Apparent short term gain for real long term loss
This is a love letter to the Earth, and a call to action to all of us who call this planet home.
We cannot continue like this. Something has got to change in our consciousness as humans, specifically those of us who live in more economically developed countries.
With the pandemic rolling into its second year, we are witnessing a large-scale example of the way we humans mistreat our sacred and beautiful Earth home in the pursuit to save our own lives. Our pattern as a species is to lurch from crisis to crisis, spending our time putting out fires, slapping plasters over gaping wounds and hoping for the best. We deal with the immediate symptoms of our Earth’s distress, but none of these crisis solutions to our problems are really working because they literally cost the Earth long term.
Our short-sightedness is costing the Earth
We realise too late that the apparent solutions we’ve put in place to deal with the immediate threat to human life have caused more problems further down the line. We experience some unforeseeable consequence with catastrophic effects that we could have avoided if we had only taken the time to listen to the more-than-human world around us, and respond to its deeper needs. Instead, we see ourselves as a superior species in that ‘other’ forms of life have to be sacrificed to ‘keep us alive’ at all costs. We tell ourselves we’ll just take care of this immediate crisis, and after that we’ll find the time to tend to the long-term picture. But we never do. There’s always another crisis that threatens human life, and we never learn.
And our mother can’t take it any more.
The long-term solution is the urgent crisis, and if we don’t tackle it we won’t have a long term future.
Our place in the web of life
Every time we approach a crisis with our emergency mindset, the Earth pays the price. As I see it, the problem lies in our deep-rooted belief that we are superior, more important than any other life. We think that our need to survive should take precedence over everything else, but we couldn’t be more wrong.
This is the shift that needs to happen and it’s inside our minds, it’s systemic in the way we have been taught to think about life : we need to remember that we are not the centre of the web of life, we are only a part of it and we need to honour and respect life as sacred, not as something to be consumed. We are only as important as the bacteria that break down our waste, as the tiniest microscopic algae that absorb our emissions, no more no less. We need to heal this sickness in our consciousness, and remember our place.
This has always been at the heart of my work, but I want to say it again:
The evolution of our consciousness is reliant on the thriving of the natural world
AND
The thriving of the natural world is reliant on the evolution of our consciousness.
Read that again.
Let’s find a way to get this truth into our bones, into our souls.
And then act as though it’s real, because it is.
We need the natural world, and right now, more than ever, she needs us to protect her. To act, to speak up for her, to challenge our established ways of being, and develop new ones that honour and nurture her.
Every day should be Earth Day
This is a love letter to the Earth, and it is a call to us to show her our love for her in our every thought, word and deed. Because love is a verb, a state of being, and love is direct action. I am committed to doing what I can to support us to make this shift in our consciousness by finding our way back to our hearts and connecting with ourselves, each other and the more-than-human world from that place.
Every day should be Earth Day. Let’s make that happen.
Image by Elena Mozhvilo