Category Archives: Earth Day

Activist Spirituality, Earth Day, Earth Justice / Environmental Degradation, Environmental Justice & Climate Justice, Spiritual Activism, Uncategorized

It’s time for the spiritual people to get active and activist people to get spiritual.

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The following comments were given at the closing of the April 27, 2019 Prayer for the Planet interfaith vigil sponsored by 350 Indiana-Calumet in Gary, Indiana. Represented at this Earth Week service were Buddhist, Christian, Humanist, Jewish, Mormon, Muslim, Pagan, and Sikh religious communities.

A friend of mind recently sent me a quote:

“There’s nothing more radically activist than a truly spiritual life. And there’s nothing more truly spiritual than a radically activist life.”– Brian McLaren, Naked Spirituality

I believe that, but I’ve struggled to live it. Continue reading It’s time for the spiritual people to get active and activist people to get spiritual. →

Activist Spirituality, Earth Day, Earth Justice / Environmental Degradation

21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Take Care of Yourself

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Each day of the month of April leading up to Earth Day (April 22), I will be offering a suggestion for how we can really honor the Earth this year. This list will go beyond the usual suggestions to change your light bulbs and take shorter showers. Instead, the focus is on collective action working toward radical social change.

Caring for the Earth can be overwhelming sometimes. If you’re just getting started, don’t try to do it all at once. Find a place to start. Find your focus. Not every cause must be your cause. Find a cause you are passionate about, something that fuels your spirit. Here’s a Starter Kit to get you going.

Continue reading 21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Take Care of Yourself →

Activist Spirituality, Earth Day, Earth Justice / Environmental Degradation

21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Face Your Death

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Each day of the month of April leading up to Earth Day (April 22), I will be offering a suggestion for how we can really honor the Earth this year. This list will go beyond the usual suggestions to change your light bulbs and take shorter showers. Instead, the focus is on collective action working toward radical social change.

A genuine re-connection with nature inevitably leads to a confrontation with death … and with our own deaths.  All around us in nature, there is as much death as there is life—for life feeds on death.  And we are a part of that same cycle.  We will all of us, one day, die and feed other forms of life.

Continue reading 21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Face Your Death →

Activist Spirituality, Earth Day, Earth Justice / Environmental Degradation

21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Let Yourself Grieve

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Each day of the month of April leading up to Earth Day (April 22), I will be offering a suggestion for how we can really honor the Earth this year. This list will go beyond the usual suggestions to change your light bulbs and take shorter showers. Instead, the focus is on collective action working toward radical social change.

“This is a dark time, filled with suffering and uncertainty. Like living cells in a larger body, it is natural that we feel the trauma of our world. So don’t be afraid of the anguish you feel, or the anger or fear, because these responses arise from the depth of your caring and the truth of your interconnectedness with all beings.” — Joanna Macy

As you learn about the climate crisis and work for change, there will be times when you are overwhelmed with grief.  Grief is not the same thing as despair.  Grief is a natural and healthy reaction to the human desecration of the earth and its biosphere.

Continue reading 21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Let Yourself Grieve →

Deep Ecology / Environmentalism, Earth Day, Earth Justice / Environmental Degradation, Spiritual Activism

21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Restory the World

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Each day of the month of April leading up to Earth Day (April 22), I will be offering a suggestion for how we can really honor the Earth this year. This list will go beyond the usual suggestions to change your light bulbs and take shorter showers. Instead, the focus is on collective action working toward radical social change.

Humanity’s paralysis over the impending environmental collapse is a function of the psychological strength of the myth that things will always be the same. The sun always rises in the morning, and winter predictably (less predictably now) follows autumn which is followed by spring, and privileged people like myself go to work during the week, rest on the weekend, and go on being good consumers, largely unperturbed by war and famine and plague.

It’s easy to believe that things have always been this way and always will be … but they won’t.

It’s likely that our children or grandchildren will live to see a day when our everyday experience, living in in a developed country today at the beginning of the 21st century, will be entirely foreign to the children being born at that time. This is not apocalyptic catastrophizing. It is simply a recognition of the reality of change, specifically climate change. And that recognition is the first step toward making the system-level changes which are needed to address the environmental disaster which is already happening.

Continue reading 21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Restory the World →

Anti-Capitalism & Anarchism, Earth Day, Earth Justice / Environmental Degradation

21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Fight Capitalism

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Each day of the month of April leading up to Earth Day (April 22), I will be offering a suggestion for how we can really honor the Earth this year. This list will go beyond the usual suggestions to change your light bulbs and take shorter showers. Instead, the focus is on collective action working toward radical social change.

One thing you can do to honor the Earth this Earth Day is to educate yourself about the connection between climate change and capitalism.

