Becoming EarthKeepers
It all begins with an idea.
Feb. 27, 2026
Becoming EarthKeepers: A Practical Guide for Those Who Hear the Call to Protect the Earth, by Justin McAffee, a book via Substack for now.
The introduction to this book is wonderful and I include this from it:
EarthKeeping is less an identity than a relationship enacted daily. You can’t buy it or badge it. You live it through the choices that keep life going: mending a watershed, tending a garden, refusing a pipeline, feeding neighbors, the Diné grandmother weaving stories of the four sacred mountains so her grandchildren will remember their orientation, the young man in Eugene turning a strip of lawn into native pollinator ground.
There are EarthKeepers in every biome and neighborhood ... following the same unwritten rule: Life is Primary. To take this pathway is to undergo a shift in allegiance. Your loyalty moves from institutions to ecosystems, from parties to places. You begin to think not of “sustainability,” a word soaked in bureaucracy, but of reciprocity.
You learn to ask: What can I give back for what I take? You stop seeing climate change as a problem to fix and start seeing it as a symptom of forgetting who we are.
EarthKeepers are those who choose kinship over consumption, presence over progress, belonging over control.
Their work is to reestablish the covenant between people and place, to stand guard over the sources of life, and to model what right relationship looks like in a broken time.