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.

We are singing a resistance song given to us by the screaming superstorm wind. The survivors among us are walking toward evolution in a new physical world.

The 28 months of the global heat wave changes everything everywhere.

The censoring of information in the consumerized West ("bad weather," "natural disasters") can not stop the screaming wind, the singing animals, the crackling wildfire...The Earth is singing a song that we are learning. Artificial Intelligence will be indoors only, a whirlwind of information that does not involve anyone who is standing on the ground. AI has nothing on the Earth.

No, it's a worldwide uprising. But I'm speaking to my home country just now - addressing the persistent mental disease of Consumerism. This passivity! It's over.

We have a history of rising up. It's time to be radical freedom-fighters again. We've done it before. Our gas and oil gov't kills how many thousands of us each month with heat, storm, wildfire and drought? WE ALL KNOW IT. Earthalution. What are the weapons of an Earthalution? Would we resemble the French resistance in WW2, or the Civil Rights Movement of the 50's and 60's, or ACT UP in the 80's and 90's... we know that Consumerism seats us in the chair watching the screen as the wind blows off the roof. Leave the screen first. We have to do this together.

The parallel disasters of Global Heatwave and Human War have a positive side, although it feels farther away - you have to imagine it, like stepping into Leonard's reality: "The superstorms are messages from Mother Earth."

Positive view: The accelerating death and life of the Sixth Mass Evolution is parallel to a Revolution against Consumerist Capitalism. Is the Earth directing everything?

Put the Evolution Back in Revolution!

The eight of us now in Toronto, our sixth city. The shows are going wonderfully. The essence of our message to the 80,000 people we've shouted and preached at so far: the 26 month global heatwave is a "message from Mother Earth", as Leonard Peltier told us. The Earth is our lead activist.

Question: Can we be strange enough to change enough to escape this culture of totalitarian consumerism? Hey all of you: Let's ask the Earth what work we need to do? Search in the 26 months of record heat for our instruction! Revisit our personal relationship to this hot living thing called Earth!

In our interview, Leonard says, "Storms are communication from Mother Earth." He talks with energy and insight, and love, after half a century in political prison.

I'm typing here on the bus with seven of us, the Stop Shopping Choir with the Detroit show tomorrow, the next show in the "love earth tour" with Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts.

Neil sings, "Love Earth, and your Love comes back to you. It's such an easy thing to do."

Emma Goldman says, "Love defies laws ...the most powerful moulder of human destiny."

The Earth moulds cities, breaks walls, somersaults cars... This is Love that breaks the laws that protect the climate-exploding billionaires. The Earth isn’t afraid of them.

The Earth gives us the stormy, fiery force of Love and shows us how to use it.

Savitri D and Reverend Billy in a broad ranging conversation with Indigenous activist and artist Leonard Peltier. You can learn more about Leonard Peltier and see his art HERE This episode of Earth Riot Radio premiered Aug 9 on WBAI 99.5 FM Radio For The People in New York City.

Thanks to Charris Ford and Peter Marks.

Special editing by Debbie Daughtry

We have the sensation that a general gravity is pulling us toward a highway. Ashtrays and lamps and pillows are sliding in the direction of the Hollywood Bowl.

Soon we are being pulled down a special kind of highway that has truckstops and rest areas. When we stop, we turn, and to our astonishment, there are huge crowds that look at us as they wait for Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts to emerge from the men's bathroom. While they wait, there are songs about the Earth and a shouting man who is wearing a suit like a southern preacher. He doesn't make sense. He says, "The Earth is Alive!"

The consumer class in many parts of the world - certainly in the USA - has been normalized so thoroughly into a life that is actually suicidal, that to survive at all will mean inventing an alternative science fiction-like life, a completely strange full-scale world.

The reality of our physical environment is now seen mostly as a relentless stream of disasters. In fact, it is our own violence that we don’t recognize. Or, we notice that we are involved when a pollster asks us on the phone whether we believe that climate change is “human-caused.” We say yes, that’s true. But if we really believed that, we would, when we hung up the phone, be shocked by the new world we will have to build, with the Earth as our creative director.

There was a bare hand that reached out of the electric swamp of my city, and I clasped the fingers and we grasped each other and gasped and moaned and we've been together ever since.

And now the city is changing because it turns out many of us have found the hand that reaches for love, and the masked police and the saturation advertising and all the rest can't possibly interrupt our creation of people, culture, and earth-loving Peace.