Working Together to Celebrate/Save the Earth 

Tomorrow is Earth Day, calling our attention to both the miracle that our planet exists at all, and the immediate escalating threat to its continued existence at all. We all feel alarm and despair in our own way, in the deepening realizations of how right now-imminent the full-blown climate catastrophe is; we all act from a fierce hope and determination to protect the planet we love in the best ways we know how. 

Working together is key. Collective action and cooperation are what is so critical. (I spent a previous Earth Day in a very different mode of action than my life is now, raising $4 million, including $400 raised in pennies from kids in an elementary school in Akron, OH, for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund to file (and win) a series of lawsuits recovering from the damage to wildlife and the environment in Prince William Sound, Alaska, from the March 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, at the time, the worst oil spill disaster in U.S. history. My life has moved in a different direction; our reliance on fossil fuels has not yet.)

Four suggestions for more global resilience in the face of our current climate catastrophes:

Listen to the Optimism and Outrage podcast: Conflict Fueling Outrage: It’s Time to Quit Fossil Fuels, a brilliant exploration of how our addiction to fossil fuels is funding the war in Ukraine and the critical turning point of responding with more investment in oil and gas or in renewable energy.

Watch Frontline’s probing and brilliant documentary The Power of Big Oil and the role of the oil industry in the denial of climate change. 

Participate in The Time Is Now: Showing Up for the Earth, an online gathering of leading climate disaster experts and activists, including Kaira Jewel Lingo on “Embodying Racial and Ecological Justice in the Face of the Climate Emergency”. Sunday, April 24, 2022, 10am-4pm, sponsored by Spirit Rock Meditation Center.

Take a moment to feel the awe of living on a living planet and contemplate the wisdom in Denise Levertov’s poem Beginners that instructs us…”we have only begun to love the earth. We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life.” 

Beginners

Dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood and Eliot Gralla

“From too much love of living,

Hope and desire set free,

Even the weariest river

Winds somewhere to the sea -“

But we have only begun

To love the earth.

We have only begun

To imagine the fullness of life.

How could we tire of hope?

– so much is in bud.

How can desire fail?

– we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy,

only begun to envision

how it might be

to live as siblings with beast and flower,

not as oppressors.

Surely our river

cannot already be hastening

into the sea of nonbeing?

Surely it cannot

drag, in the silt,

all that is innocent?

Not yet, not yet –

there is too much broken

that must be mended,

too much hurt we have done to each other

that cannot yet be forgiven.

We have only begun to know

the power that is in us if we would join

our solitudes in the communion of struggle.

So much is unfolding that must

complete its gesture,

so much is in bud.

– Denise Levertov