Storming The Stage
I’m sitting in the tour bus, 4am, lightning flashing in the windows, another performance canceled. There was a tornado about ten miles away yesterday. Our “Love Earth Tour” with Neil Young is ten days in, with 3 of 6 amphitheater shows offed, with the downpour and floods in Texas and here in eastern Tennessee.
Part of our acceptance of this extraordinary summer job was the obvious superiority of in-person shared experience to disembodied information. If from the cheaper seats we are tiny figures in the distance, it is still more present than the computer or phone. The Love Earth Tour's 25 shows could mean personal contact with 300,000 souls.
We are the half-hour long opening act, the singers and band and I. Our reach-out is a more radical environmental program for this time of extreme climate and mass extinction, which it seems to us the mainstream doesn't quite notice. It is as if a fight-or-flight response to real danger is disabled in our consumer culture. We propose radical change now: shadow communities, psychological/spiritual shifts, mass vandalism.... The boat is sinking!
We take the “Love Earth Tour” headline literally. Love is the gift of the Earth, evolved in us as attraction and desire and love-making and longterm providing and protection of one another. This is life making life.
Well, this is the most powerful thing, but it is a key profit-center, target for saturation advertising, etc. So much so that in the US consumer market it is hard to imagine love without lots of products, perfume, cars, shoes, Tinder….
Where is the Earth in love? We are the Earth - made of the stuff and electrical charge of the Earth - and the act of love is Earth meeting the Earth ecstatically. Our political proposal is that the Earth be remembered by us humans as the main active agent of love.
So that when we love the Earth with the Earth that we have within us - we can be far stronger in our direct action politics. We are life making life as we stop the pipeline, the bulldozer, the toxic dumping and the worst thing for the Earth - war.
This may seem farfetched to some, but we need to reach for a motive in our defending the Earth that has more juice than the usual moral, legal, careerist, heroic, programs. We are the Earth loving the Earth. That’s the way love always worked. Love Earth!
But it may be that the social history of our culture and the far more powerful history of the natural world are simply on different tracks. The 50% cancellation rate of our attempts at personal contact may improve, hope it does, but this could be a sign of a gathering failure to get together. And we must make new physical contact. Silicon Valley-style information has proven to be too weak. But here I sit in this downpour, pedaling pixels to you, unable to have a real conversation.
We’ll make a mad dash to each other when the Earth we love gives us a break.
Reverend Billy Talen is the preacher of the climate apocalypse. He’s the director of the Stop Shopping Choir, a radical performance community based in New York City.
Wonderful, passionate, soulful song of an essay, but ironic in its testimony to climate collapse. Could it be that Mother Nature/Father God have heard/seen enough of our BS? Am I the only one seeing the Biblical significance of the Heavens opening and showering down fire and brimstone? And, yes, we are "acclimatized" to climate collapse and our central role in our own self-destruction--next time by fire. Here's the simple truth: too many humans are using too many nonrenewable natural resources and producing too much pollution, including GHGs and waste heat fueling ever bigger and more frequent storms. We are committing suicide and too slowly to notice, and too distracted by the "consumer" culture to care. Thank you for your heartfelt efforts!