Every show rocked with pandemonium at the end. Then people wouldn't leave. Our 12 singers and musicians joined an audience that became a party that became a town hall meeting.  They stayed to talk and listen with such conviction that they impacted the content of the next performance. (We had 3 performances in two days in London.)  The idea that the  Earth is alive, communicating with us; that we are entering a new era of Earth activism; that the Earth is the leading activist and that we should wait for the signs. Standard "Earth Riot Radio preaching" yes, but still, this intensity surprised us. People are looking for radical  change in how they share life with this living Earth. Earthalujah!

We don't know what it will take to stop the climate catastrophe. We haven't found it yet. Let's look everywhere for a way to stop this great machine; there must be a weak link there somewhere. One approach: Pull out and re-direct some part of the machine that they assume can never disobey, like a highway cone, like you and me...

Today's Earth Riot is for you activists. Keep talking to the Earth as you risk arrest, crossing the property-line, of a criminal organization like Chevron. You are both talking to yourself, because you are the Earth, and you are talking to the Earth outside of you. But don't let the Earth be inside you only, you'll lose your place  in the world. And don't let the Earth be outside you only, because then you are a tourist. Let the Earth be inside and outside, and the only analogy that really works is the inside/outside relationship of a lover.

Earth must flood us all and downpour you and I into the valley below when we have built up a false border with our fear. Defeat the religions, militaries, nation states and racial hatred... Borders need to be washed away now, and fear made useless. In this "flying" episode from June of 2023 we flow the borders away with flood and flight. This is the project of love that the Earth is calling for, and the Earth couldn't be clearer as the hurricanes keep coming and all we have to offer is war.

Every Human and More than Human has a song to sing and we have a variety of singers this week, from Nigeria to LA to NYC to Ecuador to South Africa to a swelling wave of Snow Geese... There is an unmistakable swing in institutions from Peace to Violence - you see it in religions, corporations, nation-states. Official fear everywhere. But - the Earth is alive with living beings singing and deep in the melody and beat there is a shout of Peace-a-lujah!

The “repetition” of the song’s “melody-tone tempo,” she explains, provides a shared sonic “meeting place” and “stage” where our emotions can temporarily liberate individual identities. What Savitri D calls the “transformational potential” of singing with other people and (we would add), singing with the songs that radiate from the forest at night, a coral reef, an alpine meadow... Your favorite eco-system has a symphony of songs. Sing along and have your action.

In this week's "Earth Riot" we bring in Estonia, where song-power is demonstrated by Estonia's resistance to Stalinism and Nazism with huge concerts starring the whole country! and - Chile, resisting the fascist Pinochet and his killers with the songs of Victor Jara and the womens' chanting dance: "The Rapist in Your Path".  From our own continent we have Sam Cooke believing that "A Change is Gonna Come" and Ojibwai drummers up in their spirit, as your hosts Savitri D and Reverend Billy hold forth with the Earth's soundtrack.  Earthalujah!   

So here we go. I know a theatrical woman named Lois Weaver who says "The Only Way Home Is Through the Show". Well, amended to reflect our current world-wide inferno, we could say "The Only Way Home Is Through the Heat Wave". Or the only way home is through our money-sucking karma, our religious wars, our fetish for forever toxins. But please - I want to preach about how to LOVE.

We are the "Earthchxrch", and for 20 years we were "The Church of Stop Shopping" - and emerging from the lie of virtuality was our thing. But now, with every month a record-breaking nightmare of heat, and the scientists telling us that the computer modeling doesn't work anymore because everything is exploding, we are left alone with the Earth. The Earth gives us the gift of the Unknown, the fabulous Unknown, and we are humble for the first time. What are we to do? Tell us.

The riddle of our time is:  How could we remain so passive, when the violence is so near and so well-known in every way.  We know the perpetrators, their bank accounts, the location and operation of their greed. Every month for the last 14 months has been the hottest on record.  The scientists who reported what weather to expect based on computer models now say that the exponential rate of climate change makes those sophisticated estimates impossible.  They are throwing away the computers and making a run for it.  Thousands of species are disappearing while flood and fire comes roaring up the valley of zombified consumers. We can't escape the prison of convenience.  The thing is, we still have the offer to participate in this apocalypse.  The Earth waits for us.

Like the tour with Neil Young last spring, we are being allowed to celebrate our radical Earth activism in a surprising new setting. In both cases, an opening was provided for us to walk out of our 99-seat storefront and shout Earthalujah! to millions.   

