Earth Day
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| NASA |
Earth Day - User Manual for a Planet with No Warranty
Earth does not need a holiday greeting card.
It needs fewer receipts.
Still—happy orbit around the Sun,
you third rock with excellent water features,
a magnetic field that quietly blocks the worst of space’s bad ideas.
Earth is doing great, considering the tenants.
What can you do - every day?
Start with the low-hanging habits—
that don’t require a ladder or a personality transplant.
Turn off lights that are auditioning for nobody.
Electricity is invisible until it isn’t—
coal remembers, gas remembers,
even the clean stuff prefers not to be wasted
like a good joke told to an empty room.
Drive less when you can.
Combustion is just ancient sunlight
released with dramatic flair and a stiff bill.
Walk, bike, take a train—
let your commute become a small rebellion
against turning dinosaurs into traffic.
Eat like a thoughtful omnivore.
Plants are efficient storytellers—
they turn photons into lunch with admirable restraint.
Meat is a longer sentence; enjoy it,
just don’t insist it narrate every meal.
Waste less.
Landfills are museums of our indecision—
objects we finally broke up with.
Buy fewer, better things; repair what sulks;
recycle like a librarian who believes in second chances.
Water is not a personality trait; it is a finite miracle on tap.
Shorter showers, fewer leaks— let the rivers keep their plotlines.
Plant something.
A tree if you’ve got the yard and the patience—
carbon will gladly sign a long-term lease in wood.
A window herb if you don’t—
basil is forgiving and smells like optimism.
Advocate.
Vote like the atmosphere can hear you,
because policy is just weather with paperwork.
Support the people doing the slow, unglamorous math
of keeping coastlines where they are.
And yes, laugh.
Despair is a terrible project manager.
Hope, properly staffed, gets things done.
Earth Day has no finale.
It’s a recurring meeting with action items.
Bring your best small changes—
they scale, they compound, they gossip to each other.
The planet isn’t asking for perfection.
It’s asking for participation.
Preferably the kind that leaves the place
slightly better than you found it,
which, on a sphere,
is a surprisingly efficient promise.
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Shared for Open Link Night just after Earth Day with those garbage pickers over at DVerse Poets Pub.
I would love to know what you thought about this piece.
Please consider leaving a comment.
Well said, Chris!
ReplyDeleteChris, your poem is a mission statement that if followed will save us. All excellent advice. I have been following Andrew's (frewin 55) A to Z this month, all about fabrics. His "R" is about recycling all of these clothes that horribly are headed towards landfills if not recycled. There are technologies afoot to address them.
ReplyDeleteLove that nudge it gives you... Also include that our own time translated to money and energy is wast if it can be use to enjoy a walk is a better option
ReplyDeleteThere is so much to love about your Earth Day Manual. Smiles go miles as someone once said. Truedessa
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, laugh.
Despair is a terrible project manager.
Hope, properly staffed, gets things done.
If only all "user manuals" were written so affably, I would actually read one once in a while.
ReplyDeleteThere's a condition called the "Overview Effect" some astronauts experience during their missions in space, a profound cognitive shift which occurs having fully seen the "sphere" which is Earth, without boundaries, treaties, navies and defence secretaries. Just the one transcendent whole: how differently we might all treat this fragile home had that vision been imparted to us at birth. Hard to grow into it on ground that looks flat enough to defend; I suspect we finally see it down the hall of our dying moments. That, I'm afraid, is the RIP for human-oriented Gaia. (Animals and the rest of the organic order, I suspect, live free of such menial mental slavery -- sadly though, not free of us.) A pragmatic manual here for the hopelessly riven, like a mother instructing her child before heading off for the first day of a much worsened school of Earth knocks.
ReplyDelete"considering the tenants"... 👍 Great write Chris 👏
ReplyDeleteDespair is a terrible project manager.
ReplyDeleteIt is.