From Reverend Billy

I jaywalked across Brooklyn Avenue, one of the famous Avenues of Death where bicyclists and pedestrians perish, and I was quickly trapped in a flood of metal on a little island halfway across, with a patch of exhausted grass and some trees, three trees, standing there like a family.

I looked at the trees and before I could check my mouth I’d said, “There’s a wind, you feel it? No? Didn’t I …

The city is hollowed out by police and AI and luxury towers. If we have a dream of marching for the survival of the Earth, than we force outselves into a milaritized space, where men with guns surround us and our constitutional right to sing songs, denounce the poisoners of the Earth, glorify heroes of love, condemn the billionaire criminals - must be expressed with the risk of shame and arrest….

Then we make the …

AI and Earth-defending Action

The distance between our realization and actualization - has changed and it is a tragic dangerous thing that you and I share. Realizing can come in many forms. With the environmental movement - the realization was the reading of Silent Spring. (For others among us, it was Edward Abbey’s “The Monkey Wrench Gang”) That book by Rachel Carson made the danger from toxic chemicals in the air, water and soil - …

AI and Earth-defending Action

The distance between our realization and actualization - has changed and it is a tragic dangerous thing that you and I share. Realizing can come in many forms. With the environmental movement - the realization was the reading of Silent Spring. (For others among us, it was Edward Abbey’s “The Monkey Wrench Gang”) That book by Rachel Carson made the danger from toxic chemicals in the air, water and soil - …

Sunday, May 31, 2026 at 7:00 PM Eastern.

Savitri has created three new songs, in this time of our activist family's confrontation of JPMorgan Chase, the pollutingest bank in the US. We go to Chase's new $4billion headquarters on Park Avenue each week and sing through megaphones, making echoes in the canyons of finance. We shout like a hurting conscience.


In the case of this top fossil bank, the killer of the Paris Climate Agreement, …

12/9/25

Listen To The Podcast



Scientists Say that We Are At Least 2/3's Invisible

They call 70% of our body - dark matter and dark energy. The experts talk about this part of us the way they talk about outer space.

 
They resent the fact that the tiny particles that make up most of what we are - cannot be measured or photographed. It doesn't register in their sensitive devices. The mysterious particles do …

We wake up with direct questions. What can I do today? Who should I talk to? What do I need to know. We find ourselves in song, and direct relationship with meaning - and the most reliable meaning comes from the Earth. So when you find yourself reeling I suggest going outside. You may also want to come to Joe's Pub, it's a tradition! WE have 3 shows this season- Nov 26, Dec 10 & …

Rev exorcises demons from union-busting Toronto grocery. Photographer unknown.

In the sadness, anger and more sadness... and with the feeling that we are haunted by history, I reach out to our friends in Earthalujahville. Hi...

Allen Ginsberg called the Israelis and Palestinians "Sons of the same God." What seems like such a religious and military clash, also shows in its details the shared values of love of family and the godly life. In the US …

These days everything we do seems to be a conspiracy. Memories are designed for effect. Even children are babbling saturation advertising. Liars concentrate bitterly on truth. Women want control of their bodies. The Earth controls the sky and the sea.

Crackhead Barney invaded Earthchxrch a few days ago. As we say in the Church of Stop Shopping a "very necessary interruption." Please come to the Earthchxrch on Sundays in October at 3pm, 36 Ave C …

September 8, 7PM

TRAILER

At this point in our lives we are shouting or whispering the phrase "Earthalujah" really - all day long. At the end of this 22 minute film "Earth Riot", a recounting of the UK tour with Savi and the choir to COP 26 at Glasgow, Scotland, I shout Earthalujah until I can't anymore, as the choir sings...

Learn the simple, deep pleasure of the Earth. Celebrate it. "Earthalujah!" Then confront the …

When 80 year old trees are murdered and paved over and then police stand where the trees stood. We come looking for rituals of memory in our old park. We climbed and hugged the trees after they were sentenced to death and so we went to jail. And when we get out of jail, we see the rise of the floodwaters of what we call "the Monoculture."

The monoculture eats the most complex and mysterious …

Photo by Francisca Benítez

Defending a London Plane Tree

I was in the Earthchxrch when I got the call from a very upset Savitri - they were cutting the trees. I got there in a half hour, ran past the guard and hugged the tree. Then through the fence Francisca Benítez and Carl Hallberg were belting out the Stop Shopping songs mixed with freedom songs from Civil Rights. I sang along or looked up through …

Tortuguita Imagination Courage THELIVINGFOREST. Death Sex Mutation 6THEXTINCTION. Sky Unity Singing JUSTICE.

