International Mother Earth Day

Today, April 22, we celebrate Mother Earth Day, which this year coincides with the 50th anniversary of its initial establishment in the United States. Later, from 1990, with the support of the UN, this celebration would be established worldwide. Finally, in 2009, through resolution A/RES/ 63/278, proposed by the Plurinational State of Bolivia and supported by more than 50 states, the UN itself would include the term “Mother Earth”. Therefore, April 22 is officially International Mother Earth Day. The development of that decision is maintained by the UN Harmony with Nature initiative, led by Maria Mercedes-Sanchez

It is worth noting that the concept of “Mother Earth” is not only present in most primordial (indigenous) worldviews, but we also find it in the West. A significant example is that of St. Francis of Assisi (Christian patron saint of ecology), who, in his famous Song of Creatures, addresses “Sister Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us.”

However, we find everywhere, that this day is simply referred to as “Earth Day”. However, dedicating a day to the dry “Earth” is not a neutral fact. Like other key words for understanding the reality in which we live, ‘Earth’ is a concept with values ​​sustained by beliefs related to a particular worldview. The contemporary notion of Earth (like that of nature), shaped by modern Western natural sciences, inherits the materialist reductionism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which limited the understanding of reality to its physical and measurable dimension, lifting it not only the mystery, but also its intrinsic value.

In the systemic crisis we are experiencing, would it not be preferable to abandon obsolete reductionist concepts such as ‘natural capital’ or ‘natural resource’ and recover the ancestral concept of Mother Earth? In this context, the Silene Association has launched a campaign on a Catalan scale, aimed at conservationist and environmental organizations, and on an international scale (via IUCN) to demand the restitution of the name of Mother Earth on 22 April. This would be a first step in starting to apply the profound implications that come with it and that the crisis we are experiencing is even more justified.