Earth Day Challenge
Earth Day is an opportunity to challenge and expand our thinking, to draw connections between people and issues that are often seen as separate.
For example, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Earth Day, 1990, a number of Detroit organizations brought together the violence to children and the violence to our earth. Under the leadership of Save Our Sons and Daughters (SOSAD), We the People Reclaim Our Streets (WEPROS), Detroiters Uniting, and the Detroit Greens, activists decided to plant a tree for every life lost to gun violence during the intervening years since the first Earth Day. That turned out to be a forest, as 10,000 people had died over those two decades. Schools, churches, community organizations, and block clubs joined the effort taking trees. Groups held ceremonies, recalling the names and lives lost to gun violence in their schools and neighborhoods. A memorial grove was planted on Belle Isle in memory of the children of SOSAD. The day included music, workshops on conflict resolution, and sessions on urban gardening.
If we were to do a similar action today, to bring attention to the violence by police and the violence against the planet, we would need to triple this effort. Since 1990 we have lost more than 30,000 people to police killings, almost 1100 people each year.
The bullets that killed, the tactics of control and confrontation, the weapons of surveillance and control, have their origins in the refinement of military might.
Creating connections enables us to understand how deeply we need to transform ourselves and our culture. Understanding the interconnections of the violence required to maintain and advance racial capital enables us to think more clearly about the challenges of truly transforming how we are living. Such connections demonstrate why efforts at reforming small practices have achieved so little.
Efforts this year to connect the violence being done to the earth with the violence of war are especially important. Not only is the US the largest arms dealer on the globe, but our military is among the top polluters, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more CO2e than dozens of smaller countries. Maintaining our “standard of living” means we deal in death.
The destruction of people and places goes far beyond direct conflicts. The very presence of US military bases dedicated to war causes massive environmental damage by simply existing. As we in Michigan know, communities surrounding the nearly 800 military bases globally experience assaults on our drinking water, land, and air.
Today the US is dumping billions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine. This will only prolong the conflict and diminish the possibilities of peace. While arms dealers and weapons manufacturers benefit, the rest of the world suffers.
Ramon Mejia, an anti-militarism national organizer at Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, said”
“Earth Day is a bridge between movements and a bridge between communities to say that we all inhabit this world. If we want to leave a better world after we transition, then we have to build movements across struggles…The systems that seek to harm us are intersectional, and we have to be an intersectional movement that bridges across the struggles we are fighting, whether they present as imperialism, capitalism or extractivism…So it’s important that we continue to carry on [Earth Day’s] legacy.”
Earth Day is part of a legacy that we can call upon as we build new ways of living, rooted in the ethics of respect for each other and the earth upon which we depend.