Yes, review life again and again, around & around led by the women. Because why are we passive in the face of the interruption of life by fossil fuel profiteers and their police? Our powerful ally is life itself. So let's review. But not Disney's "Circle of Life"... No, let's review with Real Living, which comes out of the bright darkness before birth …

This is the climactic 20 minutes of the Earth Church's service on the 22nd of January, at their home in New York's East Village. Reverend Billy's sermon is "The Earth is Screaming" and the songs by the Stop Shopping Choir are "Change Without Us" "I Go To The Mountain.”

We can joke and cry about it, and find the usual climate criminals in it, but the suffering is the thing.  Our prayers and thoughts are with our friends and loved ones in California. 

The Himalayan mountains are melting and Pakistan is drowning, the heatwaves and blizzards come hotter and colder and stay longer, and now these Atmospheric Rivers are pouring down on the Golden State.  The jetstreams are dislodging the …

Brittney Griner and Alaa Abd el-Fattah speak to us in this Earth Riot, and two women from New Zealand follow up: India and Leila...  

My attempt to translate the Earth's language is guided by these special teachers.  First, I try to leap over Trump's wall, where I have been trapped by my name - William. 

And later in the riot I look for a new kind of media for the message of …

Welcome to these eight songs - Change Without Us.

The gift of our current mass extinction is the Earth’s presentation of life.  Life is offered to us in our months and days and moments.  Life takes the form it always gives us - death is within that life.  These songs are from “the ritual of the riddle”, created in our Earthchurch by three song-makers, Savitri, Sunder and myself.  We always …

No matter how bad the floods and diseases and storms get, most of us here in consumerized America keep basking in gradualism. It isn't really happening...not yet.  

Oh yes it is.  It IS happening.  The Webb telescope images didn't show us more Earths.  We have been living in a gift. Join the Earth Church. Create your personal Earth Church.  Let's be grateful, even if our time is up. Gratitude …

Activism nowadays in the United States comes in huge battles, always surrounded by legions of cops. Black Lives Matter, #metoo, Standing Rock, Abortion Rights. The Times only writes about protests they can see from their windows on Times Square.

Local activism is covered (if at all) by social media and that most sophisticated media of all: the talking and listening of people. But here is the question for activists who are trying to get the …

A Real Dream

I have my own dreams, real dreams, but after I wake up and go down the steps to the front door, I am engulfed in simulated dreams and I lose my real dreams in the copies. I have real dramas, but when I must make an important point I am surrounded by actors and my drama is lost in the professionals. I have real uniqueness but I find myself talking to custom-made …

The Amazon Unionizing and Defending the Earth

"Bees Dance Maps and Plants Eat Light." I read those wonderful words somewhere.  But what do we do?  What should activists do?  Yes of course we want to protect the earth, but protecting our fellow humans is an essential part of it.  There is Earth-defending magic in human justice.  Environmentalists can learn a lot from the community in Staten Island, the …

Three Sides To This War: Ukraine, Russia and the Earth

Animals and plants don’t get a lot of copy when the war reporters address the cameras with their stern faces. The only bit of nature that we can see in the videotapes is the occasional trees reaching up, their branches with imploring gestures as the buildings burn.

War is the most damaging of all the human events for the natural world. War is the human …

Big Oil Stopped by Radical Happiness

The machines that put carbon, methane and nitrous oxide into the air are dismantled by the special power of goodness!

The people who set up the COP climate conference bring oil billionaires and their bankers to a high stakes poker game with defenders of the Earth. The game is rigged, but it takes ten days. That is the essential story of the conference, until now. With the physical environment …

In the Earth Chxrch we keep noticing that right now - the average person has knocked into the weeds. The forces on a planetary scale - corporations, satellites and drones, fundamentalist religions - such large institutions are operating at full speed and the Earth will have none of it. The Earth is completely ignored by the frantic humans.

So we walk around inside this social life that is officially in denial about where we are. …

I try to write in the morning. I am always starting from the same place. I am inside a house with my partner and daughter sleeping. Inside a house on a street that in one block has as many sleepers in the little boxes of their bedrooms - as many people within a stones throw here as there were people in the little towns I grew up in, in South Dakota and Wisconsin and Minnesota.

