Episode #137 Love The Earth

Ten Problems

• Climate change affects more than just plants and animals, and it harms vulnerable communities first and foremost.
• Although America only represents 4% of the global population, it is the world’s single greatest emitter of greenhouse gasses.
• Just as we can hurt individuals unintentionally, we can also harm the environment without knowing it.
• If the Earth does not thrive, neither can we who live on the Earth thrive.
• We will never become the best version of ourselves if we live in a state of perpetual defensiveness.
• Over-shopping and overspending to fill a void in our lives only functions to fill landfills and empty our wallets.
• The price of personal pleasure is often paid by the environment.
• Failure to heal from the trauma in our lives often leads to a transference of that trauma onto the Earth.
• Selfishness elevates our desires over others’ needs.
• Redlining forced the descendants of enslaved people into areas with higher rates of industrial pollution, and this contributes to current health inequities in communities of color.

Five Principles

• The best way to heal our relationship with the Earth is to learn from those who stewarded the land before us.
• The choices we make today do not affect us alone, and they can even affect people living thousands of miles away and thousands of years in the future.
• We will inevitably make mistakes in the process of dismantling systems of oppression, but we should not use this to justify inaction or unwillingness to correct those mistakes.
• Every choice has environmental as well as cultural, moral, and relational implications.
• To love the Earth is to love ourselves.

Two Perspectives

• “Man’s heart away from nature becomes hard… Lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too.” – Chief Luther Standing Bear
• “Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” – Chief Seattle

Five Practices

• Submit to the environmental knowledge and authority of those who know the Earth best – Indigenous people of the past and present.
• Invest in companies that take good care of the Earth and the people living in it.
• Watch The True Cost to learn about the environmental and economic consequences of the fast fashion industry.
• Read My Grandmother’s Hands to learn about ways that generational trauma affects your physical body.
• Ask yourself, “Which policies do I support that perpetuate inequality by ensuring that poor people stay poor?”