Earth Day was created as a way to focus attention and organization on the cumulative damage that we human beings are doing to our planet, which will certainly do widespread harm and may lead to it becoming uninhabitable.
Already it is clear that changing course will involve profound changes in our patterns of thought and behavior, some of which may seem contradictory. Here are two necessities for moving forward:
We — as a species, all of humanity — must act together.
We — as individuals — must take responsibility for our individual actions.
The current human population of the planet is roughly 7.4 billion. Is it possible for 7.4 human beings to cooperate? And why should you or I change our habits if billions of others are not doing so?
With such vast numbers, how can individual actions make a difference?
We are accustomed to thinking in terms of separate units: nations, continents, races, religion — and individuals — often in competition, sometimes in conflict.
The Judeo-Christian tradition has a myth that describes the human problem of acting together: the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9).
As the story goes, human beings set out to build a tower to heaven but God prevented them by “confounding their languages.” When they could no long cooperate, the project was abandoned. Similar stories are found in many other traditions.
We are better at thinking about individual freedoms than about common obligations.
We tend to ask, “With so many billions of human beings, how can my use of energy or the way I handle waste possibly make a difference?” Can we convince ourselves to take responsibility for individual decisions and at the same time succeed in acting in unison?
Since air and water flow around the planet, regardless of human divisions, making climate a global phenomenon, climate change requires a global solution.
Can we develop an ethic of interconnection and empathy that includes trees and oceans, soil and forests, as well as human beings of different races and traditions whom we have never met?
Or are we crippled by an insistence on our divisions that makes cooperation almost impossible?
Within the last decade, it has become clear that the environmental crisis is a spiritual and moral crisis that challenges our divisions, even though each of the world’s great religions phrases it differently.
Mary Catherine Bateson lives in Hancock.