…

Following on Zohran Mamdani, we are thrilled at the wave of progressive grass roots wins in the current election. Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez and Brad Lander won congressional primaries in the face of vigorous opposition from establishment Democrats.

The Mamdani revolution is about affordability for people outside of the corporate system, which increasingly is not a good job economy. The obvious racial diversity of the Democratic Socailist candidates also stares down the conservative …

When did we start seeing things this way? At some point, the unchallenged feature of our lives was that we could add it up, in numbers, pixels, dollars…. Anything that was the least bit unknowable, that has characteristics that had no explanation - was taken from our view.

And so all the soft, fluid parts of love - grew less and less present in our lives. The old standbys like trust, loyalty, decency, generosity, gentleness… …

By Phil Baker - NYA

Pope Leo XIV warned of the risks of AI and unconstrained technological power in his first major papal document released on Monday. Magnifica Humanitas is the pope’s manifesto on “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence,” in which he discusses the dangers of AI-powered warfare, the effects of AI on labor, and the need for new legal and ethical frameworks to govern technology.

In his papal encyclical …

At the marble-pillared door to New York's Puck building
owned by Jared Kushner, housing the Open AI company.

Sixty of us, shouting at security guards on the steps
with tech bros sneaking in and out, smiling guiltily…

“We don’t want your Chat GPT!
“We don’t want your Chat GPT!

The first job of the billionaire economy
is to keep us in the role of hardcore consumers

But the billionaires have one trick they haven’t solved …

By Jake Offenhartz

Fresh from opening shows for Neil Young, the street preacher Billy Talen has moved on from burning Mickey Mouse in effigy to protesting JPMorgan Chase’s ties to fossil fuels.

A little after midnight on Earth Day, the street preacher Billy Talen dragged his pulpit to the new Norman Foster-designed global headquarters of JPMorgan Chase, on Madison. His self-ordained mission: deliver a twenty-four-hour sermon, calling attention to the bank’s ties to the fossil-fuel …

The month of March 2026 - average USA temp NINE DEGREES ABOVE AVERAGE??? People don't know. It's not getting past the weather channel. In Washington there's a big conference of rightwing folks celebrating the death of the EPA at the same time that the March statistics are hitting the news. The March heat will kill a lot of people, reduce snowpack and water in the west, well, a long list of tragedies there.

I've decided …

Up early, trying to wrap my head around the Earth Day on the 22nd and the Earth Week that surrounds it.

My soul is telling me to set up on the sidewalk outside Chase Bank and preach there for hours, but I don't know what my physical capabilties or psychological abilities are for such an undertaking. I'm remembering that Jimmy Stewart movie "Mr Smith Goes To Washington" and I'm
remember Cory Booker too.

I'm gonna …

The Northern Coyotes and Barred Owls and Black-Backed Gulls in Central Park are singing in the New York night at the same time. The wind that came over the Hudson River is strumming the branches of the old London Plane and Japanese Maple trees. There are buildings leaning over the trees glowing in the dark because international 24-hour money managers are global, doing business with Frankfurt and Mumbai and Sydney and Singapore. The wild dogs …

The nation states are helplessly flailing at Trump and Netanyahu and their crowd of applauding billionaires but let's remember how the beginning of a war pulls us into a story that is thrilling and ancient and addictive. We need to help each other keep distance from the burning children and flames in the market square. This is not legitimate drama. This isn't something that should add screen-time to our day.

In the life-times of most …

Neil Young argues with companies. President Trump is one of them, of course, easy target, and now Bezos. Spotify off and on. That doesn’t go with “Heart of Gold,” does it?

So you think the search for a lover is separate from politics? Trump denies that climate change exists and that’s like saying “I don’t like the Earth”. With Neil, there is always a through-line from loving your lover, loving the Earth and being good …

The rich say no to oil. The middle class says no to dreams of the rich.
The stolen and sold say no to rich consumers who start to see.
The whites say no to ICE and the people of the earth say —
Hear the yes, yes after yes in the afternoon breeze.

Border guards say yes to genders in motion and tourists say no to jets.
Young families in flight say yes to a …

And then came the moment that we all had the same thought at the same time. One single pure thought. There was no original stroke of genius that started with Einstein sipping a cup of espresso - which then swept across the land. Even though it happened to all of us at the same moment, it wasn’t a suddenly popular item. The thought stayed one unforgettable thought that we all had at the same moment.

