Earth Day?

The practice of assigning titles to days, weeks, and months is part of how we attempt to value things. Historically, the calendar was tied inextricably to the world that a people group inhabited. It is through the evolution of these holy days or holidays that we can trace not only how society has changed, but also how the world it inhabits and to which it adapts has changed.

So, “Earth Day.”

First, there is “Earth.” By that we don’t mean what our ancestors would have meant, as in the soil in which our hands collectively work to produce a living for ourselves and one another. Those who are tied to their land care for their land because their land is part of their community. It feeds them and sustains future generations.

For us, “Earth” doesn’t refer to soil. According to the United Nations in 2015, there were at that point about 60 years of harvests left on this planet due to soil degradation, unattached to other issues like climate change. “Earth” has come to mean the planet, a whole. Rather than a local landscape, we try to wrap our heads around the belief that we control the whole thing. But, as always happens with the limited intelligence of humans, we lose our soil for the whole, and that means our soil suffers exploitation.

Bicycles. They are not a “solution” to ecological problems, like climate change. They are less bad, certainly, than most other forms of transportation. And there are less bad types of bikes. But less bad is not good. Ecological problems are not ultimately caused by technologies we use. They are caused by us. We develop technologies with short-sighted goals in mind. What we need is a renewed imagination, a renewed desire, a renewed set of priorities and values.

Maybe bicycles can help us slow down a little, not mediate our relationship with the earth through glass. But at some point, we also need to get off our bikes and get to know our local soil.

Abstracting our soil for Earth is killing our soil.

A trite, pithy phrase often seen on bumper stickers is “Earth without art is eh.” The reality is, it is the “development” of earth that makes it eh. For, whatever we do with this planet, we are not capable of increasing its diversity of expression of life. We simplify everything and transform complexity into basic shape. We take fractals and make triangles, and think we have thereby “developed” something.

Second, there’s “Day.” Yes, it’s better that there’s at least one day for the earth. But what a change has taken place that one day a year a planet whose majority now lives in artificial environments of simplified, homogenized stone (concrete). Our ancestors lived with the earth daily. We remember it once a year.

But let’s not kid ourselves, far more basic transformations of the imagination are needed for earth to have a future. We have to learn to see the “art” in the almost infinite complexity of a world out of our control and out of our reach. We have to learn to see that the earth’s value should not be attached to us and what we do with it.

(If you want to read more about this see my book called Plundering Eden)