A Love Letter To The Ground

Sometimes, I’d like to walk barefoot on the ground. And yet, still. It’s shattered with plastics and litter.

Dear Ground,

You’ve carried more than your share.

We’ve poisoned you with fertilizers and ripped up your forests for malls in the name of development. We compacted you with asphalt and said our economy came first. We let landfills swell whilst we told ourselves, “It’ll pass.” Shocker: It never did.

Perhaps you’ve been treated like a doormat. You’ve been walked on, ignored, until the cracks started to form. Literally. Droughts. Flood. Erosion. You fight back and we call it a crisis, but really? It’s a consequence.

This teenage girl has recently learned that healthy soil isn’t just dirt – but a living system. It stores carbon, filters water, and grows our food. It holds our climate together while we pathetically post infographics and go back to single-use anything and everything.

And I’m guilty too. I threw away half-eaten meals and stood living vicariously through those who stood up to the bulldozers twice their size, erasing green spaces. But two brain cells is enough to start listening. To start reading past the headlines, and to realise, regeneration isn’t just a buzzword to be commercialised, it’s survival.

If you talk without giving back, you’re a hypocrite. I don’t care how old you are, protecting the ground means rethinking. You rework agriculture, urban planning, consumption – all of it. Rethinking means asking what kind of footprints we’d like to leave, and if the ground can hold more of your plastic croc footprints.

So this letter isn’t praising the ground, no, but a promise to it. That I’ll pay attention, push myself through, and that I’ll see you – not as a dirty blank surface, but as a foundation.

And hopefully, if more of us start writing back, maybe we’ll deserve to stand on you again.

– By a teenage girl who walks barefoot when the world gets too loud.