Some years the world speaks out loud what the elders have always known, and 2015 was one of them. In June a Pope wrote a letter to every person on the planet and called it Laudato si’, On Care for Our Common Home, opening with the song of Saint Francis to Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and in December, in Paris, the nations of the world adopted an agreement to hold the warming of the Earth well below two degrees and to strive for one and a half.
For a network that began with the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth in its very first year, these were moments of quiet joy, for they showed the language of the heart moving into the halls where the world makes its decisions, the recognition that the Earth is not a resource but a home, and a living one at that, shared by all who were born of her.
And still the elders remind us that a promise on paper is only as alive as the hearts that keep it. The Waitaha grandmothers spoke in 2014 of a time when fresh water would become the treasure the whole world turns toward, the Kogi and the Hopi have spoken for decades of the eleventh hour, and the Paris Agreement is in its own way the modern world arriving at that same hour, counting in degrees what the wisdom keepers have long counted in heartbeats.
So the work stays where it has always been for Para PachaMama, with you, in your relationship with the water you drink, the soil that feeds you and the air you share with every living being, because a common home is kept by those who live in it as its trustees, one morning, one meal and one choice at a time.
Laudato si’ was published on 18 June 2015, and the Paris Agreement was adopted on 12 December 2015. Read the Rights of Mother Earth the network carried from 2010.