…

Because the rest of my life
is flying by yours
the lives of our bodies
shade through the doors

Because you walk by me
and I walk by you
everyone we’ve ever loved
is walking by too

Because the air around you
moves like light
I gather the four walls
and fall with the night

Because the hours were ours
time carries the part
our quiet wildness

is the beat of our heart

Because from …

Here's a new theory developed at the Church of Stop Shopping School of Divinity: There is a direct relationship between each additional minute that we are separated and every pound of greenhouse gas that is added to the air.

What? Yes: The greater the distance that individual human beings are from one another, the more CO2 we put in the air, water and soil.

Let me say it another way: SPLIT US APART—WE KILL. (Very …

There was Occupy Wall Street, Standing Rock, #metoo and Black Lives Matter. Protest is how our freedom grows and when it happens it is precious; when it happens, you gotta drop what you are doing and hit the streets.

The Democracy movements are always in the streets and court rooms and everywhere we are having heated debates, in kitchens, at the ballpark, in jails, on podcasts. And in this time of ferment, all the protest …

Public culture is at this moment, virtual. The politicians, celebrities, talking heads, the people with the international microphones… most of them seem helplessly not actual. When they open their mouths a language comes out that seems programmed at some point in the past, trying to make a future by growing it from a data set. Lately, the sounds of voices cross back and forth in the mediasphere and the echoes have a hard, brittle quality.

…

By Oliver Wainwright

It contains enough steel to go round the world twice – and even has a fake breeze to flutter the stars-and-stripes flag in its lobby. If this $4bn colossus is just the first of a new breed of bulky supertalls, is Britain next?

Among the slender needles and elegant spires of the Manhattan skyline, a mountainous lump has reared into view. It galumphs its way up above the others, climbing in bulky …

The Mamdani campaign’s volunteers knocked on the doors of New York City voters 1.6 million times, which led to 247,000 conversations. The campaign re-discovered the old magic of a good heartfelt talk. “Hello, how are you today?” might seem like an echo from the 1950's, but after the surprise landslide victory in New York, talking-and-listening is being called “the most sophisticated media.”


Those compassionate conversations found the door to door campaigners and the voters …

The big retail banks are now readying the AI-powered teller window.  We will be talking to robots at the screen in bank lobbies, as we deposit or withdraw cash, adjust loans, etc.  The lobbies on the street, which are open all night for people with bank cards, will evolve into small pleasure centers, cafes, dating locations, screens on the walls will feature influencers….

 
The ITM lobby will soon have robots on the …

We will exercise with abandon our freedom of expression, freedom to trust strangers, freedom to experience our bodies, to love as we wish, free from White Christian Nationalist violence, freedom from algorithms, freedom from billionaires and freedom to tax billionaires and freedom to bring billionaires to justice.

We will strengthen our right of assembly, of protest and of the press.  Suppress weapons industries, stop their assembly lines and wipe their computers.  Bankers of …

Find the Earth in each other.
see the Earth in the stranger
touch the Earth in our lover...

When fire and flood take us, 
storms a thousand miles wide.  
We look deeply in all the eyes,

There's something we missed.
We need to find that stranger
We need to find that lover.

Find the Earth, see the Earth
we are made of this same stuff
and we let it get away from us.

…

Earthman around the Sunwoman not once, not twice, 80 circles around the fire, spinning with music all the way, crowds of us circling by you we listen and wave and cheer and you tell us to Love each other be good to each other and you are the hippest human to say Love straight out like that without holding back or being cool just letting the word fill arenas without any rider and promises that …

Everything happens at once too much going on so fast and so violent we can’t respond.  White House explodes helicopters drop on Chicago children screaming in pajamas fishing boats on the sea facing aircraft carriers. Prices. Tariffs.  Black leaders fired. Colleges blackmailed. Voting doubts. Suspicions. Lawsuits. Toxins in the air water soil. Gangsters run the police. Jets built to crash Gulf of America long-time citizens of color in cuffs protesters gassed no time …

Unbelievable indeed.  For those of us who fight the totalitarian consumer culture that dominates Americans - Saturday the 18th of October 2025 - we are in a state of happy shock.  Seven million people “breaking into public space” — with totally homemade wise-ass signs, dressed like frogs, leopards, giraffes, unicorns and big birds…. Wow!

