Each year, Earth Day (22 April) reminds me of what I already know: I am not separate from the Earth, but part of her body. As a Pagan, this truth is woven into the stories that inspire me and the rituals I practise. Gaia is the obvious goddess to invoke on a day like Earth Day, but I dedicate April to Aphrodite, and this year, I find her presence more fitting than I expected. It’s not Aphrodite as a figure of romance or vanity, but as the cosmological force I explored in my recent piece on Empedocles: Love as the principle that draws things together, that makes the world cohere, that binds us into relationship with everything that lives.
Environmental care is important in my spiritual practice. However, as I’ve reflected on that commitment this week, I’ve also found myself confronting the uncomfortable history behind how we came to talk about protecting the Earth in the first place.
My perspective stems from my American background. I’ve lived in Australia for some years now, and I’m still learning this country’s relationship with its land — a relationship far older and more intricate than anything European settlement brought with it. But the pattern I’m describing is not uniquely American. The dispossession of Indigenous peoples in the name of conservation and the erasure of ancient land stewardship by colonial models are not accidents of one nation’s history. They are features of a worldview that travelled.
A conservation movement built on broken ground
The men who established the first national parks in the US, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Madison Grant, were motivated not only by love of nature but also by a racialised anxiety about civilisation. They feared that industrialisation was softening white men, that the frontier was disappearing, and something they valued was slipping away. Nature, in their view, needed saving so that a certain kind of person could be saved along with it.
Madison Grant exemplifies this contradiction. He helped save the American bison, created Bronx Zoo, and established Glacier and Denali National Parks, yet also authored The Passing of the Great Race, a white supremacist text that Adolf Hitler referred to as “my Bible”. Both legacies stem from the same beliefs.
The national parks were built on dispossession. Indigenous peoples who had shaped and been shaped by those landscapes for millennia were removed from their lands to create the illusion of uninhabited wilderness. It was an illusion that served wealthy white tourists seeking a specific kind of transcendence. Some Indigenous people were permitted to remain, not as rightful inhabitants but as living props for the “wilderness experience.”
Even John Muir, who genuinely believed in the intrinsic moral value of every living being, demonstrated a painful ambivalence toward the First Peoples of the lands he loved. He could rhapsodise about the divinity of the Sierra Nevada and, in the same breath, describe the Indigenous people he encountered there in dehumanising terms. The wilderness he saw as sacred was one he imagined empty.
Our inheritance
The problem is not only the beliefs of early conservationists but also the enduring frameworks they created, which still shape our discussion of environmental protection. These frameworks reinforce the idea that humans and nature exist in separate spheres and underlie the compromises, exclusions, and biases that persist in today’s environmental movement. This ongoing logic of separation is what Earth Day and broader conservation efforts must confront to create genuine change.
The first is the idea of pristine wilderness: that wild land only has value when it is free of human presence. This notion was not simply a philosophical preference. It was, as scholars of environmental history have documented, a socially constructed idea that served a purpose: erasing the reality that Indigenous peoples had lived in, shaped and stewarded those landscapes for thousands of years. You cannot have “untouched wilderness” if people are already living there, so the people had to go. The concept justified their removal then, and it continues to marginalise Indigenous land relationships now.
The second is the overpopulation narrative. Aldo Leopold, widely regarded as the father of wildlife management and the American wilderness system, was an early proponent of the idea that population growth is the root cause of environmental problems. The implication — that poorer, more populous nations are the primary threat to conservation — has proven deeply convenient for wealthier ones. It shifts responsibility away from the high-consumption lifestyles of industrialised countries and onto communities that have contributed least to ecological destruction. The narrative persists, repeated today by prominent conservationists and wildlife advocates, despite substantial evidence that conspicuous consumption in wealthy economies causes far greater environmental harm than population growth in poor ones.
The third is the erasure of Indigenous knowledge. The North American Model for Wildlife Conservation, which has influenced conservation practice globally, is grounded in Western and Eurocentric understandings of nature that treat humans as separate from the ecosystems they manage. This model lacks a real framework for communities that understand themselves as part of nature rather than as stewards of it from the outside. It does not just exclude those communities; it erases the legitimacy of their relationships with the land.
What runs through all three frameworks is a logic of separation: nature over here, humans over there, and the relationship between them one of management, ownership or use. It is, in Empedocles’ terms, a logic of Strife — of things held apart, of division maintained by force. And it is almost the precise opposite of what Aphrodite represents.
Earth Day and its discontents
Earth Day itself sits uneasily with this history. It began not on 22 April but on 21 March, the date of the vernal equinox, when San Francisco resident John McConnell, a peace activist, proposed it to his city’s Board of Supervisors in 1969. McConnell’s framing was explicitly one of balance and restoration: the equinox as a reminder of the Earth’s systems and humanity’s responsibility to them. The 22 April date came later, through Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson, whose Earth Week proposal was more politically driven than McConnell’s original vision. The holiday we now celebrate is, in that sense, already a compromise; ecological idealism shaped by the pragmatics of the American legislative calendar.
