It’s all connected … an Earth Month meditation

In this generation of climate-changing human impact, it can feel hard to know how and where to stand. The scale of change feels too huge and daunting for any one human. Human appetites for water and oil, food and convenience drive many of these challenges, but what difference can one human being make? And how do we keep our fatalism from proving fatal to more and more of us, more and more species, and the planetary home we share? 

Wisdom traditions tell us to love people, use things and worship the divine, rather than using people, loving things and worshipping ourselves. But maybe even this teaching misses the mark. What if we were to “so love the world that” we give ourselves to protecting it, even from ourselves? Can we love people, and love the world, as we love what is sacred to us? 

I ponder these questions from a stance of complicity. I know that, just as I know my complicity in other biases we are engaging in ACPE: racism, ableism, and oppressions based on religion or values, language or immigration, sexual orientation or gender identities.  

My journey with anti-racism has taught me several things that are helping me: That I can’t let my ignorance or guilt or past inaction keep me from learning and changing now. That I need to learn and change from a place of love: love for this good earth, and love for the animate and inanimate beings that surround me. And that the voices of those whose lived experience and perspectives differ from mine have much to teach me. 

I am returning these days to the work of Joanna Macy, an ecophilosopher and Buddhist activist, particularly the deep resources in World as Lover, World as Self. Exploring four ways of experiencing the world – world as battlefield, trap, lover, self – Macy invites us to recognize our reality in the latter two identities. She writes, “Now it can dawn on us: we are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our isolation. We can come home again to a world that can appear to us now as self and as lover. Relating to our world with the full measure of our being, we partake of the qualities of both.” In the pages that follow I find so many stories and ways of finding hope in moving from guilt to actions, disciplines and practices. 

I am grateful, too, for having recently encountered climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy and a professor of political science at Texas Tech. Hayhoe’s work and identity are grounded in evangelical Christianity; her most recent book is Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. Her perspective is that we are not doing what needs doing not because we don’t care (studies show more than 70 percent of people in the US are worried), but because we don’t know what to do.  

In a New York Times interview, Hayhoe says, “And if we don’t know what to do, we do nothing. Just start by doing something, anything, and then talk about it! Talk about how it matters to your family, your home, your city, the activity that you love. Connect the dots to your heart so you don’t see climate change as a separate bucket but rather as a hole in the bucket of every other thing that you already care about in your life. Talk about what positive, constructive actions look like that you can engage in individually, as a family, as an organization, a school, a place of work. Add your hand to that giant boulder. Get it rolling down the hill just a little faster.” The talk matters, Hayhoe argues: we can each do our part, but we also need to talk about what’s on our hearts. Those conversations create a ripple effect that can turn into real hope. And a real chance for enough change, despite our past inaction. 

Finally, on the front of learning and changing from a place of love: I am finding myself drawn increasingly to explore the voices and traditions of poets, scientists and philosophers who expand my love language for this world. As I learned in my anti-racism journey, language is a key lever of liberation, opening imagination and space for new ideas, relationships, and loves.  

So many people to name here … Diane Ackerman, Shawn Copeland, Ursula Goodenough, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the aforementioned Joanna Macy, Suzanne Simard, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Mary Oliver (of course), Jerome Stone … and so many others, but let me conclude with Carol Wayne White. I learned about Dr. White when I began tiptoeing into the terrain of religious naturalism, and I am thrilled she will be one of our speakers at the upcoming ACPE/APC Joint Annual Conference, themed “Freedom, Wonder, and Liberation: Anti-Bias Practices of Spiritual Care and Education.” 

Dr. White is the author of Black Lives and Sacred Humanity: Toward an African American Religious Naturalism, and her voice speaks to my desire to engage religious naturalism from an anti-racist stance, and continue to be led by the wisdom of BIPOC women. In Black Lives and Sacred Humanity, White explores the work of three iconic figures, Anna Julia Cooper, James Baldwin and W.E.B. Du Bois, as each demonstrated active resistance and recreation in the face of devaluation and annihilation … and the ongoing power of not giving up on life and story and place. I can’t wait to see what Dr. White does with the theme of wonder, given that wonder is a strong catalyst for learning and undoing resistance. 

What does this have to do with Earth Month, or ACPE for that matter? Powerful religious ideologies have taken sacred teachings about stewardship and dominion over creation and creatures and used those teachings as a license to dominate both persons and planet. In light of how people and resources are used more than loved, how do those of us in health-care or other institutional settings engage the harm medical pollution and waste create? What do we do with our desire to gather when the gathering comes at a high cost to our environment? How do we fit care for our world into an intersectional analysis of what just care and care for justice looks like? 

Many shoulders are already under the weight of this boulder, to use Hayhoe’s image. Let us add our own strength, and see what we can do.