Our work: we fight against saturation advertising, pixelated simulations of reality which are profit-taking, invasions of neighborhoods by condos …

There are two tremendous releases of energy, two rivers carving out hills and crashing into cities.  One, is the Peace movement for Palestine, pouring through the streets in many nations, screaming GENOCIDE! into the world’s language.  And then there are the many branches of the same river, the long unending walking of migrants, the world citizens, longing for a safe place to live on the other side of some militarized border.  They …

Our work is against those who spray the air, water and soil with poisons, poisons for profit.  And lots of people are working hard against the same poisoners, and at this point, in late 2025, we are losing the fight for life.  The Environmental Protection Agency and the Paris Climate Agreement are down, and Carbon Dioxide is up.  At this point we need new ideas.  We need to evolve like living …

reflections after opening for Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts, the ‘love earth tour’ with Daryl Hannah presiding

After our go at the Hollywood Bowl, we gazed out at the empty seats, with the 18,000 who sat there now back in their homes and hotels. This was “Reverend Billy & the Stop Shopping Choir’s 32nd performance, as openers for ‘love earth tour’ - going back the last two years. Gradually we evolved from ‘opener’ to …

Imagine a nation of people suffering from a low-grade hypnosis, or maybe a selective amnesia is the right phrase. And then through this dulled population a group of 60 people are on a tour, going from city to city, where thousands of these people are told about a terrible danger that they all share. And the message is carried by singing and shouting, and the people are thrilled to have their memories restored to a …

The fans along the trail of the “love earth tour” - and the whole experience of traveling with Neil Young and Daryl Hannah's caravan of friends - are raising up new beliefs. You can imagine these big crowds having a kind of conversation with us about today's crisis.

1. We can be radical Americans again. We have done this before. Now we are being called on once again to be “Strange enough to change enough.”
…

Can we be voices crying in the wilderness FOR the wilderness. There was Christianity; there was Feudalism; there was Marxism; there was Capitalism, and now there is Earth. Make no doubt. The planet’s heatwave is revolutionary. It has content that would freeze us in our tracks if we understood it. The Earth is quickly changing everything in ways so basic we don’t have the language for it. Trump and Putin and Xi and Modi have …

Charlotte kicks off the North American leg of Neil Young’s “love earth tour.” I’m sitting in a bus that contains the opening act, the Stop Shopping Choir. They are 7 singers and musicians from different eras of our earthchxrch’s 20 year history. Our bus-driver Johnny, a glorious punk from Wyoming covered with living color tattoos, is looking for a place to park the big brown bus.

Our opening show last night was an exploration in …

Here is the riddle of our time: “Why do we refuse to save ourselves from the burning of fossil fuels?”

I believe I have found a clue. In the trains we ride there are advertisements, the smiling faces of sexually available people. They could be the lovely intriguing commuters sitting right next to us, gazing at their phones. The bold crossing over to the new beautiful stranger is removed from us. We tap the dating …

This is a good moment in history to accept that the Earth is alive.

Powerful men like to think that they are making history

But lately their big moves are identical repeats of worn-out wars

Which gives us the feeling that history is waiting for us to change.

But wars are possessive and there has been no change for years

Unless you are one of those people that think artificial intelligence

Is change. No, speeding …

We have an emergency in England - need to do the right thing. The Tories started marching Earth defenders and war protesters off into jail without a jury trial, abou 173 Earth and Peace lovers banished to prisons up to 3, 4 even 5 years.

Now the new government is reducing some of those sentences but 23 still remain and my friend in the UK fear that Labor might be playing to the right-wing by …

The Earth is Coming! The Earth is Coming! The Earth is Coming!
And when the Earth arrives it will turn our culture upside down and inside out.

Each of us knows this. We are quietly waiting. Or maybe busily waiting.
We are acting as if mass extinction is inevitable. Why? We know what and
who is doing the damage. What are we waiting for?

There are some clues to our paralysis. Why we can’t get …

Reverend Billy

Ask the Tree of Knowledge for forgiveness

Thank the snake for the apple, the snake's nice...

Here's a good dream, fake out the nightmare

The bad gods and AI, coca cola and ICE.

The Earth says bite the apple, carry the seed

Here's some time to breathe - here's your life!

