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 and birds are singing and singing. The commotion of the world is well-suited to emotional lovers walking in the trees. The money people don’t hear or see any of this. Why would they?
To survive as a species in 2026, we must learn to live with the Earth’s life. As a matter of emergency we will turn en mass to living things to save us. This is utterly radical and would seem impossible to sensible and realistic people, let alone fascists. We must quickly and deeply fall in love with the Earth, which is counter-intuitive for citizens of the West, and especially the USA, where we are openly hostile to nature. Life is watching us as we watch screens. A high percentage of our thoughts, gestures, and language are structured around commercial demands and we cannot monetize nature unless we extract it, which we do.
Leonard Peltier says that the thousand-mile-wide cyclones are the Earth talking to us. To learn that language we must live with – and love – other life. I’m here in New York. We live in large numbers surrounded by pavement, walls, glass, white noise. The breakthrough to the Earth would take a mass act of Love. We should ready ourselves for rapid, deep Evolution in this time of Extinction. What does that mean? Our necessary immersion into nature that we face will help us open our sensory life. We’ll be rubbed, danced, whirled, sung and maybe killed. You can’t murder nature for centuries and just change your mind. First, our flight into the necessary crazy behavior must outmaneuver our habits of recreation, tourism, industrial agriculture, New Age self-improvement, lumbering and all of our outright imperialistic violence toward the Earth.
A responsible President would shut down the city and direct us to walk toward the animals with roots and wings and beautiful screams… This is quite different than bombing civilians with rival gods, or hand-cuffing people in their homes, or putting toxins into the wind and water. The large institutions of our society, the corporations, religion, and military, are on record ignoring the planetary emergency at this time. Whereas the Earth is going into the 4th year of the heatwave that scientists can’t explain, we can still love.
Rev. Billy