By Karen Elias
So here we are, struggling to find even a modicum of hope in celebration of Earth Day 2025.
We’ve come a long way from April 22, 1970, when the first Earth Day was celebrated, launching what would become a worldwide environmental movement. On this date in 2016, the landmark Paris Agreement was signed by nearly 200 countries, including the U.S., all of whom pledged to work together to keep the rise in global surface temperature below 2 degrees C, and preferably below 1.5 degrees. Under the Trump administration, the U.S. has now withdrawn a second time from the agreement, and climate experts are announcing that several places in the world have already surpassed the 2-degree limit, moving the planet toward a point where the impacts from the climate crisis will be difficult – and perhaps even impossible – to reverse.
2024 was the hottest year on record. And as fossil fuel use continues to expand, the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere is rising more rapidly than has been previously recorded, producing CO2 levels that are at their highest point in at least 2 million years. Despite the alarms being issued on a regular basis by the world’s climate
experts, the Trump administration has set about gleefully wiping any reference to “climate change” from official documents and gutting every agency and regulatory structure designed to protect our environment, our health – and our planet.
The world urgently needs transformative action. For many of us it might be tempting to simply shut our eyes against a world that seems to be ossifying or, at worst, going down in flames to certain defeat. Or, wanting to take action, it might be tempting to simply work to reduce our own carbon footprint by, say, eating less meat or buying an EV. (The concept of the “carbon footprint,” by the way, was created by British Petroleum, one of the world’s major oil producers, to divert our attention from its own polluting record by focusing on piecemeal, and ultimately inadequate, individual behaviors.)
So what can we do? First, we need to stay awake. We find ourselves alive on this most vulnerable planet at a treacherous moment, one in which the actions of today will determine our collective future. It would be easy, given the chaos of the present moment in which we are deluged by alarming new threats every single day, to allow climate issues to slip unnoticed from our attention.
Second, we need to keep the words “climate change” in our vocabulary. Impoverishment of our language can shut out so much: our fierce attachment to, and care for, the natural world; our responsibility to the preservation of what life we have left: animal, plant, and human; our ability to listen to cries for help that call our own world-views into question and expand our capacity for human, compassionate response.
And last, we need to keep that awareness alive. We need to talk about what it means to live on our planet at this particular moment and use whatever talents we have at our disposal to make a compelling case for our own preservation, and our own flourishing. Along the way, we will “need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures, and to the possibility of a livable future for us all.” [Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor: The Guardian]
With our persistence and passionate grit, there will be Earth Days in our future that we can celebrate with gratitude.
Rural Progressive Voices 