“Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.”
— Ian Hamilton Finlay
I quit protesting and started a garden. It sounds absurd at first, I know. But bear with me.
Continue reading Why I Quit 350.org and Started a GardenCategory Archives: Earth Justice / Environmental Degradation
On Sale Now: “Another End of the World is Possible” by John Halstead
I’m happy to announce that my little collection of essays, Another End of the World is Possible, is now available for sale in print and e-book. All proceeds from the sale will go to Gods & Radicals Press/A Beautiful Resistance. Continue reading On Sale Now: “Another End of the World is Possible” by John Halstead
It’s time for the spiritual people to get active and activist people to get spiritual.
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.
My Grandchildren May Never See A Monarch Butterfly
Owing to its large size and its distinctive orange, black, and white color pattern, the Monarch is probably the most easily recognizable butterfly in North America. Many people know the Monarch for its annual north-south migration between the northern United States and southern Mexico, a migration which takes two to four generations. Many people may not know it’s also a pollinator species.
And it’s probably going to disappear in my lifetime or my children’s lifetime.
Continue reading My Grandchildren May Never See A Monarch Butterfly
A Guide to the End of Civilization (in 6 simple maxims), by Christopher Stanley
Editor’s Note: I am pleased to introduce guest contributor, Christopher Stanley. Christopher wrote this in response to my recent essay, “‘What If It’s Already Too Late?’: Being an Activist in the Anthropocene”, and it so impressed me I had to share it (with his permission). Christopher’s six maxims are a guide for sanity in an unsane world. Enjoy!
Civilization is not the World.
Civilization is ending, but the World is not. The World has lived through far greater changes than us. The World was here for billions of years before we came along, and will be here for billions of years after we’re gone. We are not so grand that we can kill Life itself. Continue reading A Guide to the End of Civilization (in 6 simple maxims), by Christopher Stanley
Earth Blessing by Jack Manno
May earth’s song reach us in our deepest and wildest places.
May it be heard as we move upon her, as we partake of her sustenance,
as we nestle in her waters and grasses
May we hear the voices of the stones, the winds and waters,
creatures and plants, above the human chatter,
softly but not silently, so we can heed them when we must.
May all those who try to conquer earth’s powers learn instead from
compost and humus and take from them humility,
knowing any force conquered is lost forever to the conqueror.
May compassion wrack the polluter’s heart,
so stunned by earth’s gifts their poisons cannot be released.
At long last, may earth’s protectors throw grand parties
where victory is declared in a mighty sigh of relief.
May this exhalation resound in ocean depths,
reverberate in humpback flesh and please all the watery souls.
May whales and wolves rejoice with weird shouts that all is well.
May we have a world’s celebration where everyone stays put,
our roots seeking amusements together deep in the earth,
our branches entwined in the winds.
May our grandchildren’s grandchildren share legends of when
we brought about the end of the time of arrogance and waste.
May they toss stones from shores, hearing our names echo in the ripples.
So May it Be.— Jack Manno —
Review of “The Reluctant Radical”
This past Earth Day, two of the activist organizations I am a part of sponsored a screening of “The Reluctant Radical”, a documentary about Ken Ward, by Lindsey Grayzel.
Ken Ward is one of the “valve turners” who was arrested and prosecuted for closing the emergency valve on oil sands pipelines in October 2016. He argued in court that the urgency of climate change compelled him to act. “The Reluctant Radical” follows Ken as he struggles to find an effective way to combat the fossil fuel industry. Director Lindsey Grayzel was also arrested and charged for her role filming Ken’s actions.
21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Take Care of Yourself
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
21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Face Your Death
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
21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Let Yourself Grieve
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
21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Restory the World
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
21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Fight Capitalism
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.
21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Reconnect With Nature
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.
“Probably no society has been so deeply alienated as ours from the community of nature, has viewed the natural world from a greater distance of mind, has lapsed into a murkier comprehension of its connections with the sustaining environment.” — Richard Nelson, “Eskimo Science”
How then do we reconnect with the earth?
Continue reading 21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Reconnect With Nature
21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Ground Your Religious Rituals
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
21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Learn Old Skills
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
21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Talk About Climate Change
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
21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Support Front Line Communities
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
21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Build Community
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
21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Eat Local
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.
21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Source What You Consume
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
21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Use Your Privilege For Good
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
21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Protect Biodiversity
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
21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Get Money Out of Politics
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
21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Organize Your Community
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
21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Support Direct Action
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
21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Vote Responsibly
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
21 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day: Support Divestment
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
Yes, I Drove My SUV To The Environmental Protest
In August 2017, my teenage daughter and I joined hundreds of protesters on the streets of Lincoln, Nebraska to protest the KXL pipeline. To get there, we took a bus from Chicago with other activists. As we rode the bus 12 hours, I was conscious of the fact that we were using fossil fuel to go to a protest of the fossil fuel industry. I chose to take the bus instead of driving (which would have been shorter and would have spared by knees) in part because it was the more environmentally responsible choice, i.e., the cumulative impact of taking the bus was less than everyone driving individually.
Continue reading Yes, I Drove My SUV To The Environmental Protest
4 Things Every New Activist Should Know
One thing I quickly learned when I became active is that it’s easy to get discouraged. There’s four myths about activism which I think contribute to this. These myths are perpetuated by critics of activists as well as by activists themselves.
Pray With Your Feet 