The Voices of Earth Week
The Voices of Earth Week
Weeds that liberate | Climate predictions for 2023 | Healing climate guilt | Mother E video
Welcome! You’re at Mother E, a newsletter exploring our kinship with nature in a climate-changing world. If you missed the last edition, it’s viewable here: Following Gray Whales on an Epic Migration
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Today’s newsletter features some fellow Substack writers I follow: a self-described tree-hugger, a famous climate activist, and an expert on the intersection of climate and mental health. See if any of them expand your thinking as they do mine.
This newsletter is dedicated to the Earth-protectors, active nature lovers, and visionaries out there. Maybe you are one of them. 💙💚
As always, thanks for reading and sharing Mother E with others!
Robin A.
IT’S EARTH WEEK! 🌎 April 22 was Earth Day and this whole week highlights both the celebration of spring as well as ways to heal Earth and its inhabitants.
In this age of uncertainty for those who live on Earth, I value the varied voices of the truth-tellers. These are the people who speak out bravely about how to live in better alignment with Earth and our fellow beings. These original thinkers can inspire new insights, clarify our values, and model those highest values.
Here are several of those truth-tellers. You might agree or disagree with their views, but one can’t question their commitment and devotion to healing and helping life on Earth.
Weeds as a symbol of liberation 🌿
Kollibri terre Sonnenblume is a writer who peers deeply into the green heart of the wild plant world through his newsletter, Speaking for the Trees (No Matter Where They’re From). He’s been a farmer, author, self-described tree-hugger and “cultural dissident.”
His essay with the curious title, #WeedsArePeopleToo celebrates the vitality of those “pioneer plants.” When he worked on a Cannabis farm growing another kind of “weed” he noticed the small wild plants growing in the cracks, on the edges, and in previously cultivated fields in Northern California.
I sense there’s a sympathetic relationship between overlooked weeds and the “invisible” homeless and migrant people in our midst. Weeds become a metaphor for how we judge and treat life forms living “out of place.”
“Weed” is an entirely subjective label of course. It’s not a scientific or botanical term. A “weed” species might be native or non-native in origin. A “weed” might also be edible, medicinal or have other beneficial qualities. In the broadest sense, a “weed” is simply “a plant out of place.” Obviously, it makes a big difference who is making that call. ….
[Weeds] express an irrepressible joie de vivre from first sprout to final seeding. Their maturity is a swift fulfillment and their decline rapid. A life lived so fully in the moment – with such unrestrained vivacity – is beyond the comprehension of most of us humans these days…
He recognizes edible plants and introduces readers to a handful of them in his essay. Here are his thoughts on dandelions.
No collection of springtime weeds would be complete without the much maligned and misunderstood Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale), whose roots make medicine, its leaves cooking greens, its flowers wine, and its seedheads delightful wish-carriers.
Originally brought to the Americas intentionally by Europeans who valued its many uses, its reputation as a villain is a very recent curse, perpetrated by the lawn industry for profit. Despicable. I found only three specimens and I ate two of them whole.
Kollibri speaks of the damage conventional farming has done to the planet, “taming” and subjugating both people and places. His vision of weeds and wild plants as liberators may sound eccentric, but it holds a certain justice that the downtrodden plant species may be the ultimate teachers and survivors. The meek shall inherit the earth.
… we should open our eyes (and our hearts) to the jubilant effervescence of these ephemeral creatures and reflect on how we can foster that spirit in ourselves, as individuals. That path might lead, it seems to me, to some kind of liberation.
Kollibri terre Sonnenblume
What do climate experts predict for the next year?
Bill McKibben is the founder of 350.org and TheThirdAct. He’s a 62-year old focused activist and an articulate speaker and educator for all things relating to climate and its impacts on us.
He recently ran a national campaign to get the four biggest banks to stop funding fossil fuel projects which are making global warming worse. It was a sassy protest that involved rocking chairs with grannies.
Bill is a truth teller aligned with climate experts and scientists. He says NOAA scientists are now predicting a 40% chance of a strong El Niño by late 2023 and into 2024. What does this mean for us?
It could bring a rise in ocean temperatures that could tip the planet beyond the 1.5 degrees Centigrade mark that the world agreed to at the Paris talks eight years ago. When we get that kind of heat combined with CO2 levels above 420 ppm as they are now, he says there will be “novel forms of chaos” and instability. Some of that is already happening as Asia has been plunged into killing heat waves this week.
There are myriad scattered signs that we’re about to go into a phase of particularly steep climbs in global temperature. They’re likely to reach impressive new global records—and that’s certain to produce havoc we’ve not seen before.
Bill McKibben
He speaks of the need to be prepared psychologically and politically— to push governments, businesses and individuals to move beyond insufficient or stalled climate action to effective, coherent changes. Here’s his straight talk, eye-opening newsletter, We’re in for a stretch of heavy climate.
He also promotes the new book co-authored by Rebecca Solnit.
It’s just the right moment for Not Too Late, a new anthology compiled by two old friends who are also among the most stalwart leaders of the climate fight. Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young-Latunatabua have managed something important: an alternative to doomism that isn’t sentimental or treacly, but absolutely serious.
“Hope is not the guarantee that things will be okay,” Young-Lutunatabua says. “It’s the recognition that there’s spaciousness for action, that the future is uncertain, and in that uncertainty, we have space to step into and make the future we want.” I agree with that—with the caveat that the spaciousness doesn’t last forever.
Bill McKibben
Solnit reminds us that joining with others is key to pushing corporations and government to better climate-repairing actions.
McKibben wrote another important post recently about the ocean currents in Antarctica slowing down rapidly due to melting ice, and what that means for us. I shared his article on Twitter and my usually quiet Twitter feed exploded when he retweeted it. It’s the only tweet I’ve written that’s gotten 7,000 views.
Britt Wray on the beauty of creating better habits
If you’re feeling a little battered after the jolt of climate reality, let’s go over to Britt Wray, a fellow Substack publisher. She writes Gen Dread, “a newsletter about how the climate crisis is making us feel, why that’s happening, and what we can do about it.”
In her recent newsletter, Creating Space: The beauty of trying to do better, she discusses that dawning awareness when we realize our dominant U.S. culture led us astray by normalizing behaviors that are destructive for our planet. With gentle insight, she explores the guilt we might feel and the paths to “imagine new ways of being.”
We were all born into a furious storm of concerted, dishonest environmental messaging hurtling at us from hundreds of different directions: from “meat is a crucial part of everyone’s diet!!” to the term “natural gas” to the way air travel and car ownership are incessantly advertised to us as essential human rights. The environmental damage is downplayed and waved away. Destructive ways of living gradually become normalized.
Britt Wray
It’s hard trying to live differently from the majority of one’s society, whether that difference is going vegetarian, traveling without flying, or using public transport rather than owning a car. We’re social creatures who want to fit in with the dominant society. But what happens when a growing minority starts holding different values and views?
It can feel disorienting when we wake up to realize our habits may actually be destructive to the people, creatures, and places we love. That’s a sign of a society starting to shift its awareness.
When we’re able to walk through the world with an openness and a willingness to learn, to hear new information, and then – rather than get defensive – really sit with the feelings our awareness causes, even when we dislike what it suggests about us, we bring our best selves to the climate justice movement.
Britt Wray
Mother Earth video
Happy Earth Week! 🌎 I’ll leave you with a video I created in 2019. Click here or on the image below to take you to the Mendonoma Sightings website to view it. (Video is the image with white arrow below top image.) I’d love to hear your impressions. Enjoy!
3:16 minutes
Robin Applegarth
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