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ENVIRONMENT

World Mother Earth Day as a time to reflect

  • 17 April 2020
Like everything else in the world, dedicated days have histories that witness to change. World Mother Earth Day is no exception. Its early origins lay in Earth Day. It brought together the environmental groups in the United States that grew in strength after Rachel Carson’s seminal book, Silent Spring and later major pollution. The movement and the Day, held on 22nd April, focused on the delicate relationships that constituted the natural world and and the need to protect and nurture them. Its impetus echoed the Romantic celebration of the beauty of nature.

In 2010 the United Nations built on Earth Day by instituting its own World Day on 22nd April, calling it World Mother Earth Day. The naming was largely an initiative of some Latin American governments, and reflected the cultural and religious respect for Mother Earth. The image expanded the earlier focus on the natural environment as distinct from human beings by seeing them as dependent on and nurtured by it. It teased out the relationships that placed human beings within the natural world.

In May 2015 Pope Francis published Laudato Si, in which he stressed the urgent need for conversion and action to save the environment in the face of human-made global warming. He later named May as a month for Catholics to reflect and act on the message of the document. He, too, described the earth as mother.

The document both narrowed and broadened the focus on relationships. It narrowed it by emphasising the value of each human being and the importance of the relationships on which their flourishing depended. It expanded the focus by considering the systemic factors — economic, governmental, cultural — that encouraged or damaged human flourishing. He showed that environmental vandalism and the gross inequality of the poor were correlative, both reflecting relationships poisoned by greed and apathy. He concluded that the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor were signs of a world that needed healing. They had to be heard and responded to together.

Over fifty years our view of the relationships involved in the concept of the environment has broadened and deepened. The change has partly been in response to traumatic events like oil spills, drought, melting ice caps, bush fires and rising sea levels.

This year the celebration of Mother Earth Day encourages us to reflect on how the COVID-19 pandemic and our response to it has shaped
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