Earth Day’s Birthday: 50 Years!

22 Apr Earth Day’s Birthday: 50 Years!

“Like a good parent, Mother Earth has sent us all to our rooms to think about what we’ve done.”  
-Robert Thurman

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 5 whole decades since humans first realized our expanding lifestyles threatened the Earth. Now, 50 years later, our environmental problems are more serious than ever. Did we fail or is that just the short side of the picture? And how does what’s happening now fit into any of this?

As terrible as the coronavirus is, and as much suffering as it is causing, you could see it as a gift from the Earth to help us learn to live more sustainably. It is teaching us how to do what we weren’t doing on our own: to slow down, drive less, use less, pollute less, listen more, and appreciate what we have.

While it is utterly tragic that nearly 200,000 people worldwide have lost their lives, the WHO estimates that 7 million people lose their lives each year to air pollution globally, far more than we are likely to lose to Covid-19. And as we drive less, California at least has noticed highway deaths cut by half, saving even more lives.

As we shelter in place and cease our flying and buying, our boozing and cruising, we are using less resources, polluting less, and giving Gaia a much needed rest. This virus is teaching us how to do what we needed to do anyway to combat climate change, and roll back the relentless destruction of the biosphere.

And the Earth is responding! The air is getting cleaner, the animals are coming out of hiding, the fish are swimming in the canals of Venice, and I for one can feel Gaia breathing a sigh of relief when I go outside. She is saying: “Thank you. Thank you for slowing down. Thank you for stopping. Thank you for listening.”

Before and after pictures in Delhi, India.

Humans may be getting sick from the pandemic, but the Earth is getting well.

What this means is that in the long run, more lives will be saved, for what we do to the Earth we do to ourselves. We burn the lungs of the planet in the rainforest, and we face a virus that burns our lungs. We drive up the temperature of the climate and we get a fever. If we don’t control population, pandemics will do it for us by bringing deaths. There is no separation between the Earth and us. And this virus is giving us that profound teaching.

So think of the virus as a period of getting sober. We’re in recovery right now. We’re sobering up from our addictive consumption of the planet’s resources. Sobering up from running around all the time, wanting more, more, more. The longer we spend in sobriety, the more we start to wake up to what is possible with a less hectic lifestyle, with less consumption, and a healthier Earth. The more we gain clarity and wake up to who we are becoming as a planetary civilization.

So if Gaia has given us a gift that will stave off future scenarios that could be even worse, what do we give back?

The most important thing we can do right now is to heed the lesson, and allow it to make permanent changes in how we do things. We need to not hurry back to “life as normal” as much as we want those freedoms back again, but be patient while the transformation takes place. Perhaps Gaia IS taking us back to life as normal. It is humanity that had strayed.

So let’s take Mama Gaia’s medicine of stillness and quiet; the medicine of appreciation for the ones we can’t see right now, and for those on the front lines, and those who have no homes to shelter in. Let’s take the medicine of remembering.

A new world is forming in the dissolution of the old. If we heed the call it can be infinitely better than the old one.

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