We once feared that “The world is doomed and the selfish actions of the earth’s many people are what is dooming it.”

We can see now that “If humans have the capacity to wound the earth, we also have the capacity to heal it. We have the humility to recognize, utilize, and to celebrate our collective healing capacity, and to somehow be healed ourselves by participating in that restoration process.”

We once self-righteously felt “We have to demonstrate the drive to fix ...

Quote of the Day: Rumi once wrote, “I have no vocation but this, and no need to touch every rose and thorny point…I would explain, but words will not help, how there is nothing to grieve.”

Commentary: Angst and guilt about how our society has mistreated the earth and its many people will not get us very far. We simply need to take little, modest but ultimately significant actions to care for our “earth household.” Once went I went on a ...

Quote of the Day: Our Franciscan teacher Richard Rohr once said to a bunch of us over-earnest, graying wisdom seekers: “If you’re over fifty, and you’re still thinking it’s about ‘you’—your ideas, your dreams—you are missing all the fun. Invest your time in helping the next two generations fulfill their wild dreams.”

Commentary: If you’ve assumed, I’ve been recalling a bit of Earth Day history from fifty years ago for nostalgia’s sake, I’ve failed in my task. As the Native American ...

Quote of the Day: Variety—diversity-has been called the spice of life. But Audre Lorde reminds us that “refusing to recognize difference makes it impossible to see the different problems and pitfalls facing us.”

Commentary: By ignoring the value of diversity in our community, we tend to displace or kill it off. Earth Days have taken us a long way toward recognizing and caring for diversity again. As Mary Oliver once wrote, “All my life I have loved more than one thing.” ...

Quote of the Day: When black novelist James Baldwin said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” I don’t think he was talking about the harm that is done to the environment that we live in, or how our health is harmed when we harm the environment.” But it can be applied to that, for Earth Day #1 began the “truth and reconciliation” about the long-term damage done to the ...

Quote of the Day: Black feminist Anna Julia Cooper proclaims, “We take our stand on the solidarity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritisms, whether of sex, rave, country or condition.”

Commentary: Social distancing is not, or should not be, xenophobia. It can be the respect for other lives. Yet, when any government or class tries to privilege its in-group over others, in supplying them with goods or services and closing off borders, we end ...

Quote of the Day: We live in a world much different than the one in which the first Earth Day took place 50 years ago. My friend Kathy Dean Moore reminds us what theologian Thomas Berry said, “My generation has done what no previous generation could do, because they lacked the technological power, and what no future generation will be able to do, because the planet will never again be so beautiful or abundant.” Moore and Berry agree that, “the ...

Quote of the Day: Pete McCloskey, the co-founder of Earth Day, 50 years ago this month, reminds us that youth and so-called “housewives” made a powerful combination in advocating for stronger environmental protection laws that moved us toward real “caring for creation.” Six months after that first Earth Day, two long-serving pork barrel democrats were defeated as activists generated unprecedented voter turnouts. As McCloskey recalls, “Denis Hayes and his bunch of kids had accomplished a modern miracle… five out of ...

Quote of the day: In the Christian and Muslin traditions of the Middle East and North Africa, there was fear of something powerful that is unseen –like their coded terms for molds, bacteria and viruses— but there was also recognition of the buoyant spirited power of others, live “leaven” or yeast. So in the Good News we hear that the “kin-dom of transcendence is like leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three small measures of meal, until the ...

Quote of the day: In his new book, Awakening: Musings on Planetary Survival, Earth Day pioneer Sam Love tells us that, “No one is alone, we are all part of life’s web / With each breath, we inhale, remnants of the universe, and exhale nourishment for plants / Who knows what spirits hitchhike in each breath, each morsel of food or each drink of water?” Do these spiritual fragments transform us, in ways too subtle for calculation?

Commentary: One of the ...

Quote of the day: My friend at the Duke Divinity School, Norman Wirzba, reminded me of something William Blake wrote, that is exceedingly relevant to what each of you may be facing during this era of social distancing. Poet Blake prophesized that, “If the doors of perception were cleaned, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks in his cavern.”

Commentary: Our moments of solitude can ...