Towards Wholeness: Earth is the Pulse We Cannot Forget 

This Earth Day is marked by a strange silence. It feels like the world is ending — not in the way we thought when the sky was orange, wild fires blazed across continents, and entire homes were swallowed by hurricanes — but by warmongering. As headlines are flooded with geopolitical crises, climate and environmental justice seem to have receded to the margins of the world’s attention. How did the defining crisis of our time become background noise? 

Daily news events eclipse the growing urgency of the escalating climate catastrophe. Earth Day can feel irrelevant as people are living under bombardment or just struggling to make ends meet. Yet, we can not afford to lose sight of our only home. When we center the health of our planet, the impact of war becomes impossible to ignore. So why is this not the starting point of the climate conversation? 

Across the Global south, the same logic of extraction repeats itself. Each occasion of geopolitical conflict is a defining site of the world’s upheaval, but climate never enters the frame of how we are taught to understand and interpret them. Across the world, we have witnessed as countries are destabilized in pursuit of fossil fuels. Underlying and facilitating these events are companies, driven by the desire for oil to extract from the earth, produce wealth from the labor and resources from the Global south, and destroy our environment in the process. 

It is no coincidence that the US is the world’s largest institutional carbon emitter, sustained by multinational corporations committed to the pursuit of oil and profit.  We cannot begin to have a meaningful conversation about climate justice without challenging the systems driving this crisis, whether that’s fossil fuel companies or the military. We must cultivate a vision of the world where life is dictated by land, waters, and bodies turned into profit, rather than their health and continuity. 

At the heart of the world’s largest conflicts lies climate justice. What climate justice illuminates is what many systems work to obscure: that war and environmental collapse are not isolated crises, but products of the same structures. Without this recognition, the climate movement has nothing to stand on. 

This past decade, we saw an unprecedented rise of support for climate justice, led largely by frontline youth. Foundational to this strength was how youth movements centered the importance of intersectionality, revealing the ways in which environmental crises can unify movements and experiences we often see as fragmented. It revealed that at the root of these different struggles, is the demand for a healthy and liveable planet in which we have a reciprocal and regenerative relationship with. The climate movement must bring back these teeth. 

Climate justice is a vessel for truths and questions we have avoided, to finally be reckoned with, by daring to abandon the status quo and choose life over profit and the false fantasy of security and safety it provides.  

The health and future of our planet should be guiding our politics — our everyday commitments. There is immense potential in the climate movement becoming the guiding political framework of this moment if it reclaims its capacity to challenge the systems that produced this crisis. Climate justice cannot be understood, cannot be accomplished, until we confront and defeat the fossil fuel companies and military interests that profit from the destruction of people and places. This struggle is where we learn to live beyond capitalism’s forced scarcity and survival and where life-affirming practices, cultures, and institutions begin to emerge. 

For many of us, Earth Day has been rooted by protest, because it is hard to celebrate the Earth’s beauty while the world is consumed by violence and loss. Our power, Our planet invites us to acknowledge that love for the Earth cannot end at our gaze. It must live in and through our commitments. How we see the Earth shapes how we see ourselves. When we don’t understand our land, our waters, our literal home as sacred, we will never view ourselves in the same lens. 

Let this Earth Day be a reminder of the tenderness we are capable of embodying, but are so often denied. The water that gives us life. The air that cradles us. The soil we will return to one day. Dare to be a reflection of Earth herself — vast, living, fluid, holding all elements, all possibilities, all experiences at once. We are tasked with learning from her wholeness, refusing the fragmentation imposed upon us, remembering what it means to be held by a living planet, and committing to this inherited responsibility.