The phrase “Love Earth” has built into it that the Earth is alive, and can respond to our love, and can love us back in her way. She has given us our miraculous bodies. We are made of the material of the Earth, the electric storms in our thoughts and dreams and the rhythmic ocean waves of our hearts.
At the beginning of my talk with the Love Earth crowds I wanted to have common ground with the 20,000 folks out there. I said “Aren’t we all walking around with the same feeling, that we are in mortal danger? Our physical environment is burning, drowning, crashing, life is disappearing everywhere, people are walking thousands of miles because they can’t farm anymore…. Yes? And what are we doing with all this violence engulfing the Earth? What are we doing? Shaking it off?
Lots of the 20,000 heads were nodding, signaling “yes….” and some people even responded to my “Earthalujah” shout. We ARE walking around with a shared dread. Hey you Contrarian reader – am I telling the truth?
For the last 3 years, basically since Covid, the Earth has entered a time of destruction that is so extreme that… if this isn’t “The End of the World” than what would you call it? Every month the wind is stronger, the waves are higher, the lava spits and the glaciers melt…. In the last month Hurricanes Otis and Beryl went from 50 mph wind-speed to 190 mph in a single day. Unheard of acceleration to Category 5, but the media reports are very ho-hum.
No-one seems to care that much. How can this be? We are IN the apocalypse that they always warned us about. IT’S HAPPENING. Isn’t it time for millions of us to rise up and shout “Emergency”, like the mass movement of Black Lives Matter. Can the fossil banks and oil companies continue with their extraction and pollution? …and the industrial agriculture poisons, the destruction of habitats, the built-in toxins in consumer products…. We can see who the criminals are, it is so obvious. What the hell is going on?
Debra White Plume from the Lakota people made a prophecy about 50 years ago. She said that: “The Earth will have a time of rebalancing, adjusting. Much energy will be released. And the Earth will invite humans to join her in this time of necessary violence…. The Earth will leave an opening for humans to walk through. Some humans will come to be with her. But after a time the pathway will close, and the humans who did not walk through it, will disappear.”
We are locked in the fundamentalism of the Enlightenment and the origins of the industrial revolution 400 years ago. “I think therefore I am”. When western man uploaded his body’s intelligence into his brain and his brain became the center of the universe. Colonization, extraction, racism was off to the races. The anti-Earth impulse can be dated to farther back than that, but there seems to be a ultra-fundamentalism against nature that spread to all the nations, their religions and violent explorers.
What hope is there? We have a song in the Stop Shopping Choir, “Can we be strange enough to change enough?” Turning this thing around will take some hair-raising tactics building on and going beyond the throwing tomato soup on Van Gogh’s sunflowers or spiking trees to keep the loggers away.
We have not known how to walk through that opening to join the Earth. Much of our toxicity is invisible, like PFAS chemicals from 3M, and Glyphosates from Bayer and PCP’s from Monsanto. These poisons could have been stopped based on the evidence, but so much life would have survived if they could have been stopped by an intuitive love for the Earth.
The phrase “Love Earth” has built into it that the Earth is alive, and can respond to our love, and can love us back in her way. She has given us our miraculous bodies. We are made of the material of the Earth, the electric storms in our thoughts and dreams, the rhythmic ocean waves of our hearts.
The Earth has her own kind of intelligence, and her own kind of feelings. We can’t slow down the destruction of the Earth with unfeeling things, like lots of data. We need something more than scary scientific studies. We need to walk through that opening. Embrace the Earth. She put love in our souls for a reason. Let’s say Yes! to the invitation that the Earth has offered us.