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 of the colonizers need to work at communicating with this great conscious life. We should help each other do this counter-intuitive action, this communicating, by going back to the moment in our childhoods when we first gazed in awe at the starry night sky, the unfurling wings of a great bird, the buzzy spring life of a forest.
We argue in our show that a new kind of activism for the Earth against the dealers of weapons and industrial toxins is possible, and crucially necessary. The point isn’t “saving the Earth” or saving ourselves either. That would be like trying to play chess while falling from a cliff. But our audiences in Britain seemed most excited when we proposed a new intimacy with the Earth, reading the signs the Earth offers us through its animal and plant life, as well as by its fires and floods.
The excitement of audience members during the UK tour from this approach signaled to us something that we also felt from our activism in New York. The governments and in fact all big, old institutions are set against real action for the Earth. They continue with their greenwashing from their marketing departments, but they are indulging a criminal negligence by their inaction. The institutions are letting the right-wing part of police and courts community go to a harsh (and illegal) round up of activists who interrupt everyday life to demonstrate the Earth’s emergency. Sentences in the UK range up to 5 years for even discussing a new “direct action” on a Zoom call. Paul Watson has been held for months by the Danish government, an extra-legal act, a requested detention by the Japanese government as it defends its factory ship death machines, hunting the whales of the oceans.
There is a demoralization right now, throughout the ranks of Earth-defenders, on both sides of the Atlantic. One of our performances in the UK was at a vigil outside of the Ministry of Justice in London. We sang for four hundred souls silently sitting on the pavement carrying the signs of political prisoners throughout history. About 40 Climate and Gaza activists are held in UK prisons at this time. Roger Hallam, a founder of Extinction Rebellion, is serving a five year sentence after a non-jury trial.
Jury trials are a bright spot and we honored the “Defend our Juries” activist group at our Cambridge show. Jury trials are a last bastion for non-corrupt democracy, with the chance to directly show the Earth’s crisis to a group of open-minded fellow citizens. Much to the consternation of corporations, there have been surprise exonerations. The awards by juries throughout the world for victims of the carcinogenic herbicide RoundUp have led the way. How else would a powerhouse like Bayer/Monsanto be called to account?
There was in our message the idea that the leading activist against the poisoners is the Earth itself. The extreme weather events are communications. The unprecedented spike in heat of the last two years has not been noticed by the everyday consumerized citizens of the West. We are suffering from an international paralysis. There is no sense of emergency by the public, or by our media. In the United States we have a climate denier nearing the Presidency, normalizing this nightmare by ignoring it.
In this tour, we took steps forward toward the Earth, to meet her and love her. We sensed that we were doing this with the people in the room. We were asking to join the Earth – if she will let us – at this late date. This feels so counter-intuitive, such a strange sensation – to collectively commit to this magic. But we have to trust the Earth. We can’t know what form our participation will take in this radically changing environment. But we must turn our lives over to the evolver of life, and watch for the signals.
This is different than how we have been living – since the industrial revolution began. But our singing community came away from our communing with the British public that a new realistic connection to the Earth’s crisis is possible. We know that the unknown future is in the Earth’s hands. Our move should be to love the Earth, to say that this unknown we face will be a good thing. Keep singing! Call the Earth to show the way! Move past the fear to the glory of it! Celebrate the fact that the Earth is insisting on the survival of life! …. now that is Fabulous!
much love
Billy