Hello Earth. What can we say to you on a day like today—your day—when the glaciers are melting and the rivers are rising? That we're sorry? We know that you're sick. We know that we've taken advantage of you, that we're responsible for your dangerously high temperatures. Should we apologize to you on your big day? At a moment like this, would it be awkward if we said "Thank you"?On this Earth Day I'm thinking of something that Kurt Vonnegut wrote towards the end of his life.
The crucified planet Earth, should it find a voice and a sense of irony, might now well say of our abuse of it, “Forgive them, Father. They know not what they do.” The irony would be that we know what we are doing. When the last living thing has died on account of us, how poetic it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, “It is done. People did not like it here.”