As I mentioned yesterday, the official theme for Earth Day this year is ‘Invest in Our Planet’, and on Friday (Earth Day), we will fully embrace this theme in the post.
But I want to explore other, related ways to invest throughout this week, and today it’s all about neighborhood and community.
The three themes I loosely use in Earth’s Next Chapter are: people, planet, and places.
The ‘places’ theme is the critical connector between people and planet. It’s where we witness and interact with our environment the most. It’s where we figure out what matters about what we see out the window, and it’s where we tend to have our biggest impact (for good or for bad.) Places are what tether us together and what tether us to the land that supports us. Our depth of familiarity and connection with these places, matters.
So, what would it look like to get to know your place better and to connect with it more deeply - to notice more about it?
A few thoughts:
When you are out and about this week, take a few pictures. It can be of architecture, a street scene, a particularly cool tree in the parking lot, the cows in the field down the road, the bakery you really try to avoid but can’t because…well…life. Taking a few minutes to pay more attention parts of our community we see every day anchors us in what we enjoy about it. Tell the story of your place in a few photos. Please share your stories/pics!
If you’re shopping this week, try to buy local. The farmer’s market, the independent bookstore or pet food place or wine shop, and oh hell yeah, the bakery. Perhaps there is yet a way we can create a doughnuts for Earth Day campaign…??
Get a local paper this week. For those of us in small towns, this can be….enlightening in several ways! But there’s always something interesting in it and you can see what organizations are doing good work, or who is making things happen, and what some of the issues really are.
And if you are in a town or county where early voting is happening for primaries, please, please go vote. People ask me a lot what they can do to help stop climate change or help protect the environment. There are lots of individual actions that help, but by far the most important is voting for candidates who share your commitment to a cleaner, more beautiful, (bio)diverse, and productive planet and community. Your vote really, really matters.
“There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.” Margaret J Wheatley.
The greatness of a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members.” Coretta Scott King
Share your stories and pics of your place! (comments open to everyone)
(I just recently moved to a new town and I don’t have many pictures of it yet! So this will be a great challenge for me too this week - I’ll share them as I take more. Meanwhile, here are a couple)