreaking havoc across the planet. Beyond the evident health implications of the virus, the global economy is experiencing an unprecedented challenge. As of April 22, 2020, more than 3 of the 7.8 billion people on the planet are currently in some form of lockdown. The globally interconnected economic system as we know it is being threatened at its core.

Upon the outset of the pandemic, we tried to compare this crisis to the recession of 2008. However, a look under the hood revealed the two situations aren’t exactly similar. In 2008, the crisis we had was entirely financial: the government’s intervention in our banking system was able to reboot the economy and ignite 11 subsequent years of prosperity. In 2020, we aren’t facing a financial shock — we’re experiencing an economic disruption. Supply and demand in most industries have come to a complete and utter halt. The only way to remedy this crisis, albeit temporarily, is to artificially prop up supply and demand, which is exactly what the US government did by passing a series of relief packages.

In 2008, it was clear that restoring trust in the financial system would restore our economy. In 2020, it’s becoming clearer every day that normalcy won’t return until people have faith in our collective ability to handle COVID-19: whether that requires the availability of a viable treatment or vaccine remains to be seen.

Fast forward 10 years down the line to 2030. What will have changed?

It’s probably safe to assume that a vaccine will have been developed early on in the decade, allowing us to try to restore what remains from our pre-COVID-19 world. We saw something similar happen after 2008: most industries were not fundamentally altered as the economy began to recover. The biggest change from the 2008 recession was the emergence of a slew of tech unicorns — Airbnb, Uber, Slack, Dropbox, Square, and more — that would come to reshape the way we interacted with the world around us. Entrepreneurs were able to take the burning idea they wanted to pursue and actually do it — ideas that were based on assumptions held in the pre-recession world. For example, they saw a world where people would now use technology to stay in a home instead of a hotel, or ride with a stranger instead of hailing a cab. Even though these companies led the post-recession recovery during the 2010s, nothing about our lives was truly altered at the core.

However, the nature of 2020 crisis is causing us to ask more fundamental questions about the world around us and where we are heading. When we envision a post-pandemic future, we aren’t thinking about how to improve our pre-COVID-19 lives; rather, we are thinking about what our world will look like in the next normal. Will we care more about global public health and shift resources towards preventing the next outbreak? Will we reduce the amount we travel, from our daily commutes to regular business trips? Will we begin to take other existential threats we are facing, like climate change, more seriously?

I believe that questions like these will inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs to reshape the post-COVID-19 world in a more significant way than we experienced after 2008. Tackling meaningful questions that have larger-than-life implications, entrepreneurs will create mission-driven organizations to power through the uncertainty we are facing today. They will challenge assumptions held in a pre-COVID-19 world with refreshing new messages, rebuilding society from the ground up to realize the bright future we expected the 2020s to bring.

As an entrepreneur, I am excited to take part in redefining how the post-COVID-19 world will function. My co-founder and I both wondered why we, as healthy adults with normal daily routines, experienced constant foot and back pain. Extensive research taught us that we weren’t alone: 80% of US adults have back pain and 75% have foot pain. How could living this way be an acceptable reality?

We spoke to medical experts around the world and learned that most of these issues start with our unsupportive footwear. In fact, nearly all of the shoes we wear come with flat, cheap inserts that are essentially comfortable cushions, lacking the actual arch support that our bodies need to maintain proper alignment. Yet, we all know we need arch support — we’ve been hearing this our entire lives. My co-founder and I began to ask questions: why aren’t the shoes we wear good for our bodies?

We also learned that the footwear industry accounts for 1.4% of global carbon emissions. Although that may not sound like a lot upon first glance, the entire aviation industry accounts for 2% of global emissions. Think about that: the plastics and foams we use to make footwear is nearly as detrimental for our planet as the emissions created from operating tens of thousands of flights across the globe each day. We continued to ask questions: why aren’t the shoes we wear good for our planet?

As entrepreneurs looking into the future from April 2020, we don’t think people will accept many of the realities that exist today in a post-COVID-19 world. We are building our company, Atlas, because we believe that footwear should be good for our bodies and for our environment. By 2030, we believe that people will be wearing supportive, sustainable footwear: simply put, it won’t make sense to wear shoes that are bad for us and it won’t be socially acceptable to produce shoes that are bad for our planet.

We don’t know when this pandemic will end, but we do know that it will end. And when it ends, things won’t be the same. I would like to challenge other entrepreneurs to reflect on how the world will be different in 10 years and dig deeply into what factors will drive these changes. Then, create a roadmap, and build an organization that takes shape in parallel to our own roaring 20s.

Even though the world is not in the condition we hoped it would be by Earth Day 2020, I believe the current crisis has kicked off an amazing opportunity for future entrepreneurs. The pandemic caused us to begin asking the right questions: a process that will lead to identifying the right problems and building the right solutions. And with that, we will redefine normalcy, and pave the way for a much more prosperous Earth Day 2030.