A Day to Rally Around Our Planet

Today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. It began in 1970 as the idea of Senator Gaylord Nelson (D., Wisconsin) to heighten awareness of the growing toxification of the earth. It was a heady time. A million people marched in New York alone. We did that back then. We marched in the streets by the hundreds of thousands in those days to bring awareness to issues and demand change. And it worked: civil rights, gay rights, women's rights, animal rights; we marched to bring an end what many of us thought was an unjust war on foreign soil. And in 1970 we rallied for the first time to march for the earth.

Because by then some troubling truths were becoming obvious. Only eight years before, Rachel Carson had sounded the alarm on DDT and pointed to the growing numbers of pesticides that were being sprayed willy nilly not only on our food crops but on our streets, in our yards, our parks and wild lands. And it was taking an unexpected toll. In many parts of the country, we lost the sound of birdsong in the spring. Our birds were being killed by these sprays being on the trees in which they nested or in the seeds or earthworms they ate and their young weren't surviviving because the shells on their eggs were too thin to sustain life.

And it began to dawn on us: if all that airborne, invisible junk was killing our birds, what was it doing to us, to our children, to the animals that we called food, to the chain of events we call life?

We were just beginning to understand that nature works in cycles just like the calendar, just like humans do, just like our crops and seasons, and that when you interrupt or try to micromanage that cycle, unpredictable consequences ensue. (We used to know these things. Nature was our, uh, nature.) So we marched. But marching wasn't enough. Today we pollute our lands with not hundreds of chemicals but 80,000 of them. Our mortality rate in this country is going in the wrong direction (moving us from 41st to 48th worldwide since last year alone according to the CIA Factbook).

We have to wake up and mobilize, to poke each other into action, to shout it out in all our social media networks, put documentary after documentary about the decline of our food and our health in our faces, demand accountability from the very agencies that are supposed to protect us from the bottom line zealots of for-profit corporations. Today we realize that marching for individual rights was important but now we must march for the very rights of species to survive. It's not about the rights of individuals anymore. It's about the rights of all of us to breathe, eat healthy food and drink water that will not maim or toxify us. The numbers are against us. And the clock is ticking.

Time, it turns out, is another critical nonrenewable resource.

How do you wake up? You do it one day at a time, one action at a time. This is the birthing time of the year for Mother Earth. Clear out a little space in your yard and roll in some organic cow manure. Plant some heirloom seeds. Water it. Watch it grow. Don't use chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Weed it yourself. Eat what you grow and thank the earth for providing it to you. If you don't have a yard, ask a friend if you can share a space. Everyone can do something. (Read Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening if you don't believe me.)

It's not just the planting and eating that's important. It's you touching the earth, reconnecting with the skin of the planet that sustains you, that thousands of times each day fills your lungs with the oxygen that keeps your brain alive and your heart beating. That's you down there in that handful of earth. It's where you came from and it's where you'll end up when that heart-lung action ceases. Gardening puts you back in touch with a life force that's part of you. And you're part of it. It connects you and by connecting you, it reminds you of who you are. You're an earthling, a child of this planet. We all are.

So get out there and fight for your Mother.

Happy Earth Day everyone!

P.S. For 150 or so other ways to connect, check out our book, REUNION: How We Heal Our Broken Connection to the Earth. (You can click on the title to order it.) It's out! Ted Carter and I thank you--and we'd like to think Mother Earth will too.