Posted on 05/11/2015 11:17:57 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
If information was all we needed, we’d have solved climate change by now. The scientific position has been clear for decades. Researchers have been waving a big red flag that has been impossible for our politicians to miss.
Information, it seems, is not enough. Journalists have transmitted the warnings of scientists, but they have sometime focussed too much on the mini-controversies and the unimportant disagreements and not enough on the big picture. That has often left readers confused.
As the Guardian’s editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger explained when he introduced the paper’s Keep it in the Ground project, journalism struggles with climate change.
Alan Rusbridger asked me to curate a series of 20 poems that respond to the topic of climate change. The brief was to reach parts of the Guardian readers’ hearts and minds that the reporting, investigations, videos, podcasts and the rest had failed to reach.
I hope that these poems will connect with people in surprising and different ways and, in the process, help them in some small way perhaps to see our world differently.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
After years of flawed mathematical models, fudged data, and political grandstanding, I must admit, after reading these poems, that my heart has been moved. I believe!!
Keep it in the ground: a poem by Carol Ann Duffy
Then in the writers’ wood,
every bird with a name in the world
crowded the leafless trees,
took its turn to whistle or croak.
An owl grieved in an oak.
A magpie mocked. A rook
cursed from a sycamore.
The cormorant spoke:
Stinking seas
below ill winds. Nothing swims.
A vast plastic soup, thousand miles
wide as long, of petroleum crap.
A bird of paradise wept in a willow.
The jewel of a hummingbird shrilled
on the air.
A stork shawled itself like a widow.
The gull said:
Where coral was red, now white, dead
under stunned waters.
The language of fish
Advertisement
cut out at the root.
Mute oceans. Oil like a gag
on the Gulf of Mexico.
A woodpecker heckled.
A vulture picked at its own breast.
Thrice from the cockerel, as ever.
The macaw squawked:
Nouns I know -
Rain. Forest. Fire. Ash.
Chainsaw. Cattle. Cocaine. Cash.
Squatters. Ranchers. Loggers. Looters.
Barons. Shooters.
A hawk swore.
A nightingale opened its throat
in a garbled quote.
A worm turned in the blackbird’s beak.
This from the crane:
What I saw - slow thaw
in permafrost broken terrain
of mud and lakes
peat broth seepage melt
methane breath.
A bat hung like a suicide.
Only a rasp of wings from the raven.
A heron was stone a robin blood
in the written wood.
So snow and darkness slowly fell
the eagle, history, in silhouette,
with the golden plover,
and the albatross
telling of Arctic ice
as the cold, hard moon calved from the earth.
The cormorant, the gull and the crane appear to be exceedingly bright. Maybe because they’re all water birds. I was a bit miffed that we didn’t hear from the Oleaginous Hemispingus, however.
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