By now, with Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future movement, sustainable trends taking over social media, and nearly every political candidate making environmental promises, climate change and sustainability is hard to ignore. Or are they? Nearly the entire population of Canada and most of the world has social media of some sort or follows a news outlet and inevitably comes across climate issues like wildfires, hurricanes, pollution, extinction, and so on. Awareness is at an all-time high, but sometimes it feels like empathy for the environment is nonexistent, extinct like the many species that suffered from toxic human habits.  

When passionately caring and fighting for the health of the environment, it can be so easy to drop the weight of climate change and sustainability into the lap of the individual, but it is just as toxic to blame singular persons for not working hard enough to better the earth. While it is important to be knowledgeable of how your actions can degrade or regenerate the Earth, it is just as important to recognize that corporations, who are the real source of pollution and global warming, need to adopt more sustainable practices in terms of production and disposal. It is great to be passionate about healing Mother Earth, but it is crucial that we do it together and be gentle with each other, rather than blaming one another for not doing enough. The reality is that consciousness and care are what truly matter. This means caring for ourselves and others, just as much as the trees and oceans. 

The current capitalistic society that we live in thrives off convenience, off cheap production, off exploiting the land and people for wealth. Individual and collective apathy is what fuels the corporations that feed capitalism; ignorance allows us to move day-to-day without caring where our garbage goes or how to properly recycle and compost. Capitalism offers us a convenience culture that trains us to throw out and replace items that can be fixed or recycled in another way; it trains us to accumulate so much stuff with little care for it and to view everything as disposable. The encouraging thing is that there are many people currently thinking creatively and coming up with unique ways to be sustainable, such as new methods of making plastic, recycling material, or even simple actions like Nova Scotia’s plastic bag ban effective October 30^th, 2020. Even though there is hope for sustainability, ignorance and inaction still prove to be dangerous enemies against shifting to a climate-conscious culture. 

The good news is that ignorance can easily be battled with love, mindfulness, and compassion. I did not want to write yet another sustainability article that tells you to reduce, reuse, and recycle, no matter how true those practices are. Because I am sure we have all been told to compost, to buy less single-use plastics, to sort our recycling, to eat less meat and dairy because their methods of production pollute the land, to buy clothes and furniture second hand, to shut the lights off when they are not in use, to take public transit or cycle, to go to climate protests, to plant a garden, but have we ever been told that the true secret to healing this Earth that feeds, clothes, and houses us, is to care for her? 

I did not want to write yet another sustainability article that tells you to reduce, reuse, and recycle, no matter how true those practices are. Because I am sure we have all been told to compost, to buy less single-use plastics, to sort our recycling, to eat less meat and dairy because their methods of production pollute the land, to buy clothes and furniture second hand, to shut the lights off when they are not in use, to take public transit or cycle, to go to climate protests, to plant a garden, but have we ever been told that the true secret to healing this Earth that feeds, clothes, and houses us, is to care for her? 

Look around you, feel the soft, loving grass and steady ground that supports your feet. Listen to the trees, they have voices too, voices that whisper sweet songs of home. Taste and feel the food that gives you life and energy each day. When was the last time you thanked your Mother? This Mother that warms your blood with a golden sun and chills your bones with undefinable wind, the Mother that is alive just as I am. She is not here in existence for your convenience, she is here to live and thrive, to take care of you just as you should take care of her. And she is adapting with us, whenever we build a new cement building, she sprawls her chewing vines over its forehead. But her body can only adapt to so much before it goes silent, before the toxic sludge of modern society’s convenient lifestyle seeps deep into her soils and spoils her harvest. Your house on some street in some city is not your home, Earth is your home. Just as each item in your house serves a purpose, so does everything on Earth, and it is cruel to take away many of her gifts just so humans can build another factory or make more money.  

I am not saying that we should leave Mother Earth alone, that we should sever our ties with nature, for humans are a part of nature, and Earth needs us as we need her. However, it is unnatural for our species to consume so much of our Mother. We need to learn to have a healthy relationship with her, for there are many ways to live a high quality of life with comfort and safety in a sustainable way. That strong relationship is within reach if we adopt better caring practices, and stop prioritizing wealth and exploitation over the well-being of both Earth and humanity.