Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists by Leah Penniman

Author:Leah Penniman [Penniman, Leah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Nature, Science, Social Justice, Environmental, Writing, Essays, Spirituality, Politics
ISBN: 9780063160910
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

When you listen to the earth, what do you hear?

Pandora Thomas: She cries a lot. I don’t conceive of natural disaster as the earth coming to get us, but rather, the earth speaking to us. When the water encroaches, it’s a communication to move inland. Our Native ancestors looked at the birds, insects, and critters migrating. We looked to the sky and saw that it was the time in the cycle for us to move on. The Earth wants us to slow down, listen, and consume less. She needs us to be doing a lot less driving and flying, less designing of things to exist so many steps away from their source. She needs us to be in a deeper relationship with nonhuman beings and outside of human-built structures. We, too, are animals. If you tore your skin away, you would be the same collection of muscles and bones. We, too, are trees. When I look at the Santa Cruz redwoods, I see that their skin looks like mine, and I feel more beautiful. Redwoods brought me to my true tree nature, understanding that I am a tree in human form. The trees remind us to go back to our roots and to hold the complexity of our relationships.

Greg Watson: Full disclosure, I think the earth does speak. I am a believer in the Gaia hypothesis that the earth has an intelligence that transcends our intelligence. By extension, our intelligence is part of the earth’s intelligence. She tells us that we humans are here for a special reason, and it’s not to dominate or to be passive, but to be a constructive partner in the process of planetary evolution. The challenge is that we have to reconcile our understanding of and commitment to local social and ecological systems alongside the planetary systems. There is a global aspect that we have to understand. If we are to achieve peace and realize our full human potential, it will require an unprecedented degree of global cooperation. Even as we focus locally, we need to keep our eyes on the whole earth. For example, there is no way we can build enough solar panels and wind turbines to achieve international greenhouse gas emissions goals if every country does it alone. There are simply not enough resources, and we would be mining minerals unsustainably. We need a 100 percent renewable-energy-powered and globally interconnected energy grid—originally proposed by Buckminster Fuller—that takes advantage of the fact that half of the world is always in daylight and that somewhere on earth the wind is always blowing. The earth will be around to maintain the conditions necessary for life, and she would love for humans to be part of that. But if our consciousness can’t keep up, she is fully prepared to say that humanity was a noble but failed experiment, and she will go back to the drawing board to come up with another thoughtful, mindful cospecies to collaborate with her.

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