Nuff respect, first mother:

The smaller children in the family of our mother wish to ask for some sympathy on behalf of our mother. She is unable to breathe freely, her temperature rises unseasonably, her hair is thinning and her skin eroded in flash floods, avalanches, urban forests, drones of war, and razing madness, tornados and dust risings. As for her body fluids and internal organs, there is no adequate diagnosis. The most they tell us is that her children are eating sour grapes and our mother’s teeth are set on edge! We think that they are using parables to describe our earth sisters and earth brothers as cannibals, parasites, matricides and siblicides.

In this situation, where our own kith and kin are gnawing and chomping at our mother’s life forces, we are asking our cousins for help. To the hearty woodlands, mountains, wetlands, earthworms and grasslands, we appeal; gather your forces, raise a rescue mission and come to the side of our first mother and your mother. Together, our coalition of small islands, coastlands, highlands, junglelands, biosystems, along with our Fatherhand, must move mother from their hospital consulting room and bring her here to our home care. Mother Earth is endangered by her bigger children and the indecent way they rip off her property for their own gain.

Now, every year, Earth Day is a corner show on April 22, when people in organizations plant trees, clean beaches and riversides, sing songs and make speeches as gifts to Mother Earth in her sickness. For this year, one of their themes is: PROMOTE ENVIRONMENTAL AND CLIMATE LITERACY. It is a soft theme, calling us to learn and teach and perhaps get more active for the sake of health and wholeness on earth. I think that there are three health projects that Mother Earth needs us to take up, for our sake and hers. What are they? Active literacy is one of them.

POINTING TO ME THE FARMER, YOU THE HOUSEWIFE, WE THE CHILDREN.

Whoever plants banana, plantain, dasheen and yam, especially on our mountain ground, is shipping good soil into the rivers and sea whenever the rain comes. Mother Earth is glad to help us get a good crop, but she is begging us to keep the dirt in the ground where she left it. Dirt and the agrochemicals that are found in it damage our earth relatives that live in the waters. After every 12 feet of dasheen banks, we should leave two feet of growing bush or grass to bar off the soil from washing down when it rains. It is the bio-engineering skill that we can put into farming. It helps mother and it keeps our soil rich. And that is just a start.

Some of us housewives go to the fireside three times a day. Whether we use wood, coals, cooking gas, kerosene or electricity, the hurtful carbon dioxide, directly and indirectly complicates the healthy air with an incremental oversupply. The factories and plants that produce all the comforting foods, clothing and entertainment things around the home also produce tons of excreta in the air and on the ground. The fumes from millions of factories make the atmosphere acid, help rot out the coat of ozone between earth and sun and warm up our earth environment and raise the level of the sea. All these factories don’t have to use oil-based fuels. I believe that the solar powered plant that I see up Dorsetshire Hill produces pasta. Mother Earth gives us that choice and many more energy options that are quite wholesome, but companies, big and small, don’t visit Mother in the hospital. We must take them to see her.

We, the small children of earth, the “salt”, according to Jesus, must saltify our elder brothers. We have to take mother into our home, letting her show us how our home works have her bowed down low, and we have to confront the bigger ones to become solar, with wind and wave power. Mother cannot recover without our salt.