The storms and wildfires and floods are a daily apocalypse that we mistake for sense-surround blockbusters. The Earth's violent insistence on a new realism for its chief predator is beginning to move some of us.  But we are years away from a new "Earth Movement”.  We don't even have the most basic things all successful social movements have: hot music and scathing comedy. 

The necessary revolution is here in this extraordinary moment. Our only task is to live up to it. The Earth's 6th Extinction is not demanding a response within our quiver of desire, or our strategy, or even our reverence. It is happening, that's all. And a new Wisdom must come from us.

The Earth is quickly changing us. Everything everywhere is undergoing unprecedented change and this change sees the surfacing of the once hidden Empress of Secrets.  It is the Earth's gift in this time of apocalypse.  Silicon Valley, the Pentagon and M and M's are camouflaging the surface around us with a thick coat of dullness, but the Earth is peeling off that virtual reality.  Then she turns and looks us in the eye. In that evolution is a geo-genetic hope, the creation of new life. 

The Sunday "Earthchxrch" services remain so fulfilling, the soaring voices with their justice lyrics delivered with the 200 mph wind of recent storms. The choir sings I Go The Mountain and I'm Filled with the Fabulous Unknown from our new album. And we celebrate in this Earth Riot some of our greatest "necessary interruptions": Sister Rosetta Tharp, Elvis Presley and Big Mama Thornton, James Brown and Richard Strauss's Thus Spake Zarathustra. The Earth will rock our world until we don't recognize what we are doing, and then the survivors can begin again. 

Today’s Importance Exercise:  What’s more important?  Atmospheric rivers over the Pacific, or artificial intelligence in Silicon Valley?  The rise in carbon units per million, or crypto currency market rates?  Suicides among young native Americans or celebrities-on-the-cover-of-PEOPLE who got sober and remarried?  The trillions in profits from toxins by the four dirtiest American Banks - Chase, B of A, Wells and Citi? ...or any point being made in the thousands of pages of their quarterly reports?

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!  

Asks Neil to please name his band after the mystic who met George Armstrong Custer at Little BigHorn, and Neil, open your set with Cortez the Killer.  Let in the Earth radicals from where? Who are they? … let the unknown arrestees take the stage to shout for the Earth’s life.  Ask dazzling Daryl Hannah, can she please produce the harmonizing tree-huggers from the third row.  As your hits take us to our memories, may nostalgia never be the same again, because only illegal Earth actions will give us a ride home from the concert.

Yet our neighborhoods continue to drift toward a great mono-culture, deadly to play and resistance. The physical characteristics of the city are against the body, against the poor and people of color. We are more aware of the attack on us by the rich since Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, and Occupy Wall Street. These are the great freedom rides away from the institutions that rope-a-dope the Peaceful ones. We love the Earth and we feel safer in the brave play of healthy communities.  

Dreams of liberation and laughter, freedom and love. When we get up our dreams turn into music and the more-than-human creatures sing in passionate harmonies, preparing to pull our dreams into action in broad daylight. The melody and beats that dreamily echo in our bodies make a common song shared by all living things as we march on the fossil poisoners.

The Earth's every measurement, every single set of numbers we can give to the sky-rocketing heat, the sea-rise and wind-speed of storms and Iowa tornadoes and drowned polynesian islands... all the mass death of wild-life as well as the mass war of humans... it is all deadly-looking. But look we must, and the first thing we see is that many others, including the experts standing behind the pillars of major institutions - are simply ignoring this apocalypse. Well, for them modernity must really be a dazzling, shiny thing.  

Turn to the Earth for your leadership NOW.  How is this possible?  Wait for direction from what Russel Means called ‘The Great Mystery’.  Decrypt the wild life.  Presidents should always not be sure of their answers. The only special quality that nation-states have, which make them unique, is that they are weaponized.  Disarm nations and start over with the Earth.

The danger continues. The big boys are up there messing with mother nature while I'm brushing my teeth in the suburb with no name. And entire towns are disappearing in the downpours and fires... But one person's Nessun Dorma is another person's Screaming Mountain Gopher. One person's Thus Spake Zarathustra is another person's Go Away Bird. The shadow of the final storm sweeps across  the land of oppositions...

The con-men and con-women look in at us and claim our insides. They introduce us to our own interior, our identity is their property. THIS ARRANGEMENT WILL KEEP US MODERATE, UNABLE TO CHALLENGE THE POISONERS. THE MASS EXTINCTION OF NATURAL LIFE AND ITS PARALLEL CRIME OUR EXTREME WEALTH AND EXTREME POVERTY…. THE MASS MORTALITY WILL ACCELERATE. Shopping kills.

