I was consumed with a great yearning when I heard last week, amidst all the sturm und drang of the Boston Marathon bombing and manhunt, that a twin sister of our lovely Earth had been discovered on the other side of the cosmos.

She is so far away—1,200 light years—that it is very unlikely any earthlings will ever visit her.  Not unless we can figure out how to bend time and space, like the tesseract imagined by Madeleine L’Engle in A Wrinkle in Time.

But just knowing she’s there—and that there may be many more planets like her, like us, out there in the universe—is comforting somehow, as we watch our own Earth being consumed by paroxysms of manmade violence and natural destruction.

It has been hard to focus on Earth Day 2013 with all the crazy human disasters going on.

But as the sun rises this morning on yet another day on Earth, I want to salute our battered, beautiful planet, our ever-giving Mother who asks nothing in return from her children, other than that they fulfill their own destinies.

It remains to be seen whether human beings—particularly of the male variety—can overcome our tendency to aggression and change the course of our destiny from its current suicidal path.

We are smart enough to know what is going wrong with our relationship to our Mother Earth, and we also know how to fix it.

Can we summon the moral imperative and the will to stop the violence, stabilize the climate, control our population growth, and enter a peaceful, prosperous New Age on Earth?

I wonder how the inhabitants of Earth’s distant sister have managed.  Perhaps if there are highly evolved inhabitants there they are even smarter than humans.  Perhaps they never fell from their Garden of Eden.

How much easier it is to do things right the first time, rather than deal with the mess of making them right again after catastrophe.

On this Earth Day, we must look disaster in the eye, and vow to overcome it.  Our Mother deserves no less.