Earth Awareness: Belonging, Interdependence, and Climate Justice

There are moments when I notice how easily I move through life without fully feeling my relationship to the earth. The days become full. The pace quickens. Attention is pulled in many directions. And without realizing it, I begin to live as though the ground beneath me, the air I breathe, the water that sustains me are simply there, rather than part of a living relationship.

And yet, when I pause, something shifts.

I remember that I am not separate from the earth, the sky, the air, the water, the more than human world. That my body is not apart from this relationship. That the same elements that make up the soil, the air, the sunlight, and the water are the same elements that sustain me. There is something both humbling and unsettling in that remembering. This softens me, but also asks something of me.

“If the land is sick, you are sick.”
— Aboriginal understanding referenced in Scroll.in

I find myself sitting with this not as an idea, but as a knowing in my gut. When the land is strained, there are ways in which I feel that strain too, sometimes quietly, sometimes in ways I cannot quite name. I think of communities whose lives are directly shaped by drought, by displacement, by environmental loss. I am aware of how unevenly this burden is carried, and how often those already vulnerable feel it first and most deeply.

I still hold the tension in my body from the flash flood that destroyed my house, the result of Hurricane Ida in 2021, one of the deadliest on record in the United States. I know in my bones this vulnerability and this burden.

When the tendency arises to look away from the realties of climate change, I recall Hurricane Ida and I stay with what feels difficult. Disconnection carries a cost. Something in us becomes distant, less responsive, less able to feel what is actually happening.

“Inequity is experienced as fragmentation and disconnection from ourselves, from each other, from the land & the environment.”
— Sheryl Petty, Deep Connectedness

When I read this, I recognize how much of the current moment reflects that fragmentation. Not only in the environment, but in how we relate to one another. It becomes easier to separate, to compartmentalize, to treat harm as though it exists somewhere else, affecting someone else.

And yet, there are truths that ask us not to look away.

“Climate denial was never about science and always about white supremacy.”
— Mary Annaïse Heglar, Atmos

This is not an easy sentence to sit with. It brings forward questions about whose lives are protected, whose suffering is minimized, and how systems of harm are sustained. To care for the earth, I am beginning to understand, is also to care about justice. It is to be willing to see more clearly, even when what we see is uncomfortable.

I do not experience this as a call to do everything or to get it right. I experience this more as an invitation to remain present. To notice. To stay connected. To allow what I feel to shape how I live, even in small ways.

And maybe that is where awareness begins.

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