The father and mother of our country is Harriet Tubman. The teacher of our country is Edward Said and his neighbor Frida Kahlo and her neighbor James Baldwin.

The father and mother of our country is the Earth and they were deported by agents of the monoculture, helplessly misguided men in masks who tear us apart. The father and mother of our country immediately begin healing the children ziptied in the hallways…. the ancestors rush in to guard us against plastic pixel nightmares. We remember that the Earth is our government, our culture, our economy…. Suddenly, we know power.

Image is of Savitri D, of News from the Natural World, after howling at fossil bankers

Eco-systems are running and flying for thousands of miles, all life is a foreign stranger to all other life…. what’s happening?

The sorrowing in Jamaica, Alice Coltrane's saving grace, First Nations singing to the Earth, Phoenix Fuller Ford's voice and wisdom, Savitri D's News from the Natural World, communities of life climbing up mountains to cool down, families of lizards, sharks, wolves, bacteria, mushrooms, escaping from hot homes, looking for higher ground that is too hot too... Still we sing Earthalujah!

Can We Be Strange Enough to Change Enough?

Everything happens at once, too much going on so fast, so violent, more violence, more violence, we can’t respond. Sitting in my chair in the American state of shock.

The White House is a Sopranos social club, helicopters drop on Chicago children screaming in pajamas, fishing boats on the sea facing aircraft carriers, jets built to crash in the Gulf of America. But we defend ourselves. Yes! 7 million us turn into frogs, giraffes, monkeys, tigers, and polar bears. There is room for humans to re-enter the future's ecosystem! But are we strange enough to change enough?

That's the headline that flashes through the paper and pixels. Someone finally defeats Trump and it is the Earth, who is the guardian of life itself, the captain of evolution, the giver of love.

Today's Earth Riot is led by Theodore Roszak, who identified the "Vast Wasteland" of the media culture that poor Donald loves so much, and who gave us the gift of "Eco-Psychology" the healing from the miracle that we call the Earth. We can call it healing, but the word healing is a half-built phrase, it could mean anything. Call what the Earth gives us LOVE. Now we're getting somewhere. LOVE TAKES DOWN DONALD TRUMP.

Meet me down by the river and tell me a secret beyond anything that I know. That's what water does.

Jessica Reznicek loves the rivers and ravines of Iowa and tried to protect them.

She tried to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline and was taken from her water and but not taken from her love of Iowa flowing water. Now she's out of prison but monitored, and -- back swimming again like she remembers from her childhood. Jessica, that "Meet me..." quote is from Mariam Makeba's beautiful song here in this Earth Riot. Welcome back - we are so grateful. We sent you a message from Leonard Peltier did you get it?

Scientists are hysterical now because AI can kill us soon. They are trying to plant a “cyber-conscience” into the robots before they run amuck. But the investor class LOVES THIS HORSE.

JD Vance claims the AI robots are the leaders of the American future. He may be an AI-bot himself. But the Earth, far smarter than any computer, is evolving too. There is the tragic side that we humans have made. (We’re in the 29th month of the global heatwave, also known as the Sixth Extinction.) We can die by computers; We can die by Big Oil. The Earth survives both. Choose the Earth. In fact, LOVE THE EARTH.

The necessary politics of our age is to turn down the virtual reality and reintroduce actual reality. A tree will do this. The Earth marches closer with every fire and flood.

No politician is as removed from reality as Donald Trump, no bank is farther from holding your savings than JPMorgan Chase, no religion more distant from bringing the comfort of unconditional grace than the fundamentalist empires with their God. And in our performance we call that political, financial and spiritual capitulation - we call it shopping. Consumerism. The necessary politics of our age is to stop living in the unreal echo of products. All together now, sing it! "Stop Shopping! Start Living!"

Peace on this Earth is the mother of all issues. But when we see the devastation in Gaza, the human families are in the foreground, and the rubble farther back. All the beyond-human life on the Earth, from insects to clouds to other people, becomes the background.

When I'm shouting into a megaphone on the street, I gravitate to the violence against civilian families as a habit, it's the most powerful argument for Peace. Yet the lives of all participants, even the ones who seem less innocent, even the ones who are doing the shooting, and even the animals and plants - well, nothing is worse for the Earth than war. Peace and war are repeatedly not framed as an ecological thing. But how then, do we bring the Earth closer? That's a trick question. We ARE the Earth. We are all made of the same Earth.

The United Nations is crashing, they say. But they should add that all institutions everywhere are crashing, because they aren't people. Institutions don't know how to be kind.

After returning from our tour with Neil Young, after amphitheaters and arenas and the Hollywood Bowl, Savitri and I find ourselves suddenly back home with thousands of environmentalists in the streets. The Paris Agreement and the EPA are gone. Funding is gone and Big Oil is - drilling baby drill. The new resistance against the poisoners seems to wait for us inside a science fiction future... We are free to dream with the catastrophe of the Earth, which is dream-like in its vastness and other-worldly change. We follow the Earth's instructions: love wildly and dream, break down walls and flood.

What If We Could Tell The Truth? What if artists, scientists, earth-activists - were talking to us without corporate interference, representing to us in clear language the Earth’s overwhelming struggle.

“Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir” experienced this possibility from concert stages in 16 cities over 5 weeks, as Neil's opening act. As we sang and preached “Earthalujah!” - we could believe that it is possible to share what is happening to our physical reality. We really can publicly call out that “We are in mortal danger, the global heatwave is accelerating.” Americans really can see past the thousands of advertising events that explode in our brains daily from screens and billionaires. We might not have to learn about the Earth only when our homes are burning and our children are drowning. Each of us can be a Planet Crier.