“Mother Earth” — What does the Earth’s symbolic female gender represent?

I am not sure what a mother role entails anymore, or why it existed in the first place. So what happens when a climate change activist makes reference to my relationship with a mother figure? What does it imply? If I am a Western citizen, my relationship to family values and a mother figure is vastly different from that of an Asian, Latino, or any other race. Diverse interpretations of what a family means to an individual exist within the same community. Freedom of expression and individualism are at the pinnacle of Western ideology, and the concept of gender identification discourse has recently captivated the public opinion sphere. These discourses challenged traditional gender roles for reasons that will be discussed further below, but it left the question unanswered. What does this mean to the climate change rhetoric?