It's tricky. When 10,000 products try to hardsell you every day, promising happiness, sex, wealth, health and beauty, but those products are secretly polluting the Earth creating impossible wind and waves, fire and floods... And the answer to this betrayal is to love the Earth and team up with the Earth against the product toxins, but then the Earth will kill you anyway.... We are trapped in a pincer movement of different kinds of mass murder. But hey... how's your day?

The history of movements is felt deeply in Neil's songs, in "Four Dead in Ohio" and the cracking whip in "Southern Man", the vulnerability of "Comes a Time" and "Searching for a Heart of Gold" and the relentless rock of Crazy Horse when it breaks into "Hey Hey My My (out of the Blue and into the Black). In this Riot we select as an echo to our nightly rock concert - Alice Coltrane, Charlse Lloyd, the Nightjar and the European Robin. The Earth is storming along our tour route, in Texas and New Orleans and Alabama, and the Earth storms in the songs of the struggle for justice.

The powerful thing about this experiment is that we are talking directly to people about the Earth’s crisis.  It’s not graphics, mass mailings, or social media’s pixels. In the first three shows the choir and I played to 21,000 people. Our job is like an opening act, but also we are hosting the event of the LOVE EARTH tour.  Neil and his partner Daryl Hannah came to us to help them convey the meaning of the tour.   Moving from our storefront “Earthchxrch” in the East Village, we gasped at the shift in scale, like a pleasurable version of the bends. When we wake up on the bus the morning after a show, the pleasure we feel is that we have blasted into the sweeping landscape of messages like “Let’s make a new kind of activism for the Earth!” ….and “Can we be strange enough to change enough?” …and “Love is the Earth’s radical gift.  Let’s use it for Life!” Would love to hear from you as we disappear into the thousands of people and thousands of miles.

Beatles, Panthers, Standing Rock, David Graeber, Act-Up, Earth First, XR. Today as we prepare to tour with Neil Young, we find ourselves wondering: Can a famous activist or group make change on the level that the Earth needs? Or is Consumer Society always pushing such people to depoliticize?

“There must be more to life!” was the cry as the new movement toward Earth-friendly Love took root in a White Christian Nationalist enclave of rural Texas. Worshippers were stranded with their Bibles as the mass of Trumpers seemed to veer off during a Pentecostal hymn that spun out of control. Senior church officials lamented “You could feel a happy Devil take them away” as congregants began to tumble to the carpet, amid kisses and cries of abandonment.

The Earth is the protester now. We don't know how to join her and - we must. The consume-life economy will oppose any effort to break out of the virtual world of American-style capitalism. We are all the natural disaster. We are inside the tsunamis and quakes and typhoons and heat-waves and fires and floods... We are inside the disappearance of life forms. We cannot oppose the Earth. The Extinction takes life and blesses birth– our wave to ride. Do you have a hometown radio station you’d like to hear us on? Or perhaps have a connection to a podcaster or radio host? Or even a suggestion for the show? Email [email protected] to join our family of Earth Riot broadcasters.

It is clearly a moment for a new approach to defending the Earth. All manner of protests can be absorbed by the police and their corporation sponsors. Control of the press, shadow-banning of social media, the constant presence of aggressive marketing - the sources of climate toxins have had many years to perfect their response to standard protesting. But the quasi-religion advocated by the Ehrlichs allows for a regard for the intelligence of nature put forward by James Lovelock and Lyn Marguliis in the Earth as Gaia. This means that activists are a part of a larger living being. Direct actions become rituals, and we are the fire and the flood.

Always invite the Earth - the living being who creates living beings that become a part of it - to whatever event you are hosting. If you are negotiating with New York City about what to do with the 10,000 migrants arriving each month, and you don't have the Earth at the table, then you are pissing in Hell. First of all, they are coming here because we invited them, as we in turn were invited... Second, you will drift into professional gibberish very easily. For instance, you might call "Love" something like "mitigating food and shelter insecurity...." Please put the Earth into the words you use, especially around the children. Do you have a hometown radio station you’d like to hear us on? Or perhaps have a connection to a podcaster or radio host? Or even a suggestion for the show? Email [email protected] to join our family of Earth Riot broadcasters.