By Catrin Einhorn, Photographs and Video by A.J. Mast

The solar panels on the churches were inspired by Scripture.

So were the LED lights throughout the buildings, the electric-vehicle charging stations, the native pollinator gardens and organic food plots, the composting, the focus on consuming less and reusing more.

The evangelical Christians behind these efforts in Indiana say that by taking on this planet-healing work, they are following the biblical mandate to care for God’s …

The Earth Human Moment. Is the doorway open one last time? We can do this. We can be humans returning to our eco-systems. Trump shows capitalism for what it always was. White nationalism never stopped — it was always right there as the Earth got hotter. Now we live in the 22nd month of the global heatwave. Each month with 100,00 year heat. The Earth Human Moment. The last chance to escape the nightmare.

Debra …

By Lise Pedersen

Imagine a world devoid of advertisement, a world where human beings are not reduced to consumers, their desires and behavior dictated by an economic system driven by consumer capitalism.

That’s the proposition of “You Need This,” by Ryan Andrej Lough, set to have its world premiere at the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival, also known as CPH:DOX, which opens today.

Produced by Academy Award winning filmmaker Adam McKay (“Don’t Look Up”), known for …

This is a song for hypnotizing the live audience, it casts a spell. Not so much for devices.

One person said "I felt like I was on acid"....

The two soloists are Love Earthers - they were with us on the tour last Spring 

Ali Dineen (in the short Joni Mitchell-like song) and then the long wailing prayer - Shilpa Narayan



Listen to the music, and get it here!

Beautiful Earth

What kind of beauty are we talking about?

Not just watching…. Touching sensing being together colliding loving

Touch the person next to you! Touch the person next to you!

Say this: You are the Earth! I am the Earth! We are complete ecosystems

We are wetlands we are alpine meadows deciduous forests

Coral reefs alluvial plains estuaries where saltwater meets freshwater

Where saltwater meets freshwater there's lots of sea-life loving

Give to the …

We are in a state of shock. Our compassion is being cancelled. During the election we were watching the candidates ignore the families of Gaza, and after the election people throughout the world that we were helping are suddenly abandoned as a trillionaire with nazi salutes simply leaves people stranded. South African HIV sufferers stand before locked doors of clinics that no longer have funding.

Our passivity. Our lack of a response...it's is unbelievable. We …

By Nikki McCann Ramirez

The Anglican Catholic Church (ACC) has defrocked Father Calvin Robinson after the priest went viral for mimicking a recent gesture by Elon Musk that really, really looked like a Nazi salute.

In a statement released Wednesday, the leadership of the ACC wrote that “were made aware of a post made on X showing the end of a speech made by Calvin Robinson at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington, DC. In …

By Ruth Graham and Elizabeth Dias

Millions of Christians in churches around the world heard the same passage on Sunday from the Gospel of Luke. In it, Jesus declares his intentions “to proclaim good news to the poor,” as he speaks to people gathered in a synagogue in Nazareth.

At Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration in Dallas, the passage felt particularly appropriate this week, though it was chosen years ago as part of a three-year …

Neil gave the 2024 tour with Crazy Horse the title "Love Earth", and future tours may also carry the name.  He and Daryl are addressing the great emergency of our day with the power of music and film.  This page will gather musings, research, strategies and inspiration as new touring is explored. The initial contributors to the page include Charris and Dulcie Ford and son Kashius the creators of "The Village", …

Nine Songs for the Earth.  Five of the songs in this album, grew forceful from our singing them opening for Neil and the Horse in the Love Earth tour this last Spring.  The urgency in the message lifts the voices.  Most of the Stop Shopping Choir have risked arrest in actions for the Earth.  Much of the composing and producing is the work of Savitri D.  Earthalujah!

The songs on …

There is tension in the air. Protesters are gathering from far and wide, while the national leaders and their corporate keepers come to the UN next week. We are in the opening hours of “Climate Week” in New York City. The Earth defenders are talking about Libya and Maui. And wondering - will the fossil banks bet that all this will blow over... again?

Let’s stop for a moment and marvel at these ‘fossil banks.' …

The hottest July on record is almost over and we know there will be another hottest July on record soon.

