International Mother Earth Day 2025

Today, 22nd April, is International Mother Earth Day.

The designation was given by the United Nations in 2009, following a proposal by Bolivia. Evo Morales, Bolivia's president at the time, said in a speech:

In the resolution, the United Nations member states acknowledge that:

and recognise that:

Speaking about Mother Earth as a woman, or even just as a living being, is incredibly powerful, because it opens the opportunity for deep moral and spiritual connection with the natural world.

Although the resolution notes that Mother Earth is a 'common expression', we are increasingly unused to hearing it (particularly in the West). ³ This shift from seeing our planet as a caring, generous mother to whom we owe reciprocal duties of care and respect, to seeing our planet as an unliving, dead object to be exploited, is sometimes described as 'from mother to marble' in reference to the Blue Marble photograph of the Earth taken by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972. By 1972, though, the idea of Earth as unliving was firmly established within dominant scientific and cultural communities in many countries.

The death of nature

The change in how we see the natural world had many causes. It's generally accepted to have come primarily from the West and to have been accelerated (or necessitated) by the creation of capitalism. Reasons for our changed perception of the natural world include historical and ongoing oppressive and colonial rejection by Western science of indigenous knowledge, a distaste in scientific and popular circles for anthropomorphism (a concept I reject), and an increasingly mechanical view of the world. These three groupings are deeply interrelated.

Carolyn Merchant's seminal 1980 book The Death of Nature charts the change from seeing nature as part of an 'organic cosmos with a living female earth at its centre' to a 'mechanistic world view in which nature was reconstructed as dead and passive, to be dominated and controlled by humans'. ⁴ This process was both prompted and necessitated by the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, and the kind of capitalism they established.

To understand the drivers of this change, we must first understand that capitalism was created - it has not always existed. The dominance of the neoliberal capitalist narrative that capitalism is the natural order (epitomised in Margaret Thatcher's catchphrase there is no alternative) means this basic fact of economic history is surprisingly little-known.

This humble blog post can't detail the creation and spread of capitalism around the globe (we'd need several books to do that), but we can look at what happened in England. Let's go back to the Middle Ages, when most rural people were living as peasants. The term is used pejoratively now, but traditionally it refers to someone who farms a piece of land and doesn't work for someone else; they were largely self-sufficient (perhaps with some trading) and lived in cohesive communities. Peasants had secure access to land, either directly, via rights to use land owned by feudal lords, or via rights to the commons, and this access was protected by law.

The prevailing conceptualisation of nature at this time was as a female living organism. Nature, especially the Earth, was seen as both a kindly, nurturing mother, and a wild and uncontrollable female force. The idea of Mother Earth placed moral restraints on human behaviour towards nature and encouraged an understanding of humans as nature and the interconnectedness of the natural world.

Peasants sharing a simple meal of bread and drink; Livre du roi Modus et de la reine Ratio, 14th century

In the fifteenth century, the circumstances of peasants began to change. Agriculture and wool was becoming more lucrative, and wealthy lords seeking to cash in drove the 'enclosure movement'. Rights to inhabit and farm land were revoked, common land was seized and enclosed, public access was withdrawn, and people were violently displaced from their ancestral holdings. Within a few centuries, tens of millions of acres of land had been privatised and enclosed and much of England's population had been displaced. These people relied on their land for food, shelter, and wellbeing - and they didn't go quietly. Peasant riots were common and there were episodes of terrible violence and oppression.

This process of enclosure and displacement continued and by the mid-eighteenth century it coincided with the Industrial Revolution. By then, rights to land for vast numbers of people in England were virtually non-existent, the commons had been plundered by the elite, and millions of people were left with nowhere to go. Forcefully evicted from their land, they only had one option: to sell their labour for wages. These dispossessed peasants were exactly what capitalism needed: a large working class. ⁵

Capitalism is defined by the existence of capitalists: a small group of people who own capital - people who own all the stuff.⁶ If a class of people is to be defined by owning all the stuff, there must necessarily be another class of people who are not owners and who will work to exploit those assets on behalf of the capitalists (duly handing over most of the profit associated with doing so). In medieval England, before the enclosures, a working class of such scale would've been hard to find. People didn't want to sell their labour for wages; they had secure access to the bounties of the land and long ancestral traditions associated with the places they lived. They had no reason to go and work for someone else, especially not in a dark, dangerous city. But when their rights to land were revoked, they had no choice.

After millions of displaced rural people reached the cities desperate for a way to survive, capitalism really got going. The influx of labour caused pay to crash and stay low and existing collective action forums (guilds) were weakened or disbanded. Workers were put under tremendous pressure to produce ever more goods, handing over the profit from their work to capital owners who passed very little on in wages, accelerating the accumulation of assets and wealth by those at the top.

Not only did this new landless working class provide the wage labour necessary for the elite to make the most of their assets, they became the first mass consumer population. They could no longer grow their own food, weave their own cloth, or build their own housing. Everything they needed had to be bought, and the means to create consumer goods were owned by the capitalists.

