Becoming EarthKeepers

New Book: A Practical Guide for Those Who Hear the Call to Protect the Earth

I’m currently beginning work on my second book… Becoming EarthKeepers. This is a book for those who feel the ache of the living world and sense that caring is no longer enough… that we must act. It’s for anyone who hears, beneath the noise of progress, the quiet call to become a guardian of land, water, and life itself.

Like my previous project, Ten Myths of Progress, I’m writing this book in public. The Introduction is free to read below. Each new chapter will appear here for paid subscribers, offering both early access and a way to sustain this work of regeneration and resistance.

If this message resonates, your support means a great deal.

If you’ve ever felt torn between the world you were trained to serve and the world you’re called to protect, this book is for you.

You’ll receive early drafts, behind-the-scenes reflections, and a chance to shape the vision as it unfolds. Together we’ll explore what it means to become keepers of the Earth as daily practice.

From here, we begin the work of restoration, resistance, and renewal.

Introduction

A Call from the Living World

I was nearly forty when I finally began to hear what the earth had been saying all along.

By that time, I’d already logged years in the trenches of the modern environmental movement. I was there on climate campaigns, river and water ways protections, air quality, fights over public lands, and the daily negotiations between conscience and politics that define life inside the Democratic Party’s progressive wing. I knew how to write talking points, frame an argument, court donors, and speak the language of “sustainability.”

I was good at talking the other way too. I remember a particular time being sent in to talk to the older white conservative businessman to court his support for protecting the Colorado River. His business was tied to that goal, so it wasn’t a huge lift, other than the fact the man wanted nothing to do with other environmental issues, like the ‘radicals’ at the Sierra Club. I assured him our interests were economical, as well as recreational. The Colorado River was after all good for humans. I can’t tell you how much I cringe in hindsight.

In those days I could tell you the acreage of an endangered watershed or the tonnage of carbon a project might release. But there was still a hollowness in it. I had the sense that the struggle was happening, but it was on the surface of things, like wind ruffling water but never touching the depths.

Then came the pipeline fight.

A 300-mile-long water pipeline and pumping system proposed to drain the ancient aquifers of rural Nevada so Las Vegas can continue its unlimited growth. On paper it was another “infrastructure” project, a feat of engineering, a ribbon of concrete and steel connecting one exhausted place to another. On the ground, it was a theft of the very breath of the desert and the plant, animal and human communities who depend on it.

I was hired by a progressive group (one of the few willing to challenge Democrats as fiercely as Republicans) to document the Indigenous-led resistance. A coalition of Northern Paiute, Shoshone, Pueblo, and Diné (Navajo) runners had organized a sacred run along the proposed route, from Great Basin National Park all the way to Lake Mead. I was there to film, to bear witness. I didn’t yet understand what that would mean for me in the long run.

For three days we moved together through that Great Basin country. Mountains the color of bone, the smell of sagebrush, the shimmer of mirage and silence veering down long straight roadways that stretch beyond the horizon.

At first I was uneasy, unsure how to belong in that circle. There were protocols I didn’t yet know, prayers I didn’t know how to hold. But slowly, in the miles between water stations and rest points, something ancient began to seep through the cracks of my cultural mindset.

I listened. I listened to the way these runners spoke of the land… not merely scenery (as stunning as it was) or resource, but as relative. They spoke to the mountains and rivers as if to family. They ran not only for themselves but with the land. The rhythm of their breath was an offering, the pounding of their feet a kind of prayer.

They called themselves water protectors (and sometimes land defenders), words that sounded simple at first, until I began to hear the depth in them. Defender didn’t mean protester or conservationist. These were people bound by duty to stand between the sacred and its destruction.

Their reverence was fierce, not fickle romanticism. I saw pain and tears in their eyes when they spoke of the desecrations already done to them and their respective homelands. But I saw something else: resolve. They were keeping the covenant that civilization had broken long ago.

By the third day I understood something I hadn’t known how to articulate before: this wasn’t activism; it was kinship. And once you feel that kinship deep in your soul, and realize that the living world is not a backdrop but your family, there’s no going back. You cannot return to business as usual.