The criticism of Earth Day has only grown since. Scholars and activists have long noted that the mainstream environmental movement, of which Earth Day is the most visible annual expression, has functioned primarily as a middle-class white movement that tends toward what critics call conservation politics while overlooking environmental racism and the disproportionate burden borne by poor communities and communities of colour. The same populations excluded from the conservation story I’ve been tracing here are often excluded from the movement’s present-day priorities too.
The corporate entanglement is harder to look away from. Major environmental organisations that organise and promote Earth Day events have accepted significant funding from some of the world’s largest polluters, including oil companies, chemical manufacturers, and other industrial polluters. One study found that board members of prominent environmental groups were simultaneously associated with some of the worst industrial polluters in the country. This is not a fringe critique. It goes to the heart of what the movement is for, and whose interests it ultimately serves.
Earth Day is not without value; it has contributed to public awareness and policy change. However, to honour what Earth Day represents, we must recognise its origins and the limitations imposed by inherited frameworks. The love invoked by Earth Day is real and vital, but genuine care requires examining what our environmental commitments cost and who pays for them. Only by confronting the logic of separation and embracing our interconnectedness can environmentalism truly serve all communities.
What Aphrodite knows
In the cosmological tradition I’ve been exploring this month, Aphrodite appears as the force of attraction itself. She is the principle that draws unlike things into relationship, that makes life possible, and holds the world together. In Empedocles, she is explicitly the cosmological force of Love that binds the elements, the counterpart to Strife. Hesiod’s Aphrodite is a more ambiguous figure, but even there, born from the sea and from dissolution, she emerges as something generative — what coheres after rupture. Aphrodite is the force that makes interconnection possible.
That is a very different starting point for environmental care than anxiety, duty, or guilt. It begins not with what we must protect nature from, but with what draws us toward it. It speaks to beauty as a form of recognition, desire as a form of relationship, and the impulse to tend something because we love it, because we feel ourselves bound to it, and because its flourishing and ours are not separate things.
In 2015, I wrote a piece asking why so many Pagans aren’t environmentally responsible. Why do communities that speak so reverently about nature so often fail to translate that reverence into practice? Spirituality that centres the Earth does not automatically produce care for it. I knew this then, and I know it now. I was not raised in an era, place, or household that thought much about recycling or climate change. I took ecology in high school and learned about the environment, but I didn’t really apply what I learned. It planted a seed, but the education that actually changed how I live came later, slowly, through deliberate attention. Love, it turns out, is something you grow into, and the growing requires more than the right beliefs.
I want to be careful here, too, about Aphrodite herself. She is not a simple or gentle force. Love in her domain can be consuming, destructive, and self-serving. The history I’ve been tracing in this piece is also, in its way, a love story — men who genuinely loved wild places, and whose love was so intertwined with ownership, racial anxiety, and the desire for mastery that it caused tremendous harm. Love is not automatically just. The question is what kind of love we are capable of, and what it asks of us.
For me, practising in Aphrodite’s month, the invitation is toward a love that recognises rather than possesses. The Earth is not a resource to be conserved for human use, nor even as a wilderness to be kept pristine and separate, but as the body we are part of, something we are in relationship with, something whose grief, beauty, and damage we share. That is what Gaia has always meant to me. And it is, I think, what Aphrodite’s cosmological force makes possible: not the management of nature, but the recovery of belonging.
Tending what we love
I do not have clean answers to the brief history I’ve laid out here. The inherited structures are still with us, still shaping policy and language and the way conservation organisations think about whose knowledge counts. Acknowledging that is not the same as dismantling it.
What I have, instead, is practice in the small, ordinary sense of that word. My husband and I compost and recycle, and buy second-hand. He grows vegetables. We pick up litter. Before buying, I look to borrow books from the library. None of this is dramatic, and I’m not listing it as evidence of virtue. I’m listing it because this is what loving the Earth actually looks like from the inside of a life. It’s not grand gestures, but habitual attention. It’s the kind of care that comes not from guilt or duty but from feeling genuinely bound to a place, a body, a world. It’s Aphrodite’s logic made mundane.
Part of what my practice asks of me is honesty about what I am standing on, not just the Earth in an abstract sense, but this particular soil, with its particular history. What would it mean to take seriously that the peoples most violently excluded from the conservation story are also, so often, the peoples whose relationships with the land are most intimate and whose knowledge of it runs deepest? I don’t have a clean answer to that either. But I think the asking is part of what tending looks like.
This week of Earth Day, I am sitting with all of it: the grief of what has been done and the renewal that is always, somehow, still possible. The movement’s broken history and the genuine love that runs through it. The complicated ground beneath my feet, and the choice, still, to tend it.
Further reading:
Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism by Sharon Bede, 1998
Earth for Sale, Reclaiming Ecology in the Age of Corporate Greenwash by Brian Tokar, 1997