Earth Day 2020 – A Fresh Opportunity
Later this week, one of the American astronauts aboard the International Space Station will return to Earth after many months in space. When asked yesterday in an interview how she feels about coming back to a planet wracked by climate change, a deadly pandemic, and a host of other painful environmental problems she said: “An Earth in crisis is still an Earth worth returning to.”
An upside of the current pandemic is that we have given our Mother Earth a rare chance to breathe again. We’ve also given ourselves a rare chance to slow down and consider a new way of doing things.
One of the greatest gifts of this moment is the opportunity to reframe what has become a largely maladaptive relationship between the human species and our home planet. We now have the opportunity to recognize that our future interactions with the planet need not cause Mother Earth to cringe.
We find ourselves driven towards a mandate to leave fossil fuels in the ground, to grow food with our own hands, to live consciously without destroying ecosystems, to take a walk and eat meals with the ones we love and to treat one another with kindness, respect and inclusion.
For the past several years, our community here in Taos has been working hard to create resiliency in a time of global climate disruption and we will stay the course. Taos Land Trust is doing everything we can do to protect the lands and water we love, to find ways to celebrate our querencia, and do what the people on this land have done for millennia: Thrive.
Our wish for this, the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day is that we find a new definition of what it means and feels like to inhabit a healthy, thriving socio-ecosystem. That we humans slow down and adjust to the rhythm of our Mother Earth. It is time to embrace and explore something new.
An Earth in crisis is still an Earth worth returning to. It is a gift to receive. We will continue to move the water on the land, we will plant and we will sow.
Happy Earth Day from the staff of the Taos Land Trust!!!
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