The Earth Is Speaking: Are We Listening?

Mulberry bushes have thorns to protect the sweet fruit.

Andrea Gibson, an American poet, has inspired this post. She writes about the Earth and the environment.  Her poem speaks of how everything on Earth is connected and depends on this interconnectedness. She reminds us that mulberry bushes have thorns whose only job is to protect the sweet fruit. She talks about sea otters that sleep holding hands to prevent them from drifting apart. And she mentions whales that follow their wounded friends to the shore to keep them from dying alone, even though it means that they too will die. 

Sea Otters sleep holding hands.

So, I wrote my own poem...

Our Earth is crying for help—  

Rivers are choking 

On plastic promises of progress. 

Oceans turn into black mirrors  

Become places where nothing lives and even fish forget their own names, 

The salt and water are replaced with plastic and oil. 

We are slowly killing our home  

With convenience, silence and inaction. 

“Someone else will fix it,” is our answer to Earth’s warnings. 

I wrote this poem because sometimes data isn’t enough to sway public opinion. Charts, reports, and statistics can tell us the numbers—how many degrees the planet has warmed, how many glaciers have melted, how many species are gone. But numbers don’t always break our hearts or get us to act. 

And heartbreak is exactly what the Earth demands of us now. 

Every year, “unprecedented” wildfires blaze through homes, oceans turn acidic enough to bleach coral reefs, and storms that used to be “once in a century” occur every other season. The word normal has lost its meaning. We are living in the aftermath of choices we were warned about decades ago, and the signs are everywhere: 

• Rivers are choking on plastic. Microplastics are now found in human bloodstreams and even in newborns. 

• The atmosphere is gasping and overheating. The hottest years on record aren’t a warning—they’re happening in the present tense. 

• Forests are falling silent. Biodiversity loss is accelerating so fast that ecosystems collapse like dominoes. 

Where once diversity thrived, our forests are becoming empty.

When a child asks why the sky looks tired, what do you say? How do you explain to a child that the grown-ups knew all along that pollution has consequences, and yet… they kept buying, kept burning, kept shrugging? 

We are not standing at the edge of crisis anymore. We are living inside it. The “breaking point” isn’t a cliff in the distance—it’s the ground beneath our feet cracking open. And the question is no longer, can we stop it? The question is, will we fight for what is left? 

Because the Earth is not asking politely. She is demanding action.  

In the face of so much destruction, it’s easy to feel small, as if the weight of the planet’s grief is too great for any one set of shoulders. But you can reject the lie that you are powerless. Every action—every voice, every seed, every refusal to look away while greedy billionaires use Earth’s resources to make more profit—matters more now than ever. 

The true power lies not in grand gestures but in the collective courage of ordinary people choosing to live differently—refusing plastic as much as they can, starting community gardens where empty lots once stood, speaking up in rooms where decisions to divide our coastline among big oil companies are taken. Change, after all, has always begun with a single voice daring to disrupt the quiet, a single act of care multiplied by millions.  

Hope has a stubborn root, and even where the ground is scorched and tired, it finds a way to break through—reminding us that possibility is not yet lost, and that creation, not just destruction, is within our grasp. 

✨ Your Turn 

 What do you see around you that tells you the Earth is asking for help? Is it heat, drought, flooding, or the silence where birdsong used to be? Share it in the comments section below. Let’s stop pretending someone else will fix it—let’s begin here, together.

Whales in the ocean