Our capitalist economic system is fundamentally incompatible with a healthy planetary ecosystem, says Naomi Kline in This Changes Everything.  We live on a planet with finite resources, but our economic system is premised on infinite growth.  Capitalism demands unfettered growth of consumption, but our survival and that of many other species requires a contraction of humanity’s growth and consumption. Our choice, says Kline, is to fundamentally change our economic system, or to allow nature to change it for us. The first will be hard, but the second even harder.

So we must change our economic system.

This means challenging some of our most cherished myths: the myth that capitalism and democracy are equivalent, the myth that capitalist societies are the most happy, the myth that capitalism was proven to be the “one true economic system” with the fall of the Soviet Union, the myth that consumers have all the power in a capitalist system, and that most pernicious myth of all, the myth that there are no alternatives.

We can unlearn capitalist ways of thinking.  Capitalism infects all of our relationships: with other people, with other-than-human beings, and with the Earth.  Consider the way we “value” other people and how we sometimes calculate whether what we get from them is more than what we give in return.  Think about your relationship to the place you live.  Is it a place you “use”, or is it a world you inhabit, cherish, and care for?  We learned these ways of thinking, and we can unlearn them.

Activist Spirituality, Earth Day, Earth Justice / Environmental Degradation

21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Ground Your Religious Rituals

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Each day of the month of April leading up to Earth Day (April 22), I will be offering a suggestion for how we can really honor the Earth this year. This list will go beyond the usual suggestions to change your light bulbs and take shorter showers. Instead, the focus is on collective action working toward radical social change.

Ecologist Dolores LaChapelle says that ritual is essential to creating intimate, conscious relationship with the places where we dwell. It is no coincidence that native societies tend both to be ecologically sustainable and to have a rich ceremonial life.

Continue reading 21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Ground Your Religious Rituals →

Community building, Earth Day, Earth Justice / Environmental Degradation

21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Learn Old Skills

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Each day of the month of April leading up to Earth Day (April 22), I will be offering a suggestion for how we can really honor the Earth this year. This list will go beyond the usual suggestions to change your light bulbs and take shorter showers. Instead, the focus is on collective action working toward radical social change.

I previously suggested that building community can be one thing we do to honor the Earth this Earth Day—specifically, building local, sustainable and resilient communities.

Resilient communities are those can better withstand the shock of environmental change and economic collapse.  One part of building resilience is re-skilling.

Continue reading 21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Learn Old Skills →

Earth Day, Earth Justice / Environmental Degradation

21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Talk About Climate Change

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Each day of the month of April leading up to Earth Day (April 22), I will be offering a suggestion for how we can really honor the Earth this year. This list will go beyond the usual suggestions to change your light bulbs and take shorter showers. Instead, the focus is on collective action working toward radical social change.

Despite the overwhelming weight of the scientific consensus about anthropogenic (human-made) climate change, it can be daunting for a lay person to talk about it publicly. One thing you can do to honor the Earth on Earth Day is to learn how to talk about climate change.

Continue reading 21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Talk About Climate Change →

Community building, Earth Day, Earth Justice / Environmental Degradation, Environmental Justice & Climate Justice, Environmental Racism

21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Support Front Line Communities

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Each day of the month of April leading up to Earth Day (April 22), I will be offering a suggestion for how we can really honor the Earth this year. This list will go beyond the usual suggestions to change your light bulbs and take shorter showers. Instead, the focus is on collective action working toward radical social change.

While climate change affects us all, there are some populations who are more vulnerable than others, including low-income communities, communities of color, coastal communities, and communities on the front lines of fossil fuel extraction. One way you can honor the Earth this Earth Day is to fight for front line communities.

Continue reading 21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Support Front Line Communities →

Community building, Earth Day, Earth Justice / Environmental Degradation, Spiritual Activism

21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Build Community

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Each day of the month of April leading up to Earth Day (April 22), I will be offering a suggestion for how we can really honor the Earth this year. This list will go beyond the usual suggestions to change your light bulbs and take shorter showers. Instead, the focus is on collective action working toward radical social change.

When we think about climate change, we have been socialized to think about individual actions, especially our choices at the market and gas pump. There are many ways we can change our individual consumption habits in response to climate change. But we need to understand that no slave was ever freed by individuals choosing to purchase products that are free from slave labor.

Continue reading 21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Build Community →

Earth Day, Earth Justice / Environmental Degradation, Spiritual Activism

21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Eat Local

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Each day of the month of April leading up to Earth Day (April 22), I will be offering a suggestion for how we can really honor the Earth this year. This list will go beyond the usual suggestions to change your light bulbs and take shorter showers. Instead, the focus is on collective action working toward radical social change.

Many people may not realize that a major source of carbon emissions and pollution is the food industry—especially the transportation of food. Locavores are people who try to get all of their food within 100 miles of where they live.

