LOOKING AT IMAGES of bombed-out apartment blocks and plumes of black smoke rising across Ukraine, my thoughts turned to the land. While humans flee and seek shelter underground, the birches and oaks will go on standing in place, unfurling springtime leaves and hiding black grouse in their branches. Grasses will peep out their heads and earthworms will get to tunneling, some to be trampled by marching army boots and tanks.
Human wartime activities will belch out unthinkable amounts of polluting emissions, tipping the already-sliding climate scale further toward disaster. Bombs will destabilize industrial areas full of toxic waste, threatening air and water supplies. And still, the geese will return north and hiss over their fuzzy goslings. Saplings will reach for the sky and replace carbon dioxide with breathable oxygen. The Earth will go on living. And weeping.
“The creation all around us is waiting on tiptoe for Creator’s sons and daughters to be revealed in the full beauty of who he has created them to be,” writes Paul (Romans 8:19, First Nations Version). But for now, creation groans like a mother giving birth (verse 22). The contrast between what is meant to be, and what we see before us, is gut-wrenching.
But creation doesn’t just wait around, doing nothing. Creation, following God’s design, continues about her life-giving work, sprouting new growth even as humans scar the land and deal in death.
Onondaga Lake in New York, the sacred birthplace of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, was choked nearly to death by chalky white industrial sludge for more than a century. But scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer noticed that plants are returning. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer writes, “Plant people and human people are still here and are still meeting their responsibilities.”
I could cry reading this simple observation. It brings up the same feeling I have when I notice dandelions and mugworts popping up after a long, harsh winter along the abandoned railroad tracks behind our house. Despite all the ways we have neglected and terrorized the land, she still loves us and rises up to care for us. While we traffic in war and extraction, Mother Earth goes on depositing seeds, enriching the air and waters, and incubating life.
The image of the land weeping comes from the title of a book called The Earth Is Weeping by historian Peter Cozzens, a detailed account of the Indian wars in the American West. Witnessing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we in the United States should have no illusions that we’re above such atrocities. As a nation, we too have stolen, plundered, and laid waste to lands where other people belong. None of us are immune to war-making and brutality.
It’s unclear in the end whether we humans will remain. But the land will be here. Living. Breathing. Weeping.
Liuan Huska is a freelance journalist and the author of Hurting Yet Whole: Reconciling Body and Spirit in Chronic Pain and Illness.
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