We find kindness in the strangest places. Kindness is confusing to the fearful; mistaken for crime by politicians. Kindness has power, after all, that cannot be controlled. Kindness is not a static quality; it is always in motion as people touch and fly apart. Mutual kindness can blossom into radical sharing. Strangers living in a sudden conscious agreement... Kindness is something each of us will invent with a newcomer. Trust rises in our heart.

In our current time in history, with the chaos of civil societies, the emergence of strong man governments and toxic capitalism and the resulting accelerating climate violence, we notice in our work at the Earthchxrch that there is a searching return by many humans to the most basic, hopeful, qualities:  Love, kindness, and gratitude.

Artists show the way: Coltrane and Ginsberg and Levitt and Annie Sprinkle and Bimbo Rivas and Basquiat and Keith Haring... they made new personal worlds in order to give themselves a way to inhabit on this Earth, and change people around them with their Earth-life.... It's time for Ecstatic Environmentalism!  Threatening, erotic, unembarrassable, dangerous, a radical evolution.  It’s the Earth that is our establishment royalty now.  I wanna be a Woke Monster for the Earth!

And the first wave of this mass extinction has hit New York. Thousands upon thousands of humans in busses and planes and trains and cars, with bundles and backpacks and not-warm-enough-clothes. What they call the extinction is actually sped up evolution, and our dull city needs it so badly. They walked through Earthchxrch's door for the central heating & job board. Bold, curious, loving, strong. The Fulani people from West Africa, mostly. Thank you for joining us here in the city, we were waiting for you. We're up on the wave of ultimate evolution now. The end of the world and the beginning of the Earth.

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? 

The scripted fictions - little staged videos - depicting young migrants fighting police  and shoplifting in Times Square, and then the spewing of hate from police/governor/mayor  right on cue...  All this drives us underground. We'll be non-official radical volunteers as  New York City forsakes Lady Liberty and does its best imitation of Alabama. We'll find non-professional  partners to ride the Earth Riot Wave as extinction and climate chaos accelerates, as civil wars and gangs  run amuck - and decent folks have to walk thousands of miles, float in leaky boats, confront gunmen at borders.  The politicians and police are corrupted souls we won't trust with the lives of our loved ones and neighbors,  or the lives of our new neighbors, the gracious, bold, curious guests who are arriving in our town. They come  with the gift of their lives. They remind us that love is the answer, not demonizing innocents.

The fearful hate retreats in the face of the vision of freedom for all, especially for the people of the global south who have suffered at the hands of White Nationalist Neo-Liberal Capitalism. At the Earthchxrch we welcome the Newest New Yorkers, about a hundred mostly West African young men each day. They join us at 36 Loisaida Ave (Ave C) in the East Village - each weekday from 8 am to 4 pm. On Sundays, some of them join us for our 5 pm 'Earth service,' featuring the heavenly music of the Stop Shopping Choir. We offer a heating system, but the roof leaks a little... There is a partnership (we contribute money) with a local soup kitchen EVlove. English lessons are taught, sometimes by the migrants themselves, as speaking in Portuguese, Spanish, French, Arabic, and various indigenous dialects fill the air of our single room. A strong gift is the newcomers' vision of freedom and independence, urged on by the 22-story woman in the harbor with her torch. We are reminded of our dream, coming to this place.

A hard-right Christian punched my lights out while I was preaching about Peace. But evil is dynamic. It moves. Evil flows in a river of happenstance and purpose and pain and laughter. Fearful fascists can be looked in the eye and appealed to. The Devil can change his mind. Look, I have Evil in my life like everybody else. In this episode of Earth Riot, the 102nd weekly broadcast of this show, I tell the story of preaching against violence until I was cold-cocked by Christ. I came to the Holland, Michigan jail. My attacker knew the cops. But everyone is lost in a civil war these days, right? Violence is everywhere. Just remember, every frozen fundamentalist wants to start laughing. 

He recently said “The flood of immigrants coming here - will destroy New York City. And it’s coming to a neighborhood near you.” Oh, really? And are they druggies and rapists? The migration, 200,000 souls in NYC in the last year and a half, is exactly what we need, and it is what we are. The meaning of the 22-story-high female jurist standing in our harbor, with a torch raised, is that we welcome the newest Americans, just as we were welcomed. The killers of our city, Adams’ friends in real estate and banking (and Trump-endorsing cops) may have met their match, because the shelter, food, and central heating denied the refugees by the city are being supplied by New Yorkers. We are remembering the pleasure of trust. 