Continue reading 21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Eat Local →

Anti-Capitalism & Anarchism, Earth Day, Earth Justice / Environmental Degradation, Spiritual Activism

21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Source What You Consume

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Each day of the month of April leading up to Earth Day (April 22), I will be offering a suggestion for how we can really honor the Earth this year. This list will go beyond the usual suggestions to change your light bulbs and take shorter showers. Instead, the focus is on collective action working toward radical social change.

By virtue of living in a modern industrial society, we are largely alienated from the material conditions of our existence.

Continue reading 21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Source What You Consume →

Earth Day, Earth Justice / Environmental Degradation, Privilege

21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Use Your Privilege For Good

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Each day of the month of April leading up to Earth Day (April 22), I will be offering a suggestion for how we can really honor the Earth this year. This list will go beyond the usual suggestions to change your light bulbs and take shorter showers. Instead, the focus is on collective action working toward radical social change.

If you haven’t experienced at least one privilege check in the last few years, you really haven’t been paying attention. We all need to examine how we are privileged.  Look in the mirror … what do you see?  Are you male?  Are you heterosexual or cisgendered?  Are you white?  Are you able-bodied?  Do you have some degree of job security?  Are you educated?  Do you have disposable income?  Do you have a home?  Are you legally married?  Do you live in a “first world”/industrialized-developed country?  These are all forms of privilege.

Continue reading 21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Use Your Privilege For Good →

Earth Day, Earth Justice / Environmental Degradation

21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Protect Biodiversity

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Each day of the month of April leading up to Earth Day (April 22), I will be offering a suggestion for how we can really honor the Earth this year. This list will go beyond the usual suggestions to change your light bulbs and take shorter showers. Instead, the focus is on collective action working toward radical social change.

We are in the middle of the Sixth Great Extinction of animals and plants, the highest rate of species die-offs since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.  Extinction is a natural phenomenon which occurs at a natural rate of about one to five species per year.  Scientists estimate we’re now losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the the natural rate—literally dozens of species are going extinct every day.

Continue reading 21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Protect Biodiversity →

Democracy, Earth Day, Earth Justice / Environmental Degradation

21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Get Money Out of Politics

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Each day of the month of April leading up to Earth Day (April 22), I will be offering a suggestion for how we can really honor the Earth this year. This list will go beyond the usual suggestions to change your light bulbs and take shorter showers. Instead, the focus is on collective action working toward radical social change.

When we talk about taking action to protect the Earth, our home, we are conditioned by capitalist culture to think only about our reducing own consumption.  But the choices we make at the store and gas pump can only take us so far.  The biggest contributions to global emissions are not the result of the choices of individual consumers, but the choices made by industry and big corporations.

Continue reading 21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Get Money Out of Politics →

Community building, Earth Day, Earth Justice / Environmental Degradation

21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Organize Your Community

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Each day of the month of April leading up to Earth Day (April 22), I will be offering a suggestion for how we can really honor the Earth this year. This list will go beyond the usual suggestions to change your light bulbs and take shorter showers. Instead, the focus is on collective action working toward radical social change.

One thing you can do to honor the Earth this Earth Day is to become an ecological voice in your community.  You can organize a meet-up or a local group to plan an action, host a workshop, or petition your elected representatives.

Continue reading 21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Organize Your Community →

Direct Action, Earth Day, Earth Justice / Environmental Degradation

21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Support Direct Action

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Each day of the month of April leading up to Earth Day (April 22), I will be offering a suggestion for how we can really honor the Earth this year. This list will go beyond the usual suggestions to change your light bulbs and take shorter showers. Instead, the focus is on collective action working toward radical social change.

One thing you can do to honor the Earth this Earth Day is to participate in direct action.  Every effective political movement throughout history, from the struggle for the eight hour workday to the fight for women’s suffrage, has used some form of direct action.

Continue reading 21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Support Direct Action →

Anti-Capitalism & Anarchism, Democracy, Earth Day, Earth Justice / Environmental Degradation

21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Vote Responsibly

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Each day of the month of April leading up to Earth Day (April 22), I will be offering a suggestion for how we can really honor the Earth this year. This list will go beyond the usual suggestions to change your light bulbs and take shorter showers. Instead, the focus is on collective action working toward radical social change.

When we think about what we can do to protect the biosphere and the web of life, we are conditioned to think about our reducing own consumption. But individual choice only gets us so far.

Continue reading 21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Vote Responsibly →

Anti-Capitalism & Anarchism, Earth Day, Earth Justice / Environmental Degradation

21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Support Divestment

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Each day of the month of April leading up to Earth Day (April 22), I will be offering a suggestion for how we can really honor the Earth this year. This list will go beyond the usual suggestions to change your light bulbs and take shorter showers. Instead, the focus is on collective action working toward radical social change.

It’s no secret that burning of fossil fuels is transforming our planet into a place where it will be increasingly difficult for humans (and many other forms of life) to survive.

Continue reading 21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Support Divestment →