That desert run changed me forever. It rearranged my loyalties. No donor, no election, no party apparatus could speak louder than the voice I’d begun to hear from the ground itself. I could not unknow what I now knew. Every new “project” our governments were approving, every dam, mine, highway, extraction scheme, and so-called “progress” was nothing but the continuation of a centuries-long war on life. These things could not stand. They were not merely wrong; they were violations of the oldest law there is… the law of relationship.

EarthKeepers

That encounter sent me deeper. I began to listen for the echoes of that calling in other places, other tongues. In my studies, I read that among the Māori of Aotearoa there was a similar title and concept: kaimahi mō te whenua. It meant workers for the land, those who restore what has been broken.

In the old Gaelic of my own ancestry, I found dùthchas. In modern terms, it’s just a word for the country. But the roots of the word carry much deeper more profound nuance. It was meant to describe the bond between people and place, the understanding that we belong to the land, not the other way around.

Across continents and languages, the same truth kept revealing itself: we are not masters of the Earth, we are its children. Our task is not to progress, but to remember to become again the kind of people who can be trusted with belonging.

And so this book begins not with a program or a policy, but with a calling… an invitation to become EarthKeepers (or whatever words suit you and your cultural and place connections), to reclaim the ancient work of care. Whatever our heritage, wherever we live, this is the work before us now. To protect what remains. To restore what we have broken. To live as if the Earth is alive… because she is.

The Role of EarthKeepers

When I think of the word EarthKeeper, I see hands calloused, soil-stained, still steady enough to plant a tree. I hear the rhythm of water poured onto dry ground, the whispered “thank you” given to the first green shoot.

An EarthKeeper is anyone who has chosen relationship over possession, anyone who wakes in the morning and asks, What does the land need of me today?

Among the Māori, the kaimahi mō te whenua (workers for the land) tends to what feeds all life: water, soil, the balance between taking and giving back. They know that healing the land heals the people, and that the work never truly ends. You do it because it is who you are, not because its a title.

In the old Scottish Gaelic of my own lineage the kindred word is dùthchas. To live by dùthchas was to recognize that you belonged to the land as much as it belonged to you. Rights were reciprocal; responsibility was the price of breath. It was not about ownership but guardianship, a covenant carried in the language itself. To forget your dùthchas was to lose your humanity.

These traditions, separated by oceans yet echoing the same music, remind us that EarthKeeping is less an identity than a relationship enacted daily. You can’t buy it or badge it. You live it through the choices that keep life going: mending a watershed, tending a garden, refusing a pipeline, feeding neighbors, learning the old names of places so they can speak again through your tongue.

There are EarthKeepers in every biome and neighborhood:

• The Diné grandmother weaving stories of the four sacred mountains so her grandchildren will remember their orientation.

• The young man in Eugene turning a strip of lawn into native pollinator ground.

• The Scottish crofter re-planting birch where sheep once grazed the hills bare.

• The scientist quietly choosing restoration over extraction, truth over tenure.

They do not all look alike or worship alike, yet each lives by the same unwritten rule:

LIFE IS PRIMARY

To take this pathway is to undergo a shift in allegiance. Your loyalty moves from institutions to ecosystems, from parties to places. You begin to think not of “sustainability,” a word soaked in bureaucracy, but of reciprocity.

You learn to ask: what can I give back for what I take? You stop seeing climate change as a problem to fix and start seeing it as a symptom of forgetting who we are.

No one is born an EarthKeeper; we are all apprentices. Each act of attention, each seed planted, each story retold is a lesson in remembering. And the land is patient; she keeps teaching, even through silence.

To define the pathway, then, is simple but not easy:

EarthKeepers are those who choose kinship over consumption, presence over progress, belonging over control.

Their work is to re-establish the covenant between people and place, to stand guard over the sources of life, and to model what right relationship looks like in a broken time.

Our calling as EarthKeepers doesn’t begin with policy or protest; it begins with a vow… the quiet promise to live as if the Earth were your closest relative, because she is.

In the chapters that follow, we’ll get into the trenches, get dirt under our fingernails and get into the practical pathways of an EarthKeeper.