Feel the wonder, fuel the fight

Happy Earth Day, readers. It feels happy to me, in that here in Brooklyn, the land itself seems to be crying out with joy, shouting in the raucous pinks of cherry blossoms. It’s the time of year when everything outside is so beautiful that I find myself rushing to finish my work, or take a long enough lunch break, that I can sneak out for an hour or so of sunlight to stare goofily up at the blooming trees like a lovestruck teenager.

But as Bill McKibben reminded us a few years ago: “Earth Day was born in 1970 not as a celebration, and not as an occasion for greenwashing press releases, and not as a moment for photo ops—but as a honking big protest.” The lead-up to that big protest was marked by oil spills and rivers that wouldn’t stop catching fire, but also the immense wonder of the first picture we ever saw of our little planet from space, the famous “Earthrise” photo taken on a roll of color film by astronauts aboard Apollo 8.

We’re in some ways in a similar place now: the temperature of the Earth has never been higher and the headlines are littered with environmental horror stories. And yet we’ve also heard echoes of that wonder again in the wake of Artemis II and the eloquent musings of the astronauts since their return.

Here’s Christina Koch, the first woman to travel around the moon, a few weeks ago: “The thing that changed for me, looking back at Earth, was that I found myself noticing not only the beauty of Earth, but how much blackness there was around it and how it just made it even more special. It truly emphasized how alike we are, how the same thing keeps every single person on planet Earth alive.”

This planet is so unbelievably special, so unique in its ability to support life, in other words, that we should be willing to fight for it. And in many ways, that’s what the first Earth Day was: a fight for policy that would actually protect this planet from the harms of indifference, of capitalist greed, of disconnection from our kinship with this planet.

It can be easy to look at our current political leaders (wherever we are in the world) and feel hopeless about the possibility of enacting useful environmental policy. But this cynicism is not completely borne out by the data. As I’ve written about before here in the U.S., 75% of the commitments that the country made at the Paris climate agreement can be reached entirely without federal support, and there are real climate champions taking office at all levels of government even now. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: People all over the world have done good work under repressive governments for centuries.

My sense moving forward is that we need to tap into our wonder, and we need to let it fuel our fight. We need a public that is re-enchanted with the natural world, marveling at photos of our little blue dot from space and stopping to admire the lilacs, but we also need people stepping up to fight harder and more courageously on behalf of this planet than they ever have before. Don’t stop at just one or the other.

I’ll leave you with “[since feeling is first]” by E.E. Cummings, who I think might have felt as lovedrunk about spring as I do.

Here’s to being a fool while Spring is in the world, and fighting for the planet on which Spring is possible,
Whitney