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 songs of the new release, Before and After, give us Love that we can use. The wars and mass extinction seem to mock the tenderness of Love, but the message is simple-- Love is the only way to survive. Working with his collaborator Lou Adler, Neil Young tells a hundred stories with this record, some achingly personal and many universal. Neil and Daryl Hannah remind us that with Love, we can risk our life to save others’ lives, which is the heart of any revolution for change. W.H. Auden wrote on the eve of World War II, another time in history when children and families were attacked from the sky — “We must love one another or die.”  LISTEN UP! THE CHURCH OF STOP SHOPPING IS EVERY SUNDAY, 5 PM AT THE EARTHCHXRCH, 36 AVE C, LOISAIDA, THE EAST VILLAGE, NEW YORK CITY. THIS WEEK HONORING VINIE BURROWS, AND HONORING THE MIGRANT FAMILIES STANDING IN THE COLD IN NYC.

This year, we are the Earth. We're feeling good about the activism we have tried, but the Earth creates our direct action with the radical example of the Evolution of Species. And that is a Hell of Fierce Thing. We will fly over, dig under, camouflage in plain sight. We will grow claws, fins, re-growable tails and distributed intelligence like Octopuses. The government’s and corporations cannot find the money to banish us. No militarized border, no fascist hysteria, no passive consumerism can hold back the uprising of the Earth. EARTHALUJAH!   Welcome to this week's Earth Riot, produced by Jason Candler. We offer Savitri D's "News from the Natural World", The Stop Shopping Choir's "Mother Earth's Self-Care" with Sunder Ganglani, and "I am the X in Extinction" with Francisca Benitez. The Earth Manifesto from The Fiery Eagles of Justice and "I am the Ocean" from Neil Young's new album "Before and After". Read about creation of this work in The Times Contrarian, https://m.neilyoungarchives.com/news/1 When in New York, join us in the "Earthchxrch" in the East Village, a converted Capital One bank branch. We hold forth on Sundays at 5pm starting Jan 14th, Earthchxrch, 36 Avenue C at 3rd Street. Directions and Live Stream at Revbilly.com. For inquiries about joining our family of Earth Riot broadcasters, reach out to Travis Baldwin at [email protected].  

You have to spike your mind with science fiction, to get Big Oil's Evil. The super-rich are doing with superstorms and wildfires what the Israelis are doing with American bombs.  COP28 confirms it. The Oilies believe that they can steer the planet’s heat. Yes, they are strategic climate-makers now, which must be something like being God. Or, the Devil. It’s a world-ending profit center! They believe their natural disasters will keep the indigenous people of the Global South and their protesting sympathizers - flabbergasted, and depoliticized by endless tragedy. Meanwhile, back up North, they flood themselves with orgasmic hallucinations of wealth.

This week's "Earth Riot Radio" features Hopi sunrise music, Earth Firster Dave Foreman, Earth News with Savitri D, Ojibwe music of Maureen Noodin, jazz from Fiery Eagles of Justice, and songs of the Stop Shopping Choir.  Climate change also changes the passing of time and the ability to remember. Last week’s promise by fossil reps to “transition” to safe energy feels a century old. The 6th Extinction is quickly evolving human beings in new directions. At COP28, the 2,500 fossil lobbyists, marketers, and lawyers have experienced pathological amnesia. Environmentalists, on the other hand, report dives into deep wisdom consciousness. Landing back in their hometowns, the activists are out-of-control Earth revolutionaries, singing Earthalujah! in fossil banks. 

In this week's Earth Riot Radio and our live stage show Sundays the 10th and 17th, (LiveStreamed at https://www.youtube.com/JoespubNY), we explore the intimidating challenge of Making Peace in 2023. Peace is Life. Peace is the Earth. Peace is forests, wetlands, high plains, and coral reefs - ecosystems that live in steady balance, changing but flourishing over time. Human culture works that way, too. A healthy neighborhood (and a big Peace March) has diversity rather than a monoculture, lots of first names everyone knows, and people keep an eye on the predators to stay safe. Now we must enter a time of radical change, and the Earth is showing the way.

….and News from the Natural World with Savitri D and The Sixth Extinction with the Stop Shopping Choir, coming to you directly from the Earthchxrch in New York.  We speak with Gail Bradbrook, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, and her friend, the Conscientious Objector to the Master Narrative - Dr. Alnoor Ladha. "Psychedelic Civil Disobedience" might describe the world-saving mental-emotional reordering that results from experiencing the upcoming 29 minutes. Plus - Common Loons, Wolves and Coyotes and Howling Monkeys are on loan from that extremely radical culture called “The Earth”.  Comments and replies welcome: [email protected]