In March 2022 we moved into the old bank at 36 Loisaida and started performing every week. We took a few weeks off to do a different kind of thing at Joe’s Pub and a few other weeks off during the longest nights of winter but otherwise we’ve been over there singing and preaching and …

Rev at the Earthchxrch
Sunday July 9th, 3pm EST
36 Loisaida Ave C at East 3rd Street, East Village NYC

A week ago I hugged the tree that was here, while the chainsaw ppl waited for the police to peel me off. They killed the tree (as they slay our green space), then they let me out of jail. Trees talk through their roots. I called out to the soul buried under our pink circles, …

Radio from the Earthchxrch, Reverend Billy and Savitri D

Two things are happening at once.  The language of human culture adds up to a message of agonized hesitation.  On the other hand, the language of the Earth is powerfully clear.  The humans are permitting public hate to hunt down love and transform it into consumable products.  The Earth is saying that love is the provider of life and life is the …

Yes, the major rock opera now opening everywhere is the Sixth Extinction. Burning cities, snowdrifts in NOLA, and floods in the Blue Ridge…. and 30 months of record global heat. Its here. The Sixth Extinction is here. But we gotta love it just like we love springtime flowers and the return of the beautiful bobolinks and bluebirds and wood ducks…

When we are confused, we need to go outside. We find in a healthy ecosystem …

Something strange happens when we call a hurricane or a typhoon by name. Lately we’ve had Beryl and Otis and Helene and Milton. It seems arbitrary that the snow in New Orleans and the fire in Los Angeles go nameless.

Yes something very different happens when there's a name. Meteorologists and FEMA officials and news anchors seem to quickly get on a first name basis with a new windstorm, regardless of the body-count. When the …

Something is broken in the relationship between Hurricane Helene and the humans. Something is definitely fatally broken between the Los Angeles fires and you and me. And how couldn’t we get the message? How could we not see?

Background: The Earth is a medium. They are everywhere all the time. (The Earth is non-binary.) And they communicate through our bodies as well as everywhere all the time, vibrations through the air & water & soil …

EARTH BURNS LOS ANGELES!

Why would we never see this headline?

The Earth is left out of our reporting of the apocalyptic fires in the city of angels. The headlines scream “Wind whips…” or “Fire spreads…” as if the disaster is self-generating.

No, the Earth is the cause. The Earth is the original prime mover. And the Earth is coming! It is the Earth that swelled the rivers of the Blue Ridge Mountains with a …

If a tornado is on the edge of town, what you want to do is walk toward the music in it. Each disaster is like a body - there’s a heartbeat in there. It might be more like reggae or more like polka - or it might be all over the place like a jazz drummer having a bad day….

Every disaster is built around a song. People say “that tornado was so loud - …

We wait on the edge of a great block of time, and we peer into next year unable to focus our eyes. We listen for the sound of wind. Instead of holding phones, we hold hands. We feel like a city that is about to be sacked. Well, we know in our hearts that we have refused to change how we live.

Now 2025 advances toward us, like an unfathomable ecosystem. It is very close. …

My eco-system asked me to change, again and again. It never let up. I would wake up from a deep sleep and I knew I had to change completely. My career, my idea of who my friends were, my idea of what I looked like - everything needed to change before I could have my coffee.

Savi and Lena kept hugging me and I kept hanging on, poor bastard. The house that we live in …

Thanks for what?

This year the old quaint holiday seems impossible. We are lost in wars, the human tragedy comes in waves of violence, superstorms from humans and from nature. We have our meal with loved ones, but… we are carrying shock and sorrow to the table, trying not to ruin the conversation with too much reality.

Let’s be grateful to the Peace-makers. They are wading into tides of mindless tribalism that like we haven’t …

The only way back to a normal life is
Thru radical change.
The only way back to radical change is
Thru justice for all people, and
Justice for all living things.

One of those living things is
all of life put together, the planet Earth.
The only way back to any life at all is
Loving the Earth!

Our Fabulous Unknown of eight performances across England came to its finale yesterday in Birmingham on October 27th. About a dozen singers and musicians from the Stop Shopping Choir held forth in Hastings, Brighton, Canterbury, Colchester, Cambridge, London three times and Birmingham.

Our message in the songs and my secular/comic sermons (and our prayers) came down to these main points: The Earth is alive, a living being, like the native peoples always thought. The descendants …

Writing in my journal from Brighton, UK, a grand version of Coney Island. The ocean in the window, choir groggily awake now.  Last night in Hastings we had an ecstatic chxrch show with the Stop Shopping Choir; got the Standing O... but we didn't have an encore song ready.

