
How a little prince can inspire 8 billion gardeners to clean up the Earth

Summary
- As our planet gets less habitable, the idea has popped up of moving to Mars while we give it a good scrub. ‘The Little Prince,’ though, offers a better idea: Let’s all tend to our little part of it.
Have you ever looked at your house and thought, “This place needs a complete makeover?"
You know the drill—pack your bags, move to a hotel, let the professionals work their magic, and return to your freshly renovated paradise. Simple.
Now, let’s apply that same logic to Earth. Maybe what works for a three-bedroom apartment in downtown Mumbai will work perfectly for an entire planet.
But hold on.
Why do we need to do this at all? Because every minute, we dump a garbage truck’s worth of plastic into our oceans, a trend set to reach 29 million tonnes annually by 2040.
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Meanwhile, our forests are vanishing at an alarming rate. In 2023, global tree cover loss was equivalent to losing an area larger than New Zealand in just one year—or 28 trees per minute.
The WWF has identified 11 critical deforestation areas that will account for over 80% of global forest loss by 2030, potentially reaching 170 million hectares. These areas contain some of the richest and most unique biodiversity on Earth; their loss is equivalent to destroying 80% of a 100-page book representing Earth's forests.
Our carbon footprint is equally troubling.
In 2023, we emitted a record 37.4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. Conservatively, it would take between 30 and 45 trees to offset 1 tonne of CO2 annually. As you can see, the issues are interlinked in a complex web of cause and effect.
By 2030, plastic-related emissions could reach 1.34 gigatonnes per year, equivalent to the emissions from over 295 new 500MW coal-fired power plants, while tropical deforestation alone means almost 5 billion extra tonnes of greenhouse gases annually.
Think of Earth as a bathtub. Deforestation clogs the drainage, plastic pollution fills it with toxic sludge, and carbon emissions blast all the hot water taps.
We’re racing towards an overflow point, threatening irreversible damage to our planetary home.
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Like overwhelmed homeowners, some of us are reported to be considering the most logical solution: hop over to Mars while we give Earth a good scrubbing.
Like sending your kids to grandma’s while you clean their room, except ‘grandma’s house’ is a radiation-soaked red planet 225 million km away.
Let’s crunch some numbers.
Moving 8 billion people to Mars would cost somewhere in the quadrillions. A quadrillion needs you to count one number per second, with no breaks for eating, sleeping or TikTok, for 31.7 million years.
And the timeline?
Even if we launched a SpaceX Starship daily, moving everyone would take about 219,000 years. By then, we’ll have evolved enough not to need spaceships anyway. Who knows, we’ll probably teleport, Star Trek style, or have grown wings by then.
But just as I was getting excited about this extraordinary idea, I found myself watching a performance of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.
Here was this little guy who kept his tiny asteroid clean by pulling out baobab sprouts daily, tending to his volcanoes and caring for his rose. There are no billion-dollar budgets or grand plans. Just old-fashioned wisdom hiding in plain sight.
The Little Prince Approach is simple yet elegant. An earth clean-up can be everyone’s story. Instead of treating Earth like a house that needs professional renovators, see it as a garden that needs all its inhabitants to tend to it.
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Make planetary care as natural as watering a rose. This is societal thinking at planet scale.
What it requires is:
Personal connection: Just as the prince’s rose became special because he cared for it, each person can develop a unique bond with their piece of Earth.
Local action: Instead of waiting for grand solutions, start with your own little ‘asteroid’: your home, your street and your community.
Shared responsibility: Like the prince cleaning his volcanoes daily, everyone has a small but crucial role.
This is decentralized environmental care at its finest. Every person becomes a steward of their own little piece of the planet, creating a network of millions of small but meaningful actions.
The Little Prince would not have seen 8 billion people as a problem to relocate; he’d see 8 billion potential caretakers.
The solution isn’t about escaping to Mars or waiting for global initiatives.
It’s about understanding, as the fox taught, that “what is essential is invisible to the eye." The power to heal our planet lies in millions of tiny, daily acts of environmental ownership multiplied across billions of people.
Is it idealistic? Perhaps. But remember, it was adults who thought a drawing of an elephant inside a boa constrictor was a hat. Sometimes, it takes a child’s wisdom to see the obvious solution we adults miss.
Instead of planning the most complicated cosmic evacuation since the plot of Wall-E, we should take a page from the Little Prince’s book.
After all, as he would say, the time you spend caring for your planet makes your planet unique to you. And 8 billion people caring for their unique piece of Earth? Now, wouldn’t that be something? One that costs less than a Mars ticket, requires no space suits and has a chance of working before the sun goes supernova.
Besides, Mars is looking a bit dusty these days. And we definitely do not want to clean up two planets.
The author is a technology advisor and podcast host.