Archive for the ‘global warming’ Tag
What, then, is to be done?
Filed under: poems | Tags: Canadian poetry, climate crisis, ecopoetry, global warming, poetry, poetry recordings
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Today, in reaction to the burning of over a hundred wildfires, thirty-six out of control, the province of Alberta has declared a state of emergency. Meanwhile, neighbouring British Columbia is suffering spring floods. And one doesn’t have to look too far afield to see the same and worse elsewhere (or elsewhen).
Understandably, among those persuaded of the reality of the threat of global warming and who either are not among those breathing hot and heavy over their growing fossil fuel wealth or haven’t simply given up (e.g., those persuaded of Near Term Human Extinction) the question of “What is to be done?” weighs heavy.
Among them are The Guardian‘s George Monbiot and scholar-activist Andreas Malm, the latter who has just published a rebuttal to a recent column by the former questioning the aptness of property destruction in the struggle for the system change the fight against global warming calls for—a good, provocative read.
Among those who pose the question asked above is myself, or, at least, the self who wrote the poem “And if I thought…” you can hear, below. (You can also read it at The /tƐmz/ Review here). I don’t offer any answers, but rather give vent to that sense of crisis, writing out of what that demand to act feels like, at least for me, then…
Avant le deluge…Rising up against that sinking feeling
Filed under: Ecology, poems | Tags: climate change, ecopoetry, global warming, Pacific Island Forum, poems, poetry, Smaller Island States, Tuilaepa Sailele, Tuvalu Declaration
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A bitter example of how vested interests (William Burroughs named them “the Nova Mob”) pervert reason, choke compassion, and stymie sane responses to global warming played itself out at this year’s Pacific Island Forum. Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, refused to endorse the Tuvalu Declaration proposed by the Smaller Island States group, “which acknowledges a climate change crisis, encourages countries to revise the emissions reductions targets and calls for a rapid phase out of coal use.”
“I am accountable to the Australian people, that’s who I’m accountable for,” Mr Morrison said.
Tuilaepa Sailelethe
Not a year ago, Tuilaepa Sailelethe prime minister of Samoa, delivered a speech in Sydney, Australia, 30 August 2018, wherein he said that “Any leader … who believes that there is no climate change I think he ought to be taken to mental confinement, he is utter[ly] stupid and I say the same thing for any leader here who says there is no climate change.”
By serendipity (if not synchronicity), the year the world was supposed to end (2012), I composed a chance, fourteen-line poem in harmony with Sailelethe’s sentiments. I’m not sure it’s much of a poem per se, unless a linguistic expression that fuses topical pertinence, heart, and complex irony is enough.
“BE IT RESOLVED…”
BE IT RESOLVED that
whereas public officials
who deny the reality
of Anthropogenic Climate Change
and hinder efforts to mitigate
its destructive effects present
a clear and present danger
to themselves and others,
said public officials should be
removed from office forthwith
and placed under a physician’s care
until such time as their suicidal
and/or homicidal and/or ecocidal
tendencies cease to present.
Doom porn: What would Martin Luther do?
Filed under: Ecology, poems | Tags: climate change, doom porn, ecopoetics, ecopoetry, Gerard Manley Hopkins, global warming, poems, poetry
Comments (1) Again, as happens, acquaintances I believe should know better, being educated, intelligent, and reflective, let the doomporn clickbait get the better of their sincere, best intentions and share distressing articles, such as this one about a report by two (2) Australians this spring positing that there is a “‘High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End’ Starting in 2050”.
Nearly, already, three decades back, a similar despair, coupled with Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur” I had by heart and the offhand remark by a friend visiting the lush, extinct volcano near his birthplace, inspired a poem in answer (the second of seven Budapest Suites in Grand Gnostic Central).
Budapest Suites II
for Laszlo Gefin
“There is a god here!”
In wild strawberry entangling thistle,
In maple saplings, a shroud on loam,
In chestnut and cherry blossoms over tree-line,
In goldenrod and grass, every green stalk, bowed with seed.
