Showing posts with label Mother Earth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mother Earth. Show all posts

April 22 - International Mother Earth Day

Posted on April 22, 2020

Gaia is the Greek version of
Mother Earth
There are some people who seem to think that caring about the environment and celebrating Earth Day puts wildlife and open spaces ahead of "more important" things - like money! Earning! Profits! Stock prices!

But of course nothing could be more important than the health of the environment. People can't drink profit and can't breathe stock prices. It doesn't matter how much money you have, if there is nowhere you can live, no reasonably clean water to drink, no reasonably clean air to breathe, no oxygen in the air, no land on which to grow food. 

Prithvi is the Hindu Earth goddess

Also, the health of the environment affects the health of animals, and the health of animals affects human health. 

And human health is important to the economy.

Mother Nature is teaching us this lesson right now - the hard way! COVID-19 is a new disease to humans - a disease that crossed over to us from a non-human animal (probably bats, possibly through a "middle-man" sort of animal such as a pangolin). And this disease is not only infecting many, many people the world over, it is also causing a lot of deaths and a tremendous amount of economic damage.

Houtu is a kind of Mother
Earth in Chinese mythology.
According to the United Nations page on Mother Earth Day, a new infectious disease emerges in human populations about one per every four months. And 75% of these emerging diseases come from non-human animals!

A healthy ecosystem with a lot of different plants and animals actually protects us from these diseases. It's a lot harder for germs to get from organism to organism in a healthy and diverse ecosystem. 

Spider Grandmother is an Earth goddess in
some Native American traditions.
So, protect the economy - jobs, profits, stock prices, etc. - by protecting the Earth!