Today is Earth Day.

Margaret Renkl—in a gorgeous meditation on life on Earth: ‘We Were Born to be Wild’, writes for the New York Times:

“To get from my bedroom to the coffeepot every morning, I pass a bank of windows that overlooks two feeders and a birdbath. My early-morning habit is to stand there for a bit, starting the day with my avian neighbors. If it’s migration season, as it is now, I get my coffee and come back for a longer stay, just in case an exotic visitor has arrived during the night.”

“Last summer the biggest grasshopper I’ve ever seen in my life flew into my pollinator garden while I was weeding. My bug book taught me her wonderful name: obscure bird grasshopper. She studied me as I pulled weeds, turning to follow my movements, and I studied her studying me.

“I find all creatures fascinating, and have ever since I was a little girl, but I pay more attention to them now because I know how much harder my species is making life for all the others.”

The pivot begins.

“During my childhood in the 1960s, it was common to see people casually throwing trash out of their car windows, but these days human indifference to the natural world tends to be better hidden, even from ourselves.

“Market forces have worked hard to make sure we don’t notice the depredations we’re complicit in: the microplastics that pollute our waterways every time we wash a fleece jacket or a polyester blouse, the toilet tissue that’s destroying the boreal forest, the poisons we spray on our yards — up to 10 times as much, per acre, as farmers use — because they are marketed to us as benign “applications.”

On the subject of those poisons…

“As I waited in line at a garden center last week, I listened to the store owner telling another customer about a “treatment” she could spray on every bush and tree in her yard to “take care of” any kind of bug that might be feeding on them. He didn’t tell her it would also kill butterflies and bees and obscure bird grasshoppers. He didn’t tell her she would also be poisoning the songbirds that would feed on the poisoned insects or the predators that would feed on the weakened songbirds.”

Then she nails a very uncomfortable truth:

“Many people no longer feel a connection to the natural world because they no longer feel themselves to be a part of it. We’ve come to think of nature as something that exists a car ride away.”

Yep.

Things you can do this Earth Day and in the following weeks and months to start to reconnect with nature:

• Get online and look at places in your country where you can go free camping, away from civilisation for a day or two, and look at the stars and listen to the forest rustle around you in the dark, and try not to freak out when you hear some of the few remaining wild animals on Earth stumble around outside in the night. Try and get there by public transport and hiking.

• Grab a copy of the brilliant book, ‘Silent Spring’, by Rachel Carson and then marvel at how—believe it or not—we actually do worse things to the planet now than when it was published in 1962.

• Think about eating a little less meat this year.

• Get an electric bike and use it.

• Muse on the destructiveness of Western “culture” with a copy of Helen Norberg-Hodge’s seminal, ‘Ancient Futures, Learning from Ladakh’ (1991) in which she observes an ancient self-sufficient and HAPPY culture entirely cut off from the developed world (Ladakh) implode after India builds a road in in 1975 and lets the tourists arrive. This book’s a true eye-opener and could have been written yesterday. It’s translated into 40 languages, so don’t let that be an excuse.

• Only buy an SUV if you have to ford rivers frequently.

• Try to fly less, or not at all. Especially if you live in Europe and you need to get somewhere else in Europe. Take the train, look out the window, sit in the dining car with a glass of wine (if your train has one) and watch the world go by. Bliss.

Best wishes to you all.

Kevin

[Cover photo: Rose Marie Cromwell for the New York Times]