Our message (my sermon) urges the UK audience to wonder about these little monuments that direct them everywhere, which they never think about …

Debra White Plume’s words feel true. She was a Lakota Sioux teacher. I heard a woman at Occupy Wall Street tell this scary little story standing on a bench corner speakers-corner style. In this prophecy, Debra White Plume urges us to feel the opportunity to survive. It is a radical view for us, in how we should count minutes and hours and days in these dangerous days. And in the tradition of native cultures, she …

And so we struggle out of the mudslides of North Carolina looking for something, and we spin out of the tornadoes of Iowa and look for something that we desperately need. We are covered with ashes as we climb out of California and where is it? That thing that always gets us out of the disasters.

And so we come to the end of 2024, and this is the end of two years of heat-waves …

Governments, corporations, militaries: these super-groups are not people. Their power is based on violent separation from life, domination from afar. They consistently put poisons into the Earth.

And who defends the Earth? Individual souls and small groups like families where love grows, or neighborhoods, which can then grow into movements. But we activists, whatever our campaign, have been unable to change the devotion of major institutions to toxins and war.

So - who defends the …

July ’24 the hottest month since the birth of Christ?

Advertising departments are trying to re-purpose the slow, huge disaster by slotting the outlandish heat as a 3rd world phenomenon, or the result of foreign religions, or even as science fiction. Distancing the 120 degree and thousands of deaths from profitable industrial toxins has become a priority.

These recent natural disasters are growing in power and evolving into a many-headed hydra. A recent example would …

What kind of people would we be, if we were so powerful that we successfully defended the Earth?

It happens once in a while in history. Some of us are THAT possessed. Call it "Justice Possessed". Black Lives Matter, ACT UP, Standing Rock, Occupy Wall Street, The Rapist in Your Path, #metoo... Many of us have never been that possessed. We have watched radical change in the distance. Many of us think of a "revolutionary" …

We're at a turning point for the wandering souls that come into New York, 200k in 15 months. We have had young African men in our 60 by 50 ft Earthchxrch all week, wall to wall men sleeping laying their heads on the carpet exhausted in the middle of the day.

Our east village community has risen up making food and coffee and tea
cleaning the bathrooms helping them with their phones lots of loving …

This week we let fly one of our 29 minute radio shows. Earth Riot Radio is a fast-moving semi-trippy plunge into the fiery stink of the Apocalypse. This week we offer - along with the voices of Loons and Jackals and Timber Wolves and Howling Monkeys - two brilliant Earth-loving guests, Gail Bradbrook and Alnoor Ladha. The live link to the show is down there below their bios. Earthalujah!

Alnoor Ladha comes from a Sufi …

Two more Sundays in our Earthchxrch and then on the night of Sunday Nov 26th we're lifted into the lights and our audience of radicals are below us somewhere in the dark with their drinks. That's a big change for us. We are being produced and presented.

TICKETS

In the Earthchxrch we are cycling through the different emotions of songs on the same floor as the chxrch-goers. We are in circles, holding hands in rituals, …

Everything is so violent just now, it’s hard to think.  The sorrow and helplessness just takes over.  But as our thoughts emerge from the shadows, they are clear and radical.  The struggle for Peace is one with the struggle for the Earth.

I mean radical as in root.  The Earth poisoners and the tribal soldiers are blind to the simple, vulnerable, sensual life of loved ones and friends.  The innocents …

We are IN it now. The smokiest day is not two Wednesdays back, or today either. We are IN it. It is not “unprecedented,” not “…since records were kept.” No! There is no precedent. We live in the constant no-precedent-ever of Extinction, which we created.

This weekend is the 61st EarthChxrch! We have never been more grateful. We are stepping out of Pride and into the Hottest July On Record! Let's get past the comparisons. …

RevBilly & StopShopping Choir at the EarthChxrch
Featuring the Sainthood of Malachy McCourt
Sunday, April 16 // 3PM // 36 Ave C @ East 3rd, NYC

Malachy McCourt

1st Year Anniversary Reflections from Billy

The experiment gave us tools that we took up immediately a year ago. Humor and music for defending the Earth? Consciously approaching arrest-risking events? And debriefing afterward under the Blue Marble Earth photo, our altar? It is working! We want to …