Earth Day celebrates the beauty of nature
and our partnerships with one another and the world. And fosters, teaches, and
organizes to conserve this harmonious accord.
We are connected through our bodies with
our partners in the living systems we inhabit, and our choices and decisions
over vast epochs of time about how to solve problems of adaptation and growth
shape both our own human evolution and that of our ecosystem and all the beings
we share it with.
There is no greater nor more dire limiting
factor of our human potential and future becoming than the material world we
inhabit and our stewardship of its resources. We are bound together by our
needs and desires, mind and nature, negative spaces which define and create
each other like Escher’s Drawing Hands.
To harm our home is to harm ourselves, for
our world and its beings are like phantom limbs, through which we extend
ourselves into our environment and our future potentialities.
When such bonds become atavisms and forces
which threaten to consume us, vanity, greed, addiction, consumer fetishism, the
conversion of ourselves and our environment into wealth and power and the
refashioning of our relations into hierarchies of masters and slaves, we must
restore the balance.
How shall this balance be defined, and by
what acts can it be restored?
To
these ends I refer you to the works of Fritjof Capra on the interdependence of ecological
and social issues, and for shrewd analysis of current events and insight on
ideological frameworks, see the Green New Deal issue of In These Times: http://inthesetimes.com/archives/covers_ind/43/05/.
What may each of us do this very moment to
restore the balance of the world and ourselves? Look to the origins of
imbalance within ourselves, the inchoate cauldron of emotions wherein fears and
desires arise to drive and bind us, the eternal struggle of good and evil in
the human heart.
Here I would speak of the sacredness of life, the loss of the
reverential or what Schiller called “the disgodding of nature”, the power of
joy and of love to transmute us, of principles which are immanent in nature
including freedom and cooperation, autonomous mutualism, the beautiful anarchy and
chaos of self-organizing systems, interdependence, and coevolution.
Above
all prescriptions is this; to laugh, love, and seek joy together, to enact the
dance of life as a wild and unfallen being, to claim each other and bear the
suffering and trials of our common humanity with the responsibility for each
other of a member of our great and diverse human family, to learn and become
our best selves throughout our entire lives, no matter the source or where it
leads.
We
must conserve the wildness of the earth, and also the wildness within ourselves.
Torch of Liberty 
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