WHERE DO WE COME FROM? WHAT ARE WE? WHERE ARE WE GOING?
OPEN’s Planetary Repair Service
A James T. McKnight Legacy Initiative
Building the Foundations for Planetary Repair
OPEN and its partner organizations design and deploy environmental and agricultural sensor networks, AI-enabled data platforms, and hands-on STEM programs — active today across the Caribbean, Africa, the United States, France, and Australia.
Planetary Repair is the long-horizon extension of that work: a multi-generational effort to repair Earth’s life-support systems, coordinated across the many organizations already tackling pieces of it. If your organization is doing this work, we would like to hear from you.
Contact Us to PartnerWhat We Do Today
OPEN works at the intersection of environmental science, education, and applied technology. Across multiple countries, we and our partner companies design and deploy:
Environmental and agricultural sensor networks (focusing on soil remediation, water conservation, increasing yields using natural farming practices, weather/climate systems and air quality monitoring, improving disaster response, and protecting biodiversity and ecosystems).
AI-enabled IoT data platforms that turn all this raw data into usable insights.
A hands-on STEM program for sustainable community development where students and teachers build, program and deploy air quality sensors, teaming with other local schools guided by OPEN and partners.
Field-tested solutions operating in schools, gardens, farms, and urban environments.
Training and capacity-building for educators, farmers, communities, and institutions.
Our approach is deliberately practical: measure first, learn together, act locally, share globally. Each partner organization contributes and operates the technology it builds best.
OPEN’s work also helps close the knowledge gap, making environmental data accessible to students and professionals alike and embedding science and technology directly into STEM, the arts, and the humanities. Environmental literacy, data literacy, and systems thinking are now core civic skills. We connect local community action to global understanding, giving the next generation real tools and a multigenerational perspective on how they are used.
Why Coordination Is the Missing Piece
The challenges facing our planet are no longer abstract: food insecurity, environmental pollution, disastrous climate change impacts, biodiversity loss, and uneven access to knowledge and opportunity. They are present in our cities, our schools, our farms, our waterways, and our communities.
Environmental problems do not respect borders. Yet the responses to them are often fragmented.
Responses are separated by discipline, geography, funding category, or institutional mandate. Many organizations are addressing important pieces of the environmental puzzle. But the scale and duration of the challenge call for deeper coordination, longer time horizons, and shared frameworks.
This is what we call a Planetary Repair Service: a long-horizon, multi-generational approach to repairing Earth’s life-support systems, while rethinking how humanity learns, builds, and sustains itself. It is not a departure from our current work but a natural extension of it. We see OPEN’s current projects as beachheads: practical, proven starting points that show what becomes possible when education, environmental monitoring, and technology work together.
What Partnering Looks Like
Planetary Repair is built from the work organizations are already doing. We are not asking anyone to change direction. We are building the coordination layer that lets separate efforts add up to more than their parts.
Technology partners
Companies building sensing, data, or AI platforms, contributing and operating what they build best within a shared framework.
Schools and universities
Institutions bringing students into real environmental measurement, and researchers who need field data at scale.
Environmental organizations
Groups already doing remediation work, who gain shared frameworks, coordination, and a longer time horizon.
Communities and policymakers
Those closest to the problems, and those able to act on what the data shows.
If you believe that repairing our planet will take both practical action now and sustained collaboration over time, we would like to hear how your work might connect. The work of planetary repair has already begun. It is needed. The open questions are how it will be carried forward, and with whom.
Annual Planetary Repair Conferences
Coordination between environmental groups is carried forward through annual Planetary Repair conferences, both physical and virtual. These gatherings take place in beautiful remote settings, such as the Olympic Peninsula in Port Townsend with OPEN’s partner United Earth Networks (UEN), moving around the planet every few years.
Future conferences will also take place in some of the most polluted environments on Earth, with field trips into these human wastelands to give a first-hand sense of how grave the situation is. Now is the time to map this out, with the assistance of AI and of human experts across environmental, technical, scientific, and policy domains.
To be notified about the next Planetary Repair conference, or about UEN’s Global Earth Repair Convergence programme, write to us at info@oneplaneteducation.com.
Call to Arms: AI for Planetary Repair
Our founder’s case for why artificial intelligence should be enlisted in this work, and what that would ask of us.
We must enlist AI as a long-term partner in Planetary Repair. Its first task is to help us align and coordinate the hundreds, if not thousands, of disparate and well-intentioned environmental initiatives under one Planetary Repair Service umbrella. From there we can partner with AI, in its current pre-AGI form, to tackle environmental problems A through Z into the near and far future.
Let us show this generation of AI what humans are capable of when we put our minds, our bodies, and our full commitment behind a multigenerational cleanup effort. The evolution of AI and the job market over the next five to ten years is genuinely unpredictable. That is all the more reason to make a species-wide commitment now, and to create a new sector of work enlisting AI for the most important task of our times: planetwide environmental remediation.
Economists and policymakers are still debating how societies will absorb the disruption ahead, from large-scale retraining to broader forms of income support. Whatever they conclude, committed citizens, young and old, from every corner of the Earth will be encouraged to join this quest. We may soon be living alongside AGI and superintelligence. Now is the time to build the foundation for working with AI in the form it takes today, combining human creativity and out-of-the-box thinking with targeted, customized AIs aimed at each significant environmental issue.
Join the Initiative
For those who sense that the challenge, and the opportunity, is larger still, we invite you to explore our evolving work on Planetary Repair — long-term frameworks for environmental remediation, cross-disciplinary and cross-border collaboration, and a thoughtful reckoning with the impacts of AI now and into the future.
We are also developing new models for convening scientists, educators and their students, communities, policymakers, and OPEN’s strategic partners, so that Planetary Repair is better coordinated and can be sustained.
Contact Us to Partner