Kurt’s Outside Magazine “Top 10 Suggestions for Earth Day”

1. Explore locally. Rediscover the variety and wonder of what is near at hand. Get a detailed map of your home territory and find 10 places within 10 miles of home that you’ve never really explored. Choose one and take an Earth Day field trip to visit it. Travel there on foot or by bicycle. Enter the place with reverence. Be astonished by what you find there.
2. Celebrate Earth Day with someone you love. The pleasure you take in the company of a loved one is an expression of your own inner wildness. It may be the single greatest act of inner habitat restoration that you can accomplish on Earth Day.
3. Spend the entire day uncoupled from mechanized travel. Do this in solidarity with your ancestors who never knew this level of separation from the elemental world. What did they know by living closer to the earth that you are in danger of forgetting? Marvel at the simple pleasures of walking, of sitting still, of listening. Peel off the layers of human artifact that stand between your senses and a direct experience of the natural world that sustains us.
4. In this era of childhood obesity and “nature-deficit disorder”, take a young child you know to a place that you love. Believe that doing so could literally open the universe to that child, which in fact it almost certainly will. Let them lead you. Go at their pace. See through their eyes. Live into their questions with them. Tell them what you love. Tell them how much you still have to learn. Marvel with them at what you find together.
5. Get up close and personal with your own carbon footprint. Take a carbon footprint survey online. See how your footprint compares with the national average. Learn in detail where your use of energy is excessive, and commit yourself to taking concrete steps to cut back in those areas. Identify actions you can take that would make a big difference in your carbon footprint with relatively small changes. Make a plan and specific timeline for how you will execute those changes.
6. Write a letter to your Congressperson regarding an environmental issue you feel passionate about. Write it by hand. Keep it simple and from the heart. Tell them why it matters to care. Ask for a response, and then write again. Make it a real conversation, even if it doesn’t seem like they are listening. Believe that it will make a difference.
7. Make a list of vacations you could take close to home, and especially if you travel a lot by jet already, plan to trade in a high-carbon vacation this year for a low carbon alternative within your home region. See it as an opportunity rather than a sacrifice. Know that a single jet flight to Asia or Europe from the United States produces the equivalent carbon emissions, per passenger, as driving an SUV for several months. Is your trip worth this cost to the planet? Are your reasons for going compelling enough? What will you miss back home that might be just as compelling, if you opened your heart to it, without all that hassle and expense of jet travel?
8. Dig into the deep cultural history of the home ground you walk on. What native tribes lived near your home before European contact? Where and how did they live? What specific places were important to them and why? What local tribes are still there? Have you ever visited their communities or witnessed their celebrations? Visit some of these “power places” from a native perspective.
9. Don’t limit your Earth Day explorations to the places that are beautiful and easy to love. Open yourself to the wounded places near home also. Take a pilgrimage to one of those places. Approach it with the heart of a healer, letting the losses register at a visceral level. Understand our shared complicity in these losses, but resist the temptation to judge yourself and others. Simply take it in and allow yourself to feel it. Imagine this wounded place whole again. What will it take to bring that about? Commit yourself to a specific act of restoration. Consider joining a group that is working to restore the places you care about the most. Trust that these actions will make a difference, even if you don’t see the immediate results yourself.
10. Make a 500-Year Plan and a 10,000-Year Plan for the restoration of your home territory. Who will be here generations after you are gone? What shifts are needed now in the way you are living your life that will prepare the way for deep restoration that extends far beyond your own life span? What will it take for you to include your children’s children in the choices you are making today. Ask for the courage, wisdom and strength to begin that deep shift in your own life now. Begin again, as if the very future of life on earth depends on what each one of us decides to do now, which in fact it does.