When do we believe in climate change? When our legs are on fire and waves are breaking through the window.
When will we start believing what the scientists say, that we’re sliding into Extinction? Maybe somewhere in the Irma-Maria-Florence-Michael-Malibu-Paradise parade of agony – we felt the presence of mass death.
Most of the USA citizens are in the camp that treats the Earth like it’s a machine. This is our generally held view since the industrial revolution. But the native people of this land, who persisted in surviving us – they feel that the Earth is a living being, a life.
The trouble with the idea that the Earth is a machine – then you think you can tinker with it. The year 2018 gave us tsunamis, wildfires, floods, landslides, firenadoes. 2018 was disasters all day every day. That’s no problem. That just means the old Ford is broken, its belching smoke, so fix it.
If you look across an expanse from a mountaintop and you see the natural world as a one single surging life with a trillion trillion trillion lives within it, you know something that the machine people don’t know, which is that Extinction is alive. It is a fissure between lots of life and lots of death and there is a message streaming from that crack in the future. Earthalujah!
If the Earth is running things and Extinction is its feverish struggle; if Extinction is the Earth working through to the other side of human beings, then that is a conversation to have with the forest that you are walking in. If that forest is full of silence from the disappearance of so many songbirds and insects and frogs, stay there a while.
Is there a bird crying on the branch of a two hundred year old tree? Hear a message in that chattering song; listen for an instruction. Listen! What is that life on the edge of Extinction saying? What is the Earth saying through that vibrating animal? We haven’t dis-encrypted this language in a while…
Let’s take what we learn and re-tell the story. Walk out of the forest and tell that story in the next town we walk into.
Reverend Billy
The Church of Stop Shopping