News
Between power & progress
Rebecca Irby shares a woman’s view from inside the United Nations.
9 March 2026
This article first appeared in our World Environment Day 2026 issue of My Green Pod Magazine, published 05 June 2026. Click here to subscribe to our digital edition and get each issue delivered straight to your inbox
Main image: Rebecca Irby speaking at Times Square on Earth Day 2026. Photo by Andrew Gold
When we speak about climate action, we often speak in the language of urgency: emissions, policy, innovation, targets, adaptation. All of that matters. Deeply. But if we are honest, the crisis before us is not only environmental – it is relational.
We are living through a rupture in how we understand responsibility, belonging and care. The planet is asking for something deeper than individual lifestyle change or periodic public concern. It is asking us to remember that we belong to one another, that we belong to the Earth and that survival has always been a collective practice.
This Earth Day, I had the honour of participating in Love Your Mother in Times Square, an event that brought together music, meditation, storytelling and Indigenous wisdom in the heart of one of the busiest places in the world.
There was something powerful about speaking of Mother Earth in a place so often associated with speed, consumption and spectacle. It felt like an interruption, but also an invitation.
The invitation was to slow down long enough to ask a more meaningful question: what would it take to become good relatives again, to one another and to the Earth? For me, that question is no longer theoretical.
I am writing this while preparing for my mother’s funeral. In the midst of grief, I was held by elders in a transition ceremony that was both grounding and profound.
There was no rushing past the moment; no insistence that grief be private, tidy or efficient. There was presence. There was witnessing. There was reverence. There was community. I have found myself returning to that experience again and again, because it offered a glimpse of something our culture has forgotten.
Community care is not a slogan. It is not an aesthetic. It is not simply being kind. It is the ancient, necessary practice of showing up for one another in ways that affirm our humanity and our interdependence. It is making space for transition, for vulnerability, for responsibility and for the truth that no one survives alone.
If we cannot hold one another through grief, change, illness, displacement and loss, how will we ever hold the magnitude of what the climate crisis demands of us?
This is why the wisdom of elders and Indigenous communities is so essential in this moment – not as a symbolic gesture, and not as something to be acknowledged and then ignored, but as living knowledge.
Across many traditions, there is a deeper understanding that human beings are not separate from land, water, air and one another. There is a recognition that stewardship is not ownership. That relationship carries obligation. That care is reciprocal. That decisions must be made not only for immediate gain, but with future generations in mind.
Modern society often rewards domination, extraction, speed and individualism – but none of those values can save us. We will not consume our way out of collapse. We will not innovate our way forward if we remain spiritually, socially and politically disconnected from one another.
The future we need will require a different kind of leadership – one rooted not only in expertise, but in humility. Not only in ambition, but in accountability. Not only in vision, but in relationship.
Climate gatherings should push us beyond performance and into practice. They should challenge us to ask how we are building communities capable of care. How we are resourcing those on the frontlines. How we are listening to elders. How we are honouring Indigenous leadership. How we are creating systems that recognise that human wellbeing and planetary wellbeing are inseparable.
As we move through London Climate Action Week, my hope is that we widen our understanding of climate leadership to include not only policy and innovation, but also grief literacy, community care and intergenerational wisdom.
In my own work, from peacebuilding and global advocacy to education, I keep coming back to one truth: real change happens when people remember they are part of something larger than themselves. That is what I witnessed in ceremony. That is what I felt in Times Square on Earth Day. That is what our movements must reclaim.
If we are serious about saving our planet, then we must become serious about how we care for one another. The Earth does not need more detached spectators. It needs stewards. It needs communities. It needs people willing to live as if we belong to each other. Because we do.
Rebecca Irby shares a woman’s view from inside the United Nations.
Introducing Love, Peace, Harmony: a global foundation restoring balance for humanity and the Earth.
A Times Square Earth Day event to reclaim the sacred feminine & wisdom of the Earth.
