The Love This Place! Story Mapping Challenge: Crowdsourcing Compassion for Mother Earth

by | Apr 21, 2015 | Earth Week, For Self, For the Earth, Ways to Play

Announcing the
Love This Place! Story Mapping Challenge
for Serve the Earth Week!

In celebration of the Earth and our connection to all life, we invite you to play with us starting now and through the end of Earth Week in the Compassion Games “Love This Place! Story Mapping Challenge!“.  Join us as we crowdsource our love for the Earth and turn it into compassionate action for the benefit of all living beings!

Here is how the Story Mapping Challenge works:
Sit for a moment and reflect on a place in nature that brings you a sense of joy, wholeness, awe, or even peace. It could be a special place in a park or a forest, a garden, or even your backyard. Do you have a special place picked out? Are you picturing yourself there? Wonderful!

Research tells us that just by imagining this special place in the natural world, your autonomic nervous system has calmed down and you’ve given a boost to your immune system, which is incredible! Good work…

Next, take or find a photo of this place and upload it to the Love This Place! Story Map. Here you can tell your story about why you “Love This Place!” where it will join the stories of people from around the planet!

If we can challenge ourselves to collect 1,000 of these “love” stories, we will expand the Story Mapping Compassion Game to include connecting players to care for these special places, transforming our love into compassionate action for the Earth and all her inhabitants! Special thanks to our friends at Esri who have generously supported the Compassion Games.

Are you up for the challenge? Will you help by sharing your stories to get us there by the end of the Serve the Earth Week Coopetition on Sunday, April 26th?!

Let’s awaken our innate biophilia, or “love of life”, in people everywhere so that we can turn our love for these places into effectively caring for them!

What Do You Mean by Crowdsourcing Love for Compassionate Action?

The Internet has opened new possibilities for how we might share and uplift one another. There are many examples of linking and harnessing our collective intelligence as a species in this global, informational age. Think Wikipedia.

We’ve also seen this collective power applied to our financial capital to crowd-fund projects and initiatives that “we the people” deem worthy. Think crowdfunding platforms like KickStarter, IndieGoGo, or GoFundMe.

Well the Earth, our natural capital, is in great peril due to our collective activities and ways of existing on this planet that are incompatible with life. Can we change how we collectively act and relate to each other and the Earth, doing things differently so things will really be different?  Can we change the game from making “more” to making life better for us all?

The Compassion Games are about changing the games we play by ourselves and together. So when it comes to serving our Mother Earth, we ask… “Can we use the technical and social power of crowdsourcing to crowdsource the goodness that’s needed to protect and care for the places we love?” We certainly believe so!

Add your places and stories to the Story Map to start a conversation, a fire. Share these stories with your friends and your family. Encourage them to think of the places on Earth they love, bringing forth an awareness of the love within us for the planet we depend on so that we are inspired to see the Earth protected and cared for!

Add Your Places to the Story Map Here!

“Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, in his cities of steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water and the growing seed. Intoxicated with a sense of his own power, he seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world.

There is certainly no single remedy for this condition and I am offering no panacea. But it seems reasonable to believe — and I do believe — that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.”

– Rachel Carson, Author of “Silent Spring”