So Friday was Earth Day, friends.
It was Earth Day, and we have a really long way to go if we want to stop climate change from getting worse. That’s not to say that we aren’t making progress—we are—but we need to do a lot more, and a lot faster, if we’re going to preserve this planet.
I’m not going to drown you in statistics in this article. I won’t tell you that bees are dying at a disturbing rate (they are) or that rainforests are being cut down at an alarming and unsustainable rate (they are) or that there are droughts and flooding in places where there have never before been droughts and flooding (there are). And I’m not going to tell you that the media should care more about this than about what Kim Kardashian wore to that thing last week, or what Donald Trump is yelling about today—even though it should. You’ve already heard all those things.
I’m going to talk about Mary Oliver. And one of my favorite poems, which is called "Poem of the One World:"
“This morning
the beautiful white heron
was floating along above the water
and then into the sky of this
the one world
we all belong to
where everything
sooner or later
is a part of everything else
which thought made me feel
for a little while
quite beautiful myself.”
It’s lovely, so take a second and let it be gorgeous.
Now, I’m bringing it up because I think everyone has a white heron. There’s something for all of us that makes us understand how we are connected to the rest of the world. It doesn’t have to relate to nature, though often it does, but it’s something that can be a fleeting understanding, or it can be an understanding that encompasses a lifetime as it did for Oliver. But we all have it, and we all find it. For me, it’s the woods back home where I often run with my dad. It’s walking around the lakes on a sunny day. It’s finding somewhere outside to write. It’s hearing the geese from my window while I’m doing French homework.
In short, it’s often small things that are reminders of a very profound connection.
It can be difficult to think about it in the abstract, to think about places we’ve never been and people we don’t know. It can be difficult to feel the immediacy of climate change when we are affected comparatively little by it, especially in landlocked and cold Northern Indiana. What we have to remember is that it’s coming faster than we think, and that climate change will eventually affect all of us. What we have to remember how much we truly are all connected, how much we need to preserve what we have. The world is a beautiful place, and we have to respect it. It’s on all of us to protect our white herons. Do I know exactly how to do that? No. What I know—all I know—is that it is possible.