And there is a god who
Quarries slate for imperial highways,
Mines iron-ore out of greed,
Who would have Mount Ság again
Ash and rock.
And there is a god
In the seared, scarred, spent, still,
For lichen, poppies and song
Here rise from the bared
And broken rock to the air!
Just last year, some widely-publicized remarks by Mayer Hillman (“We’re doomed!”) inspired a number of responses, an early version of one I posted here the last time a friend disseminated some other bleak pessimism…
I’m hardly a Bjorn Lomborg playing down the gravity of the situation and the urgent, concerted, radical action it calls for, including the need for no less focussed, lively and creative reflection and critique to articulate a post-anthropocentric, if not post-humanist, biocentric ecosophy. But nor am I a latter-day Jeremiah confusing his insight into the woes and flaws of the present with visions of imminent, righteous catastrophe. (It’s high time I address at greater length this newly-arisen apocalyptic tone in cultural criticism…).
To wit, and not for the last time, I’m sure, I share here two unpublished (…because editors [eye-roll emoji][facepalm emoji]…) sections of the sequence “Made in Germany”, composed in 2012.
Waiting on a train to what was
the East, the summer of the year
the New Age believed the World
would end, wildfires smoke
from Colorado to Croatia,
floodwaters deeper than memory
drown southern Russia and Thailand,
tornadoes plough the Midwest,
hurricanes blow past records
on the Eastern Seaboard.
∞
http:// arctic-news.blogspot.de/p/global-extinction-within-one-human.html?spref=fb (21.07.2012)
Asked what he would do were the world to end
next day, Luther replied, “Plant an apple tree.”
“We’re doomed.”
Filed under: Ecology, poems | Tags: ecological despair, ecology, ecopoetics, ecopoetry, global warming, insect apocalypse, Manu Saunders
Comments (1) ….or, as the refrain of another “Dark Mountain” climate change jeremiad would put it, “It’s worse than that.”
It is, surely, rationally difficult not to deny the gravity of global warming and environmental degradation in general and not to fall prey to anxiety or even despair. It is not irrational, however, to maintain an open, critical mind and culture hope.
For instance, even fairly responsible media sources distort the findings of ecological researchers. For example, two recent studies of declines in insect biomass inspired copy such as “insect apocalypse,” “global ecosystem collapse,” “loss of all insects within 100 years,” and “collapse of entire food webs.” However, learned reflection reveals the matter is less dramatic, far more complex, though hardly without concern. The same can be said for headlines about how humans have wiped out 60% of all animals on Earth in the last 30 to 40 years.
Much more could be said in this vein, but not quite eight months back, similar, dire and final pronouncements from Mayer Hillman prompted a number of poetic responses, of which the tersest and most direct was this:
Replies to Mayer Hillman
“We’re doomed.”
Your therapist would guide you
gently to see you’re fortune telling.
The dialectician would unfold the thought
that determination does not
foreclose unforeseen developments
being the condition of its own negation.
A happy chance slip of memory recalls
“What is real now was only once imagined”.
On the end of the Doha Climate Change Conference: a poem and commentary
Filed under: poems | Tags: climate change, Doha Climate Change Conference, ecology, ecopoetics, ecopoetry, global warming, poetry
Leave a comment Brushfires from Colorado
to Croatia; floodwaters
deeper than memory
drown southern Russia
and Thailand; tornadoes
plough the Midwest;
record hurricanes on
the Eastern Seaboard.
Humanity betrays all
the collective intelligence
of a bacterium
in a petri dish.
Although the poem above was composed in Berlin this past summer, today its sentiment seems prescient of what many of those of us who care about the fate of civilization feel. A lone voice speaks to the issue in Canada’s parliament, and in the face of suicidal official denial and incapacity, it would be barbaric not to lend a poetic voice in support. Posting a poem, of all things, must seem a futile gesture, but its impulse takes inspiration from Luther, who, asked what he would do if he knew the world were to end tomorrow answered, “Plant an apple tree.”
Poeta Doctus 