It’s difficult to celebrate Earth Day when we live in a toxic swamp of a President who calls climate crisis a hoax and a party, 40% of Americans, who actively enjoy “trolling our planet,” as if the future—or lack thereof—of our children is a partisan game, and caring is just for “woke” losers and nerds.

We live in a Bully culture. Not Teddy’s Bully, as in cheer and can-do energy, not protecting, founding, and naming parks as he did but selling them off and defunding their skilled, caring staff, a public good that works to serve all Americans in our play, our R&R, our vacations, our pride for this beautiful country.

And yet—it’s all the more important to celebrate this Earth Day. To do the little things, and when we can, to push for the big things (vote: if it wasn’t important, if it didn’t matter, Trump wouldn’t be trying to undermine and tilt the midterms).

I love this planet. I love Nature. Spending 20 minutes with our little baby in our backyard, just now, amongst the green and the flowers and the blue sky above…is pure present-moment joy.

She’s naked to dry out from one of her first trials trying to drink water, enjoying the sun and shade in our now-lush backyard (we bought this house 8 months ago and haven’t mowed, there’s wildflowers and 25 newly-planted local-appropriate trees and bushes and no pesticides—no thanks, Mosquito Joe).

Our little baby is vulnerable, 24-7, to, well, everything. To: cars idling (30 cigarettes a minute for a small car), to neighbors spraying Roundup, to our politicians gutting regulations for clean air and water and to restaurants and farms and groceries soaking our bodies in plastic, poison, factory farming suffering, PFAS, and greedy cynicism.

There’s an easy fix for all that: care.

Caring isn’t easy, of course, but it sure as hell is natural to care, to love, to feel. It’s looking away from hurting cows or normalizing single use plastic use that isn’t natural. Capitalism might love pushing us in its speedy consumerism, but Nature is here to tent-peg us back into reality, into peace, into beauty, into breath.

So if you give a care, remember: the little things, as Jane Goodall and David Attenborough and every other wise caring person reminds us, are the big things. And the big forces for bad, the billionaires and Big Oil…well they’re dependent on us to keep giving up our power, and our dollars. Don’t.

Instead, let’s invest in community. Let’s protect insects, leaves, birds, all animals, one another…the vast majority of us do care, and it’s time we realize that and organize and refuse to give up our ethics or give in to convenience, one of my least favorite words in the English language for the amount of harm is shields under its cheap wings.

You know what to do, already. You know the lists. If you don’t, read this—

…(and buy it used or from anything but Amazon)…it turned me into a passionate environmentalist who cared, and cares today. But most of us, while we swim in lists of eco actions, aren’t doing them. And that’s because we’ve half-given up. We’re hoping someone else will come to the rescue.

Well we are the solution, of course—just as we are the problem. That’s good news. That means the power is in our caring hands.

So, Gosh Darnit, Happy Earth Day, I say to you—and as I do, I thumb my nose at the wealthy men who are gutting the present and future of this planet. Join me.