Healing Earth
Last Sunday, following relentless requests from my four-year-old, we headed over to the tiny beach at the Albany Bulb, a former landfill-turned-nature area on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay, for a “beach clean-up.” She has been learning about trash at her preschool and from her plastic-waste obsessed parents, so is often hit by the urge to “clean up the world.”
For various reasons, it had been a long, exhausting week and I could certainly have done with some quiet, do-nothing time. But what environmentalist parent can possibly refuse an earnest, persistent request like that? So there we were late in the afternoon, two kids, two parents, two grandparents, being buffeted by rather bracing winds as we tracked down bits and bobs of plastic bottles, coffee-cup lids, discarded masks, and other mysterious detritus. The kids had a whale of a time, running up and down the shoreline. The grownups mostly tried to find warm spots in the sun.
“Won’t the world to be so happy that we cleaned up so much trash?” my son, who turns seven tomorrow, asked, eyes shining, as we headed back two hours later with a full, but honestly, pretty small bag of garbage. “Yes, sooo happy!” responded his sister, joyfully.
My heart ached. Ah, my dear children! Ah, all children everywhere! If only we could heal the world that simply, one trash bag at a time. But here we grownups are, still warring with each other on so many fronts. Still unable to find common ground. Still incapable of strong, collective action to prevent our world’s inexorable journey in a direction that imperils all living beings great and small.
On this Earth Day, when so many eager kids are out on the streets, in the woods, and on beaches picking up our trash, I call on all of us grownups to try harder to see past our differences and work to restore the balance needed to keep life thriving on this planet.
Maureen Nandini Mitra
Editor, Earth Island Journal
Photo: Ian Umeda
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