Autumn isn’t typically the time of year to be thinking about planting seeds. It’s the time of harvest, the time of storing up and shoring up. But in the wake of the Climate March and Strike, we found ourselves today wondering what seeds we can plant, among ourselves and others, to inspire change and movement around the coming chaos, disaster, and mass death that unchecked climate change will surely bring.
And so I found myself wondering if things might have been different if the environmental movement had had a different message all along. When I was growing up, and maybe even as recently as a few years ago, I received the message of the environmental movement as a message about the Earth: protect the Earth, keep it clean. I dutifully recycled and took public transit and ate no, or at least less, meat. But Greta Thunberg and her young allies in climate activism put it bluntly: The future for young people looks fragile, even bleak, indeed, and even more fragile and bleak for the young people of the developing world. The Earth will survive us if necessary. But we will not survive an Earth that is rapidly warming, flooding, storming, and burning, much of it aggravated (even if all of not directly caused) by human activity. Climate change deniers may scoff at the idea of protecting the spotted owl from extinction until they realize, likely too late, how the spotted owl (or any other vulnerable species) is also a canary in a coal mine.
Continue reading “Take Me to Church 9/22/19: Seeding in Autumn”
