Earth Day : The Birds In The Meadow

Every day is Earth Day

I’ve been torn about writing something for Earth Day. Earth day should be every single day, and I am so very wary of tokenism. However I rarely make my beliefs explicit here and I have so much stuff to get off my chest, so where do I begin? This blog usually takes a diary form, with me describing something I’ve seen or experienced of the natural world in a narrative of some kind, and though I do try to infuse it with passion or meaning however slight, so often it just reads like a damn travelogue. Maybe it’s time for once to ditch the pretty narratives and get on with writing about why these places, these animals and plants matter. Not just why they matter to me personally, (although they do and I’m not intending to scrub the personal from my writing as if it were dirty, quite the opposite) but why they matter to us all.

No matter how little we do to stop global warming, habitat destruction and pollution in general, I don’t (perhaps foolishly) believe we have the capacity to completely destroy life. But if we carry on dirtying up the nest, Gaia will eventually shuck us off with one elegant shrug; us and all that we live beside in lovestruck familiarity – whales, tigers, all that charismatic fauna we love to watch on tv and all your favourite wild flowers too, we’ll all go together when we go. When a report is published describing a decline in zooplankton of more than 70% since the 1960s, as top banana in the food chain we need to be worried. If we want a world fit for cockroaches to live in, we are currently going the right way about it.

We all depend on our biosphere. Once that’s screwed so are we all, and oh, let’s not forget just how extremely screwed our children will be. There is no way off this planet; some day we will realise that there is no-where left to run. Global warming, habitat destruction and all that these entail make for a crisis far bigger than any other that humanity has had to face, yet we keep our heads down, sweat the small things and do nothing about the big fat gas guzzling elephant in the room.

We can ALL make a difference, by using less energy, lobbying for more clean renewable energy sources and not least protesting the lack of change from on high. Don’t wait for Government or big business to make changes, be the change yourself! Whatever your political or environmental beliefs, who wouldn’t want clean fresh air and a safe place to live, given the alternative?

Get Busy… click the links and find something positive to do on Earth Day!