Earthling

I want to start by sharing a quote from the great, late Barry Lopez. And he wrote, “In this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?”

The river, the trees, the soil, other alienated people... the more time you spend with each, the more attention you give to each, and the more you love each, the less alone in all of this you will feel. It is from this place that others can be invited. Hearts may even change.

As the American ecologist Aldo Leopold deftly put it, we need to transform the way we see ourselves, ‘from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it’.41 Thanks to forty years of Earth-system research, we have a rapidly improving scientific understanding of how the Holocene epoch – with its stable climate, ample fresh water,

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So action isn’t a burden to be hoisted up and lugged around on our shoulders. It is something we are. The work we have to do can be seen as a kind of coming alive. More than some moral imperative, it’s an awakening to our true nature, a releasing of our gifts. This flow-through of energy and ideas is at every moment directed by our choice. That’s... See more

You describe something about the way the nightingale sings, which was about silence, that there is as much power to the silence in the nightingale’s song as there is to the notes that it sings; and that it taught you about the great art of decorating silence, a phrase I like very much. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit.

Small actions, like learning about the ecological roles of species (such as bats or wolves), spending mindful time in nature, or exploring Indigenous perspectives, can help build this deeper philosophical connection. These inner shifts ripple outward, influencing how we view ourselves not as masters of the natural world, but as stewards and... See more

If we would remember that we are first and foremost Earthlings, a term describing our shared heritage that should never have been ceded to science fiction, we might start paying more attention to what the planet itself has to say.