Introspection; Earth Day 2020

By Suryamithra Vishwa

This Earth; Our cradle, our playground, our kitchen, our dispensary, our coffin

This Earth; Our heaven, our hell, our music, our silence, our mystery

This Earth; Our happiness, our sorrow, our greed, our avarice, our murder

This Earth; Our darkness, our light, our blindness, our disease

This Earth; Our awakening, our healing, our trepidation, our unification

This Earth; Our shadow, our whisper, our scream, our breath

This Earth; Our saviour, our blood, our bones, our resurrection

This Earth; Our arrogance, our punishment, our prison

April 22nd arrived and departed. Just like another daybreak and sunset. Yet for the first time in the fifty years that this day had been commemorated it came and left without being smudged by smoke and fumes. This year’s Earth Day was celebrated it seems by the Earth itself and all its creatures; the trees swayed to a new rhythm, the soil was not burdened by the weight of humans and their cluttering, and the other still free children of our One Mother, that man had in his sheer barbarity thought only fit for his plate and zoos, roamed unhampered. For over a month, freed of our toxic influence, the Earth breathed through the lungs we have destroyed; and while our Mother Earth attempted to recover, most of us were doing the same, languishing in hospital beds in many corners of the world, waiting desperately for our lungs not to be destroyed. What came to our rescue were not our fancy cars, not our high-rise buildings, our technology, or our knowledge used for destruction and devious innovations. What came to our rescue was oxygen as we took breath after breath, breathing in hope, whatever that is left of the forests that we have destroyed; those lungs of mother Earth that humans - the virus of superiority has threatened. We now stand at the cornerstone of an uncertain future. A future where we do not yet know whether we will survive as a species, but we now do realise, possibly - at least some of us do - that this Earth will continue regardless to flourish over our bones. If we threaten it further, and its other inhabitants, we will only be endangering our own future, the way we have done so far. 

Fighting the COVID 19 pandemic is not merely hand washing and having ventilators in hospitals. It is about defending the Earth against industrial pollution, reclaiming the ecological foundation of life, and transforming toxic industrial civilisation and consumerism dictated by multinational companies. It is about relearning that we are the Earth and that we cannot be suicidal by destroying ourselves anymore.” -  Farida Akhtar, the founder of Nayakrishi Andolan - the farmers movement for biodiversity conservation and food sovereignty in Bangladesh - on the occasion of commemorating Earth Day, as told to the Harmony page team.