An Earth Day Resolution

Stop fighting climate change. Start respecting boundaries.

Here’s an idea for an Earth Day Resolution: Stop fighting climate change. Instead, start respecting the Earth’s boundaries.

I’ve been making this mental and lexicon shift over time because the language we tend to use to describe taking action to mitigate and adapt to climate change is generally problematic. We fight climate change and tackle global emissions with aggressive targets.

The framing itself evokes violence and oppression—dominance over nature and other people. One that centers mankind as the doer who knows best while ignoring the inevitable hubris. The not funny irony is that it is the very attitude that has resulted in our present global climate emergency.

Collectively, we will only have the energy, resources and capacity to battle climate change for so long. The real work is living in harmony with nature and within the boundaries of the Earth’s natural systems. This requires collaboration, cooperation, listening, patience for failure, keeping promises, trying new things, and investing in people and places for the long-term. We must care about others and about all life. None of that is the art of war. It is actually just art . . . and community, empathy, innovation and connection.

3 ways to consider our Earth’s Boundaries

1. Planetary Boundaries: The Stockholm Resilience Center has been analyzing our nine Planetary Boundaries and publishing reports on how close we are to transgressing those limits since 2009. In 2024, we have passed 6 out of 9 boundaries related to climate change.

The Earth’s Planetary Boundaries, 2024. redit: "Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Richardson et al 2023"

2. Earth Overshoot Day: Earth Overshoot Day is calculated by dividing the planet’s biocapacity (the amount of ecological resources Earth is able to generate that year), by humanity’s Ecological Footprint (humanity’s demand for that year), and multiplying by 365, the number of days in a year. In 2024, we blew past using one Earth on August 1st of that year.

3. Empathy for the Earth: Centering the planet. I love this video which personifies the Earth and posits: If the Earth Treated Us the Way We Treat the Earth. We have violated her boundaries and Mother Earth is ticked off.

Since April is host to Earth Day and is National Poetry Month, I offer up a good one by Mary Oliver (of course).

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver