Earth Riot Radio

We have made common journey to find each other in the intensity of this moment that we meet. We get whole-body relief, that they are here, pouring out their trust and we reply in kind.  And quickly after that, a pact of mutual loyalty. What can I do for you? Share laughter. Best wishes. Willingness to work. Music.  In the Earthchxrch we are feeling a community grow. Why is this a threat and not a coming-true promise?

Since the Earth's crisis gives us months or maybe years, gradualism is a faster kind of suicide. Every one of our prayers needs to be like an ambulance, flooring it right at the emergency. Scientists say that most of reality is a whirlwind of subatomic particles called Dark Energy. So, we are stranded on a desperate little human island, while Dark Energy rages bafflingly over and through everything. This is the Fabulous Unknown. We trust the deepest space with our wildest imagination and that's our church. Earthalujah! Come visit us at the Earthchxrch, 36 Ave C Loisaida, at 3rd Street, in the East Village, New York. We hold forth at 5pm most Sundays. Reach us at Revbilly.com Earthalujah!

The Big Lie is everywhere. It's the atmosphere, it's glyphosates, it's radiation, it's the ultimate poison. The Big Lie comes in many forms, from QAnon to the Atom Bomb. But it's so saturating, that if we walk along the sidewalk and encounter someone telling the truth, those words hit us like magic mushrooms. To sell the simple truth is now, in 2022, to be a radical revolutionary. Join us. The Earth is a conscious living being and we still have a chance to join up. But you gotta tell the truth.

We environmentalists must move our point of view from the center of human power to a point in outer space, back somewhere in the early days of the big bang. Then maybe we can overpower these gods that make poisoning the Earth sensible. We are marching toward men marching toward us. They have a god above them, who guarantees their eternal life. The god is Krishna, Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha, Donald Trump, Mickey Mouse, and the pink plastic ruler in the Cracker Jack box. They don't believe in climate change -- that's a sneak attack from a foreign god. Just before these god-people kill us, they see that our supreme being is the Earth, and so they, our fellow earthlings, our murderers, are a part of our mysterious guide. We explain to them that life and death are unexplained but very beautiful. The Fabulous Unknown!

As the big institutions try to spread their life sentences, they are stopped by love. It’s the same old story and that old story of erotic romance is making a comeback as the libraries are burned down by fear of sex and foreigners.  The books are in our bodies and we dance away. We sing our strong beliefs in the songs in today's Earth Church radio show... The title track of our new record "Change Without Us", is in this show at the 3 minute point. It's a disco song for radical earth activists in the time of 6th Extinction.  The libraries burn but we got the songbook in our bodies.  We have more control of our fate than Q’anon or Scientologists or Exxon would think- because we keep falling in love.  We keep falling in every kind of love.

Most of us know how we will be required to be far more radical than we have been, and very soon. We have quietly agreed with ourselves that we will try to work with the complete collapse of this thing called civilization. Personal extreme change will match the conditions of the Earth's release of fire and flood, virus and death in this Sixth Extinction. Covid, Black Lives Matter and the Ukraine Invasion are object lessons for us. Our house, career, and city... Our plans for parenting and educating and accumulating comforts will be abandoned. Strange evolution will overtake us, sudden intimate agreements, a faster dance in the disappearance of time.

The people who set up the COP conferences invite billionaires and their enabling professionals to a poker game with a large herd of aggrieved advocates. The game is rigged, but it takes ten days. But that is the essential story of the conference, until now. With the physical environment so clearly deadly, the question "How will we survive" is bringing back the emotions of decency. Good people who want to live will tear apart a refinery with their bare hands over the weekend. As they do this, they are happy.

No matter how bad the floods and diseases and storms get, most of here in consumerized Americak keep basking in gradualism. It isn't really happening...not yet.   And when I say God I mean celebrities, the first crypto million, and the hope that we will all have one more moment of unexpected sex. What do we really worship? What were we worshipping when the Earth slipped us through the door to our own extinction? The Webb telescope images didn't show us more Earths. We have been living in a gift. Join the Earth Church, your own version. Be grateful, even if our time is up. Gratitude we should have expressed long ago can be concentrated in a message to the forests that are still standing.  It's the Earth, the Earth, it's Earth... it's always Earth.

The planet is spinning toward extinction. We might survive if we learn how to spin with it. When a glacier the size of Manhattan melts and disappears, then we have to melt, too. There is no history that we know of to deal with what is happening. We can't even make the phrase "extinction" popular enough to help people steal it back from blockbuster films and video games. We have to try every dance, every language and music and every rupture of what we thought was true. A new activism for the Earth!

A barrier to mounting powerful actions for species and ecosystems is the loss of forgiveness. We face self-blame for the ineffectiveness of environmentalism. We give ourselves unrealistic schedules of work. We can be harder on ourselves than the polluters because we are more familiar with the facts of the crisis, which are devastating.   This is a time of name-calling and finger-pointing, and it's not just from extremists. It's everywhere. But we've learned in the Earth Church that right-thinking doesn't persuade like spiritual joining. Would we ever offer best wishes to Jamie Dimon or Jeff Bezos? In this radio show we listen to reconciliations in Rwanda. At the sentencing of Dylan Roof, we witness radical acts of compassion.

Something happened on the way to the 11th rally and march. After the Supremes ruling gutted the EPA, we went down to Foley Square, site of the NY State Supreme Court, to what? To make new climate change relationships... All the groups were there, from Sunrise to Extinction Rebellion. Each carries its own history of brazen love struggling against the traditions of fear.  The Supremes are betting that we will enter their cages of hate, like good little consumers. But it may be that the Trumpian lawyers-in-robes have made so many deadly rulings that a new hybrid of justice seeker is in the making. So many different kinds of activists have mixed in the streets to the point of dizzy exhaustion. Will we stagger out of all this with an Earth-loving super-majority?

The spinning wet white-and-blue rock that we call home is completely outside the systems of governance that order society. It is extreme and changing radically in all directions. Our only hope is to connect with the Earth with an invented and secret way of life, evolving into a personal wildness.

Our 'Stop Shopping' community has landed in a great urban gospel tradition of the storefront church. Every Sunday at 5:00 pm we gather in the empty branch bank on Ave C & East 3rd St in New York's East Village. The "nabe" is all the races, though the famous local culture is "Loisaida" -- the presence of Puerto Rican culture is strong. Our songs are about the Earth's crisis but belted out as gospel. We welcome people who come to the door, hearing the 30 voice Stop Shopping Choir. "We love the Earth!" "It's the Extinction but it's Evolution too and we're Alive now!" Some of the folks walk in and sit down and begin to clap their hands.

It isn't clear to us how to pass into the cloud of nothingness that already claims so many lives. How do we warn others, and is survival to be the only project of our lives?  We send signals into the unfathomable extinction like bats and their echolocation. And we listen.

The suicide and murder epidemic by children?  Children cannot grow up in the this monoculture.  Children breakdown as their families and communities explode.  Why is this happening?  Because love’s destruction is identified as a profit center.         We have made the violent movie that we can’t stop. The Earth, though, is not helpless. The Earth has new life, new love and new caring.  But the storms and wildfires are a part of that new life because we live in the time of extinction.  We will have to become strange to evolve.  As we become radical by re-inventing who we are, we ask the Earth for a place, a mind, a love.

I propose that we revisit the Earth Riot of March 6, with Ukraine freshly invaded, with the onset of the old-fashioned war, a sort-of-like-World-War-2 war. The trial of today's Bonnie and Clyde -- Johnny and Amber -- was beginning to form in the Covid-addled mind of America. In the past 90 days, "eras" have passed. The culture is spinning out of any kind of gravity. There's no plan. The future is a bomb. Let's get back to reality, children. Featured in this episode is Grammy nominated artist and sustainable fashion guru Angela McCluskey.

A young girl sits in a window of the projects. She watches an oak as it goes under the chainsaw. The park has been sold to someone. The man starts cutting the branches that look like gestures. The oak is older than her parents. It has always been there. A loud machine chews it to bits. Protesters down there are dressed up like deer, carrying signs and chanting. The girl watches the deer dancing, waving branches.  As the physical environment asserts its power, we hunger for the Earth as it really was and may someday be again. But as the children in the windows will learn, to remember the Earth is to remember the crime.

Putin's drilling became murder in broad daylight. Exxon & JPMorgan Chase do the same thing. Is Pakistan and India's heat wave cooling from 110 degrees? Is the fire season already started? Chase's Jamie Dimon is the prince of New York. He makes almost $100k each day. Gaseous toxins from his investments make climate murder every day. What's his body-count? He is the prince of ashes.

Mother’s Day and Jane Jacobs' birthday set up a report of our activism for Mother Earth.  We push our secular hot-as-hell Earth Church up against the threatened forest along the river and then we are hand-cuffed somewhere in that sing-along because there were chainsaw people interrupted by our concert and so it’s off to jail... which happens to be on the same street as the Church, so it’s easy to repeat, just like a song.

The youth among the Earth defenders, from tweeners to college debtors, are fierce like the folks in Earth First and Redwood Summer. They arrive with a reckoning, a moral sureness. In this "Earth Church of the Air" we meet an eco-Marxist named Kala, a holistic healer named Wally, and Ariella -- freshly returned from jail for singing in a tree surrounded by men with chainsaws.  Ariella is one of four tree-sitters in the Stop Shopping Choir, arrested in the endangered East River Park. Our Earth Church is a block away in an unrented bank branch. We gather each Sunday at 5 pm (address: 36 Ave C at East 3rd Street in the East Village). To oppose real estate power in New York City is full of pressure. One of our activists took his life yesterday. So our friend has gone with the 500 trees that went under the blade so far. May each us find that fierce defender within us, recover it from passive Consumerism, and go to the trees.