My reflections on Earth Day include both sorrow and love, fear and exhilaration, a sense of urgency mediated by the joy of springtime. The painful feelings are rooted in the fact that humans stand at a crossroads, and it is at this juncture that we must either choose to change, or face letting go of all that is passing away, in the only place we call home.

A 30-minute Google search about climate change, the state of planetary physical systems, and the current rates of plant and animal extinction can so saturate the reader with fear and sadness that it is understandable why people do not wish to dwell on such thoughts. But turning away provides only temporary escape. Turning toward what we love about this world is what will bring relief, as well as the answers we so urgently need.

Both empirical and anecdotal evidence offer overwhelming support for the hypotheses of the vast majority of scientists concerning worldwide environmental degradation. Magnum, Oklahoma, reached 99 degrees Fahrenheit on Feb. 11, 2017; in Amarillo, Texas, the high temperature that day was 88 degrees, while only a few days later in Amarillo it was snowing.

Australia’s half-million-year-old Great Barrier Reef, long considered one of the “seven wonders of the world,” is now diagnosed by despairing scientists as “terminal” due to repeated coral bleaching, which occurs when ocean waters are too warm.

Most people are subjectively aware that anomalous weather events are increasing both in frequency and in severity worldwide.

These problems are very difficult to solve because we have designed modern societies around economics, and environmental problems are thoroughly intertwined with our perceptions about our own prosperity and security.

The fecund earth features a spectacular ballet of interlaced systems and processes, developed over many millions of years, that has given rise to a dizzyingly diverse array of plant and animal species, and to the biomes that support and nourish them. Human thriving is the result of 65 million years of biological evolution, which has led to the perfect conditions for the emergence and flourishing of our species, and for the cohorts of species with whom we share this place.

Unfortunately, the industrial economy, for all its technological brilliance and efficiency, has become a mass killing machine. It is destroying not only living things, but also the essential physical life-support systems which constitute the actual “bottom line” on this planet. This is unnecessary: Since it is purely a human invention with no intrinsic value, the money on which our security is based is, as startling as it sounds to the modern mind, really a negotiable concept.

Every single thing we have done, built, created, healed and sought is available without it. Physical processes, on the other hand, are nonnegotiable: They deliver our real wealth. Mexico City is sinking due to prolonged drought, and Miami is flooding regularly due to rising sea levels, each community facing the prospect of a cascade of unimaginable consequences.

In the end, no amount of money will solve these problems.

If humans, arguably the most adaptable and creative species ever to grace the earth, are to have the chance to thrive anew, and to repair the damage we have caused, it will be because we accept the actual “bottom line”: Any system of prosperity and security we devise must be derived from and acting in accordance with wealth as defined by the planet that invented us. That means designing our activities around Earth’s priorities: If what this place does is create and nourish a diversity of lifeforms, everything impeding that mission must be reimagined.

Several years ago on one of the space shuttle voyages, Sultan bin Salman al-Saud, one of the astronauts who was part of an international crew, said that during the first few days in orbit everyone tried to spot their own countries. By the third day they were just identifying continents, and after five days all they saw was Earth. It took only five days for a group of ethnically and linguistically diverse people to develop a shared perspective on reality.

When we do so in the larger global community, we will finally achieve permanent progress.

(Karen Barrows holds a bachelor’s in political science from Georgia State University and a master’s in environmental studies from the University of Oregon. This perspective was distilled from a sermon on the care of creation, delivered a year ago at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Port Townsend. She will again deliver the sermon this year on April 23 at St. Paul’s. All are welcome to attend.)