So, peasants forcibly evicted from their ancestral land and forced into smoggy cities to work for low wages in dangerous mills and factories, or down mines. Increasing exploitation of the natural world: more mining, more deforestation, more pollution. The domination of machines: the steam engine, power loom, blast furnaces, boring machines, milling machines. How could we still conceive of the world around us as a nurturing Mother Earth - or a woman, or even a living organism, and perpetrate such acts against her? Not only were such acts becoming more brutal, more extractive, but the actions of individual workers carrying out these acts were increasingly less about subsistence or wellbeing and more about contributing to accumulation by the capitalists. Small-scale mining, for instance, used to be associated with cultural limitations about how much to take and what for, and the extraction was often treated with a form of reverence, with rites and rituals that acknowledged the violation of Mother Earth. None of this translated to the large-scale, commercial, capitalist extraction that took off during the Industrial Revolution, when new machines made extraction and destruction easier and drove the demand for more mining. The social fabric was already fraying; riots and peasant revolts continued. If we were all to continue down this road of exploitation, a new narrative about nature was required.

The increasingly mechanistic understanding of the world during the Scientific Revolution and increasingly exploitative approach during the Industrial Revolution combined to create new images of 'mastery and domination' over nature, which functioned as 'cultural sanctions' for brutal harm to the natural world. ⁷ These cultural conceptions of mastery and domination would be unpalatable if exercised towards a living Mother Earth, so Mother Earth had to die in the popular imagination - this is what Merchant calls the 'death of nature'. Brutally exploiting a living organism is morally reprehensible, but exploiting an unliving object is not. These conceptions of nature as a non-being became easier for the masses to internalise as time went on, not only because it was perhaps a sort of self-preservation to cope psychologically with their new circumstances and the change they were seeing around them, but because day-to-day life for most people had by this time been divorced from connection to nature, and in many cases people spent little time outdoors as their working days were so long.

These narratives of dominance and mastery over nature were exported, along with other avenues of exploitation like capitalism and colonialism, to many countries around the world.

Over time, mechanistic views of nature as a non-living object came to dominate our culture. In fact, I'd argue it's now taboo in many contexts to speak about a living world to whom you are spiritually connected. Would you feel more comfortable talking about Mother Earth at work, or talking about 'natural capital'?

The reasons for this are in many respects the same reasons we killed nature in the first place: if we acknowledge that the natural world is a living being with whom we are deeply connected, how are we to bear the harms we cause her? How are we to continue them?

Words matter

How we talk about the natural world matters, not only because it shapes how we think about her, but because it affects how we behave. Our actions are, in large part, a manifestation of our cultural views (and when I say 'our', I mean national, regional, or global societies, not only individuals). As Merchant says, 'because language contains a culture within itself, when language changes, a culture is also changing in important ways'.

International Mother Earth Day seeks to prompt action but it is also an important reminder of the cultural heritage of connecting with Mother Earth as a living being, a cultural approach that spans the globe and which within many communities was never forgotten.

More of the story

The history of how we connect to nature is long and varied, so much so that this post can barely scratch the surface. Merchant and others identify important related imagery, like the association between women and nature, and the way that much of the narrative change regarding the natural world also enabled the brutal exploitation of women. The colonial and neocolonial aspects of the changing dominant narrative about nature and the deliberate and often violent suppression or denial of indigenous knowledge and beliefs entrenched the exploitative view of nature. There are also lines of thought linking certain religious beliefs and texts to the development of dominance and mastery narratives, and conceptions of nature vary by geography and community.

Looking forward

As we look to create a fairer, greener future, reconnecting with Mother Earth is an important part of the change. This connection will be different for each of us and the terminology we use will vary, but we must prioritise reestablishing our kinship with the natural world.

References

¹ UN Press Release: GENERAL ASSEMBLY PROCLAIMS 22 APRIL ‘INTERNATIONAL MOTHER EARTH DAY’ ADOPTING BY CONSENSUS BOLIVIA-LED RESOLUTION

² Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 22 April 2009 63/278. International Mother Earth Day

³ The 'West' is an amorphous and contested concept. I use it here because it is so widely used as to be helpful shorthand. It is also used in my source material so I use it here for consistency. For the purposes of this post, the exact boundaries of the 'West' are not of critical importance.

⁴ Merchant, C. (1980, revised edition 2020) The Death of Nature, Harper Collins, New York, p. XXV.

⁵ Many authors have detailed the creation of capitalism. A useful account is Hickel, J. (2017) The Divide. Other useful explanations of the enclosure movement include Shurbsole, G. Who Owns England? (2019) and Oliver Rackham's books about the history of the British countryside.

⁶ Grace Blakeley helpfully reminds us of this conveniently oft-forgotten conception of what capitalism actually is in her book, Vulture Capitalism (2025).

7 Merchant, C. (1980, revised edition 2020) The Death of Nature, Harper Collins, New York, p. 2.

The peasants breaking bread image is provided via Wikimedia Commons. Wikipedia, though often insufficient for use as a primary source, is a fantastic place to start research and holds a wealth of information. It is run primarily by volunteers, and is an important contribution to the information commons.

This post has also been informed by my study of The Open University's DD213 Environment and Society, a module in my Geography and Environmental Science degree, which gave me an understanding of the importance of representations of nature. It also introduced me to Merchant's work.