Earth Day always feels strange to me now, because every year governments, corporations, celebrities, institutions, and political leaders say the correct words about the planet, post the correct pictures, release the correct statements, and then return almost immediately to the same machinery that is consuming the Earth faster than ordinary people can even understand.

Environmental collapse is not an “environmental issue” to me and and is more like the clearest political failure of our time.

Because the Earth is not an abstract moral concern. It is infrastructure. Soil is infrastructure. Rivers are infrastructure. Forests are infrastructure. Clean air is infrastructure. Food systems are infrastructure. And yet modern politics still treats them as secondary issues, as if the economy is real but the soil producing the food is some emotional side topic for activists and schoolchildren on Earth Day.

That is insane when you really think about it.

The top layer of soil, the living skin of the planet, is what is producing the food that keeps civilization alive. A few inches of living earth are doing the work that no government, no corporation, no stock market, no military, no technology company can replace at scale. And that soil is being depleted.

This is where the political conversation becomes unavoidable.

Because if the basis of food is degrading, then this is not just about “nature.” It is about national security. It is about public health. It is about inflation. It is about farmer distress. It is about migration. It is about water. It is about whether future generations will inherit a functioning civilization or a survival economy where everything natural has become scarce, expensive, and controlled.

And yet political systems across the world keep behaving as if the planet has no limits. I find it really disturbing.

The planet is much larger than a human being, so human beings assumed it was infinite. Rivers looked endless, so we treated them as dumping grounds. Forests looked vast, so we treated them as inventory. Soil fed us for thousands of years, so we assumed it would continue no matter what we did to it.

But the Earth is showing us something now. Even the planet has boundaries. Even the Earth can be exhausted. Even nature can say, “Enough.”

And when I think about this, I keep coming back to the dystopian films we grew up watching - Total Recall, Star Wars, The Book of Eli, Dredd, all these damaged worlds, desert planets, broken societies, artificial systems replacing natural life. These worlds used to feel cool because they were safely fictional. They were “what if” worlds. You could enter them for two hours and come back to a world where food still came from soil, rain still meant something, trees still existed outside your window, and nature still felt like the default setting of life.

But what happens when the boundary between fiction and policy starts thinning?

Because for a world like that to arrive, this world has to be dismantled first. Real soil has to become dead first. Real food has to become rare first. Clean water has to become a commodity first. Fresh air has to become a privilege first. Natural nourishment has to become something only wealthy people can afford first. And then suddenly dystopian science fiction is not entertaining anymore. It is just a preview of political negligence.

This is why I think Sadhguru’s Save Soil movement deserves more serious attention. He did something most political systems and media ecosystems failed to do: he made soil part of mainstream public conversation. Not just climate in vague distant language or carbon or plastic - Soil! The actual ground from which food, agriculture, rural survival, and human nourishment emerge.

And maybe that is why it does not get enough attention.

Soil is not glamorous. It does not trend like war. Soil does not produce the kind of outrage that political parties can easily monetize. It does not fit into the usual left-right shouting match. Soil just quietly feeds everyone until one day it cannot. That should terrify us more than it does.

But modern politics is still largely built around short-term incentives. Win the next election. Protect the next donor. Approve the next project. Expand the next industry. Show the next growth number. Announce the next scheme. And if the soil is dying underneath that growth, if water tables are collapsing underneath that development, if forests are vanishing underneath that prosperity, then apparently that is someone else’s problem, preferably someone not yet born.

This is not only environmental irresponsibility. It is intergenerational theft. We are taking from people who do not yet have the power to vote, protest, lobby, donate, or sue. Future generations are not represented in today’s politics, and that may be the deepest flaw in democracy as it currently functions. The people most affected by our environmental decisions are not even in the room.

And because of that, the present keeps raiding the future. People call this survival. They call it development. They call it growth. They call it the economy.

But at some point, we need to ask a very uncomfortable question.

Is it really survival? Or is it greed wearing the language of survival?

Because there is a difference between people trying to live with dignity and economic systems that require endless extraction from a finite planet. There is a difference between feeding people and destroying the very soil that feeds people. There is a difference between development and organized self-destruction with better paperwork.

Earth Day should not be a ceremonial day where politicians pretend to love the planet for twenty-four hours. It should be a day of political accountability.

What are governments doing to protect soil? What are they doing to regenerate agricultural land? What are they doing to support farmers who protect ecology instead of punishing them through market pressure? What are they doing about water depletion? What are they doing about chemical overuse? What are they doing about food quality, not just food quantity? What are they doing to make sure that “economic growth” does not become a polite word for ecological collapse?

Because if the soil dies, there is no economy. There is no left or right. No nationalism. No progress. No public health. No civilization in any meaningful sense. There is only management of scarcity.

And maybe that is what our politics is slowly preparing us for without saying it out loud - a world where the basics become scarce, the wealthy insulate themselves, and everyone else is told to adapt.

But I don’t think adaptation is enough when the crisis is being manufactured by unconscious systems.

A finite Earth cannot survive infinite appetite.

That is the political reality beneath the environmental language.

The planet has limits. Soil has limits. Rivers have limits. Forests have limits. The human body has limits.

But greed, when institutionalized, behaves as if it has none.

And unless politics starts from that truth, Earth Day will remain what it has mostly become - a yearly ritual of pretending to care about the thing we are still actively destroying.