Reflection
Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. As we mark Earth Day this year, the world community is dealing with an unprecedented global threat to human life. We are locked in mutual fear and grief. The structures we considered normal have been disrupted and we have an invisible threat indiscriminate in its assault. It is a moment of truth, a time of realization that our lifestyle is fragile and unstable. We have been living in a false security. On Earth Day let us stop and reflect on what we have done to the planet and its beings. We are now experiencing what many species have experienced before us because of human activity. This can be a time of great turning in our realization and responsibility for one another and all life. May we not lose the opportunity.
“Climate change represents the biggest challenge to the future of humanity and the life-support systems that make our world habitable. Earth Day reminds us of our responsibility and challenge in the crisis we are facing. It calls us back from accepting gross economic gain and self-indulgence in the misuse of Earth’s resources to respect and protection of the riches of Earth’s gifts on which we all depend and in which we all share.
The theme for Earth Day 2020 is Climate Action. At the end of 2020, nations will be expected to increase their national commitments to the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. The time is now for citizens to call for greater global ambition to tackle our climate crisis. Unless every country in the world steps up – and steps up with urgency and ambition — we are consigning current and future generations to a dangerous future.
Earth Day 2020 will be far more than a day. It must be a historic moment when citizens of the world rise up in a united call for the creativity, innovation, ambition, and bravery that we need to meet our climate crisis and seize the enormous opportunities of a zero-carbon future.”
Earth Day Official Site
Prayer
May we be grateful and zealous for Earth not just today, but every day of our lives.
Action
Go to Earth Day 2020 Read the information. Choose an action.
Suggested Reading
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.
Job 38:4
I urgently appeal, then, for a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet. We need a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all.
Pope Francis, Laudato Si
Each community can take from the bounty of the earth whatever it needs for subsistence, but it also has the duty to protect the earth and to ensure its fruitfulness for coming generations.
Pope Francis, Laudato Si, 67
The Great Work, now as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner. The deepest cause of the present devastation is found in a mode of consciousness that has established a radical discontinuity between the human and other modes of being and the bestowal of all rights on the humans.
Thomas Berry
Since our leaders are behaving like children, we will have to take the responsibility they should have taken long ago.
Greta Thunberg I Sweden
We had no power in creating the systems that are destroying our world and futures — and yet we are and will be paying the biggest price for the older generations’ recklessness.
Jamie Margolin | USA
What the world community is doing with the planet, will be described one day as the biggest political failure of our time.
Luisa Neubauer | Germany
The earth is what we all have in common.
Wendell Berry
We might be saved by a flower, a pebble, a bird, a thunderclap. Anything can bring us a message from Heaven. Anything can wake us up to life right here and now.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.
Mahatma Gandhi
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.
Native American Proverb
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else to do.
Galileo
If we are ever to halt climate change and conserve land, water and other resources, not to mention reduce animal suffering, we must celebrate Earth Day every day — at every meal.
Ingrid Newkirk
I had assumed that the Earth, the spirit of the Earth, noticed exceptions — those who wantonly damage it and those who do not. But the Earth is wise. It has given itself into the keeping of all, and all are therefore accountable.
Alice Walker
To treat all parts of Earth as sacred and Earth’s beings as our neighbors to be respected and loved…
Land Ethic Statement, Sisters of Saint Joseph, Brentwood, NY