Note—This is both Earth Day and Passover begins tonight. That means a bonus—double posts to Heretic,
Rebel, a Thing to Flout to cover both bases.
Today is Earth Day. It seemed like a
very big deal when it was introduced in 1970.
The Environmental Movement as
we know it was still in its relative infancy having grown out of the
earlier Conservation Movement that
emphasized the husbanding of
natural resources for human use.
It seems in those early years when hundreds of thousands responded to calls
to march or participate in some way that real change was
possible.
Three years before the first Earth Day underground cartoonist R. Cobb
invented the omega symbol for the burgeoning ecology movement in 1967.
And, of course, much was
accomplished—the EPA was established and increased regulation of pollution, the hands-on
movement to re-cycle and re-use, the on-going involvement
of children which critics charge
has now become a virtual secular
religion. But despite it all, the Planet is in more desperate shape
today than it was then. The Cassandra warnings about climate change have come true in
spades, faster than anyone really expected.
Yet resistance to real change to address the root causes
has never been fiercer—or more successful—as it is fueled by billionaire exploiters and exploited by
rabid right wing movements. If liberals
love the Planet, conservatives MUST
attack it wrapping themselves in an ideology
of unfettered capitalism and apocalyptic
Evangelical claims that the End of
Days is at hand so humans can and should squeeze every ounce of value
from the Earth that will be thrown away anyway. on the other.
All of that as enabled by the former
Wrecker-in-Chief who threw hand grenades at international environmental cooperation, dismantled every Federal environmental regulation he can find including those that successfully
cleaned American water and largely scrubbed the skies of
pollution. And in the face of incontrovertible evidence of looming irreversible disaster actively promoted
increase carbon emissions from dirty coal and petroleum while attacking renewable
energy like those cancer causing
windmills. His minions in state governments have taken over the work and scramble to out
do each other in environmental Sabotage.
R. Cobb always had a macabre side. He envisioned the destruction
of the Earth by human greed and stupidity whether from nuclear war or
environmental catastrophe. That dark side captures the concerns of many
today better than the sunny we-can-fix-it optimism of 1970.
President Joe Biden has scrambled to undo as much of
the Federal level attacks as possible, but action drags on as bureaucratic
“I”s are dotted and “T”s crossed.
And there is only so much he can do by executive action, so he faces the daunting task of
moving new and restored legislation through Congress where MAGA Republicans still maintain a majority.
Most
of the early optimism of Earth Day has faded. The environmental collapse predicted
by Al Gore’s An Inconvenient
Truth in 2006 is coming true faster than the most alarmed Cassandras of science predicted. Most think the tipping point has come and gone.
Mass extinctions loom, violent weather disasters not only
become routine but intensify year by year. Ocean
temperatures and sea levels rise drowning
polar bears and threatening low
lying land across the globe. Scorching heat and deforestation create deserts
at a galloping pace. Famine
stalks the world as changing climate destroys agriculture. Some say a
total collapse of modern civilizations is inevitable now within
100 years—or less.
The Apocalypse
may indeed be at hand—but not the one that will rapture believers and leave behind a ruined earth. It may be the one that dooms the doubters and the increasingly frantic alarmists as well.
So
today’s Earth Day poetry collections are not the rapturous odes to nature of nearly 50 years ago.
The alarm
is shared with a last desperate and perhaps naïve appeal by an obscure
poet to an on-line poetry page.
Save Environment
Earth comes to an end,
Save it my friends!
Pollution is going on,
In every city, village and town.
Stop this ghost of pollution,
There are many solutions.
Do not pollute; water and air,
Don’t throw garbage, here and there.
You can do something now, or never,
Let’s save Our Earth forever!
—Shiangi
Gupta
The
Environmental Movement rose in tandem with neo-paganism
or Earth centered spirituality. The goddess
Gaia—Mother Nature embodied as
the Earth—is now herself threatened.
Gaia, a sculpture by Lorenzo Quinn.
Gaia’s
Demise
Mother Gaia,
what have we done?
You birthed us from your benevolent womb.
You feed and clothe us, protect us;
gave us life
but, we are left wanting when it,
comes to
gratitude.
We have shredded and poisoned your land and seas;
over fished, over hunted; slaughtering even
the forests and for...greed.
Human ego is the genuine...Devil.
Existing to gain; loving money more than family;
a species of doom is the human being;
lacking...humanity.
When it comes to our siblings, animal and plant;
to our
mother, we exhibit indifference.
We have lowered our species to a level beneath the cockroach;
all we’ve
touched has been destroyed.
We blame the cows for Global Warming
but, we
humans are the guilty,
the depraved
and mangled minds, who are to blame.
Forgive us, Mother, we do know what we’ve done to you.
What we don’t collectively realize is that,
what we’ve
done to you, we do to ourselves, in the end.
William was right when he penned, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
The fools of
the universe;
our great
shame is that, we don’t work together enough to save you.
—M.L. Kiser
This poet grieves but offers faint hope.
Once the World Was Perfect
Once
the world was perfect, and we were happy in that world.
Then
we took it for granted.
Discontent
began a small rumble in the earthly mind.
Then
Doubt pushed through with its spiked head.
And
once Doubt ruptured the web,
All
manner of demon thoughts
Jumped
through—
We
destroyed the world we had been given
For
inspiration, for life—
Each
stone of jealousy, each stone
Of
fear, greed, envy, and hatred, put out the light.
No
one was without a stone in his or her hand.
There
we were,
Right
back where we had started.
We
were bumping into each other
In
the dark.
And
now we had no place to live, since we didn’t know
How
to live with each other.
Then
one of the stumbling ones took pity on another
And
shared a blanket.
A
spark of kindness made a light.
The
light made an opening in the darkness.
Everyone
worked together to make a ladder.
A
Wind Clan person climbed out first into the next world,
And
then the other clans, the children of those clans, their children,
And
their children, all the way through time—
To
now, into this morning light to you.
—Joy Harjo
But perhaps Shelly
had the clearest vision of all more than 200 years ago.
Ozymandias
I met a
traveller from an antique land,
Who
said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the
desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a
shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled
lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that
its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet
survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand
that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the
pedestal, these words appear:
My name is
Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my
Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing
beside remains. Round the decay
Of that
colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and
level sands stretch far away.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
