A Declaration of Independence for Earth

On Behalf of the Living Earth and All Who Live in Right Relation

Yesterday, I decided my note on Substack would explore the idea of standing with the Earth on the 4th of July.

A reader suggested we draft a declaration of independence to this end.

So I sat down and decided to commit to writing a first attempt.

A Declaration of Wild Sovereignty

On Behalf of the Living Earth and All Who Live in Right Relation

When in the course of Earthly existence, it becomes necessary for the living world and its human kin to dissolve the political and economic bands which have bound them to a culture of domination, and to assume among the powers of the planet the equal station to which the laws of ecology and of wild autonomy entitle them, a decent respect to the interdependent forces of life requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to severance.

We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That all beings—creature, forest, river, fungus, stone, and human—are born with intrinsic value;
That they are endowed by existence itself with rights inseparable from being:
The right to exist, to flourish, to evolve, to resist destruction;
That to secure these rights, systems of culture and governance must be rooted not in extraction, but in reciprocity;
That whenever any civilization becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the living Earth and its human allies to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new way of being, laying its foundation on the principles of regeneration, community, and humility.

Such has been the long train of abuses perpetrated by industrial civilization, which, by its engines and its economics, its pipelines and its propaganda, has reduced the biosphere to a machine, the soil to a commodity, and life itself to data.

It has declared war upon the forests, the oceans, the atmosphere, and the sacred balance of seasons.
It has built its empire on the bones of species driven to extinction, on the backs of rivers dammed and skies defiled.
It has transformed the sacred into the profitable, and in so doing, desecrated the future.

Let it be known that:
The Earth withdraws its consent.

We, the wild rivers and rustling trees, the thunderheads and mycelial webs, the wolves and the coral reefs, together with the human beings who walk in reverence, who resist in defense, who remember what it means to belong—do now solemnly declare:
That we are, and of right ought to be, free and independent from all systems that reduce us to resource, to unit, to means.

We claim the freedom to be undammed, undrilled, unbroken.
We reclaim the right to heal, to return, to evolve beyond the reach of those who would pave us to death.

In witness to this declaration, we call upon all whose hearts still beat in rhythm with the living world—human or otherwise—to rise in solidarity, to dismantle the death machine, to rejoin the Earth not as conquerors, but as kin.

We are the land, and the land is rising.