Good News for Gaia, Our Mother the Earth
On This Mothers’ Day 2025
Photo by Martha Ture
It’s true that there isn’t a lot of obvious good news available on any front. It’s true that the mainstream media don’t prioritize the diminishing ability of Gaia to support life. So I have been questing for good news about Earth, despite expecting to be marginalized, trivialized, ignored. You’re here, so you will be glad to know what I’ve learned.
1. Environmental and Science Advocacy Groups Sue EPA and Other Agencies Over Removal of Environmental Justice Tools
Environmental and science advocacy groups have sued EPA and other agencies in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for removing without notice “vitally important webpages” that served as sources of information about environmental justice and climate change. Sierra Club v. EPA, No. 1:25-cv-01112 (D.C. Cir. Apr. 14, 2025). The groups allege that the removal is arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and violates the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA), which mandates that every agency “ensure that the public has timely and equitable access to the agency’s public information” and must “provide adequate notice when initiating, substantially modifying, or terminating significant information dissemination products.”
2. While the Trump regime has directed federal agencies to stop estimating the economic impact of climate change when developing policies and regulations, it is clear that the approval of projects, like pipelines or power plants, would most likely face legal challenges on the grounds that the administration was failing to take climate change into account.
3. Climate Groups Sue Hochul Administration Over Climate Law Backtracking
Four environmental and climate justice groups filed a lawsuit in March in a state court, claiming that New York is “stonewalling necessary climate action in outright violation” of its legal obligations. By not releasing economy-wide emissions rules, the suit alleges, the state Department of Environmental Conservation, or DEC, is “defying the Legislature’s clear directive” and “prolonging New Yorkers’ exposure to air pollution … especially in disadvantaged communities.”
It’s the first lawsuit to charge the state with failing to enforce the core mandate of its 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, or CLCPA: eliminating nearly all of New York’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The law tasks DEC with crafting rules to get there and to reach an interim target of 40 percent emissions cuts by 2030.
The state’s deadline to release those rules was Jan. 1, 2024 — a date the agency blew past. More than a year later, New York has yet to issue even draft rules, and it’s becoming less and less clear that it intends to do so, even though, throughout last year, Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration promised that it was working on them as quickly as possible.
4. A future on our terms’: how community energy is lighting up Latin America
This news article is filled with surprising good news and potential for energy self determination by tribal groups and villages. Small-scale projects are replacing dirty diesel with clean electricity in remote areas – and ensuring a just transition.
In 2020, Roxana Borda Mamani returned to her remote Peruvian indigenous community and began researching ways to provide an off-grid solar energy system for the village. Now, 5 years later, her community has a 400 Watt solar system powering a 24-hour satellite internet connection and charging points for phones and flashlights, next to a school. A second face will provide the 50 families with regular electricity, and end their reliance on diesel generators.
“Our idea was to be independent [and] promote the autonomy and self-management of the energy and communication systems,” says Borda. The project is called Aylluq Q’Anchaynin, which means “the energy of the community” in her native Quechua.
More than 16 million people in in Latin America and the Caribbean lack access to electricity, despite often living in the shadow of fossil-fuel extraction projects, as in parts of the Amazon.
Community-driven clean energy systems, such as Borda’s, sometimes called “energy communities”, are a way to tackle the region’s energy poverty and insecurity while also contributing to a just energy transition that puts people first.
This is the kind of work we need to spread around the world. The ability to create inexpensive grassroots energy sovereignty from spare parts, knowledge, and good will is the basis of a new paradigm, one we Gaians need.
5. A crucial tool in your kit is this website. Look at what Ayana Elizabeth Johnson has put together on What If We Get It Right? Evergreen Action, which tells us about energy costs and transitions, Environmental Trackers such as Columbia University’s Sabin Center Climate Backtracker, Harvard Law School’s Environmental Justice Tracker, and more.
6. Last year, the US produced more electricity from wind and solar power than from coal for the first time.
7. Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, has been outspoken about the need for urgent climate action and voiced his support for the use of climate technology such as solar panels and EVs. When Pope Francis spoke, in November 2024, about how climate change would impact the world’s most vulnerable populations, and how it requires global cooperation to address, Cardinal Prevost shared his support for climate action, too. Prevost “stressed it is time to move ‘from words to action,’ ” on the climate, Vatican News reported. Prevost also warned against the “consequences of unchecked technological development,” while reiterating the church’s commitment to protecting the environment through actions like the Vatican’s solar panels or by shifting to electric vehicles.
We are in a transition period. We know that we have to contact the majority culture in order to change it. These projects show that we’re doing so.
The ongoing hope of one strain of Occidental culture is for a life of community, as well as competition, and for a life that values nature, and works together with nature, rather than simply treating it as the object of exploitation.
Those values are not exactly new. But a resurgence of belief or hope in those values is what characterized the counterculture of the `60’s and is resurgent today.
We have learned that what controls people is culture, not laws. And the operating theater of culture is community. We have some Gaian values at work today, on earth. Most effectively, they are the common work of the tribe, or community.
At bottom, we need to realize what the Paleolithic cave painters knew. Our mother the earth is alive. That’s a woo-woo hippy boomer sentiment. It’s also a fact.