Letters to the Earth

For decades, the dominant narrative has been that we should feel guilt. Then, there’s the dual narrative that calls for hope. Others have called for fear, or panic. I myself am on the record calling for anger.

But I don’t always feel angry, to tell the truth. In fact, sometimes I’m hopeful, sometimes I’m scared. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed, and sometimes I’m downright stubborn. (My mama would tell you that’s pretty much all the time.)

That’s because none of those emotions really get to the heart of what I truly feel. None of them are big enough. If I’m honest with myself, what I truly feel is … love.

Hear me out.

I don’t mean any simple, sappy kind of love. I don’t mean anything cute or tame. I mean living, breathing, heart-beating love. Wild love. This love is not a noun, she is an action verb. She can shoot stars into the sky. She can spark a movement. She can sustain a revolution.

I love this beautiful, mysterious, complicated planet we get to call home. The planet who had the audacity to burst with life, from her boreal crown to her icy toes at the South Pole. I love her caves and her valleys and her rivers and her oceans. I love the majesty of larger-than-life elephants and whales and rhinos and lions. I love the elegance and enigma of all the different kinds of bats – even the ones that eat other bats ! I love the unapologetic sass of butterflies and hummingbirds and coral reefs and the tear-jerking aroma of flowers that bloom below the equator.

I love that night-time symphony on steamy southern nights when the frogs croak and the crickets sing and the owls hunt. I love the taste of watermelon and blackberries in the summer – the way that they ooze down the side of my face when they’ve reached perfect ripeness. I love the delicate feel of honeysuckle petals and the warm, grainy earth and dewy grass on my bare feet.

I love sitting on my mama’s back porch in Mississippi to watch ‘God do his work’ in the form of late summer thunderstorms underneath a thick blanket of humidity. I love the late summer haze when all the colours come to life and seem to throb.

And I love my mama. I love my family. I love my niece and nephew and I love that it doesn’t matter that their parents are actually my cousins and not my siblings. I love my Aunt Joyce’s laugh and my cousin Candice’s freckles and my Aunt Karen’s voice.

I love – dare I say it? – myself. And some days it’s easier to do that than others. Sometimes it feels impossible, but it’s a work in progress and I’m working on it, OK?

A love like this doesn’t live in your heart. She’s too big for that. She’s in your blood, your bones. She’s in your DNA. The places where people think racism is. She envelops you with an impenetrable armour.

When you love something, or someone, that much, of course you’re frightened when you see her under attack, and of course you’re furious at anyone or anything that would dare to harm her.

I am furious that my mother is in more and more danger every hurricane season. And I am terrified at the thought of living through my old age, when my body aches the way my mother’s does now, in an unpredictable environment with disaster at every turn. What happens when my knees don’t have enough spring left in them to run from a wildfire? What happens when I’ve lost it all in a flood, but I’m too old to work again?

But this love is strong enough to break through the terror. She is hot enough to burn through anger and turn into fury. She can shake you out of your despair and propel you to the front of the battlefield.

It’s a love that can also – even in the teeth of these most insurmountable odds – give me hope. If I’m brave enough to accept it. I’ve seen her looking back at me in the eyes of some of the bravest climate justice warriors I have ever met, and I can feel that tickling tingle of ‘maybe, just maybe, we’ll be okay’.

A love like that doesn’t seek peace, or even vengeance. She seeks justice. And she’s strong enough, ferocious enough, brave enough to burn this bitch to the ground.

Mary Annaïse Heglar

Dear Planet Earth,

I am sorry we have misused you, messed you up, and physically abused you.

Now we are pleading for forgiveness, although we have done nothing to stop it, we just brought it upon ourselves.

It’s like watching a paper fall, and instead of catching it you watch it drop to the floor.

It’s like watching a child drown, and instead of saving him, you slowly watch him sink, sink slowly to the ground.

Because planet earth, we had the chance to catch you. We had the chance to save you.

Though people chose to ignore you. They chose to look away and say, ‘that’s not my problem to face.’

I’m sorry that when you stumbled and fell, we didn’t kiss your bruise better: we didn’t place a plaster over your cut: we didn’t even blow it better, we just left it, untouched. I’m sorry that we paid more attention to our problems, than we did yours. For we forgot that you, planet earth, are the reason we breathe and live, and us humans let that message pass our minds, way too quickly.

And for that I am truly sorry.

Help me correct our mistake.

Help me catch our world: save our planet .

Jenny Ngugi, 13

A little girl about seven years old, lying on stubby brown August grass in a London back garden. Using the pale inner core of a stem of grass as her quill and a flat green blade of it as her papyrus, she writes intently and invisibly. When the letter is done, she folds it into a tiny parcel and drops it into a hole in the ground. She is writing to the worms.

Her postbox is unnaturally circular, its ridge barely breaking the surface of the tiny lawn, but showing as a greener ring where the rain is slower to drain away. It is the air-vent of the bomb shelter dug into this suburban garden during the Second World War, for the benefit of the local residents. Now it is a portal to a subterranean universe where, via these green deliveries, the child’s secrets may be unburdened. Afterwards, if she lies on the ground and listens carefully, she feels a sort of comfort coming back to her, though not in actual words. Neighbours stare from above. She ignores them.

It is too hot and dry for gardening and the ground is hard. This means that the worms are safe because when it’s wet, she has seen them writhing and racing as the metal fork lifts them to the light. Sometimes the spade cuts them in half, but both pieces continue to writhe, contorting with agony – that much is clear. She marvels at the news worms can regrow themselves after what looks like certain death. Worms must be magical like Jesus, or else Jesus is a kind of worm. She is told never ever to say this again.

At school, she ponders the origin of the hard grey-pink slices on her plate, coated in gluey brown gravy. ‘Eat your roast,’ is all the dinner lady will say, so she sits there chewing away, a feeling of disgust filling her mouth as finally the fibres grow mushy. She cannot swallow it, so surreptitiously she transfers bite after bite under the table, onto a little ledge that seems purpose-built for concealment. Then she goes out to play, until there is uproar from the dinner ladies clearing the hall. The whole school is called back to their exact dining places, and the culprit is discovered and rebuked for wasting good beef. When in distress and shame she says she does not want to eat cows, her parents are called to the school, where they are asked if it is for religious reasons (it is not). There then follows a discussion of her strangeness and lack of friends. The little girl has no explanation, but listens and can only silently agree with what they say. Fortunately it is the end of term.