After the enormous victory for the Democrats in the midterm election, pundits and interest groups are itemizing the agenda for restoring democracy and rebuilding a just society. Here are some policies that should be pursued: 

1. Repealing the Citizen’s United case, i.e., getting  corporate and oligarch money out of our politics.
2. Taxing the wealthy fairly.
3. Fully funding public education.
4. Ending war profiteering.
5. Removing corporations from owning major media.
6. Establishing universal health care and universal child care.
7. Making a living wage the minimum wage.
8. Providing affordable housing.
9. Re-establishing international agencies, like USAID, that helped struggling people all over the world.
10. Ending support for and complicity in the genocide in Gaza and other such profitable barbarities.
11. Demanding accountability for Trump’s corruption.

 But, what’s left out? The most important of all (numero uno): Caring for the Earth.

Our most critical responsibility is to the miraculous planet that creates and sustains life. We must restore full power to the Environmental Protection Agency, making illegal the release of toxins into the air, water, and land. This should not be a compromise between health and profit. The litmus test for politicians must be a pledge to protect the web of life. 

We know that voters care deeply about the price of gas and Trump’s corruption – both issues about money. But why wasn’t the media reminding voters that Trump’s policies, denying climate change and increasing fossil fuel production, were threatening life itself, endangering the possibility of raising healthy children?

One of my favorite quotes in the entire AWTT collection is from Erik Reece, a poet and professor in Kentucky, who, when talking about the atrocity of mountain top removal coal mining, said:

“Our most modern sin is that we do not love the world enough. We have exiled the holy from this realm so that we can turn its mountains into money.”

The oligarchs and war profiteers have tried to turn hope for the future into money. This election revives the  opportunity to show how much we love the Earth.