The Great Big Green Week – Day Eight

Thoughts On Rising Sea Levels and Sinking Expectations

On the coastlines, sodium-saturated
Wood, swells as systemic
Denial of knowledge
And actively propagandized policies
Override reasonable
Solutions.

We know
Of unreasonable
Numbers of plastic water bottles, saturating
Our waterways and systems
Without any long-term pollution policy
Solutions,

As reasonable-
Minded policy-
Makers are saturated
By systemic
Conflict and mandates, knowing
It’s not enough to propose simple solutions.

Policies
Providing lasting environmental solutions
Must be backed by a reasonably
Large number of knowledgeable
Lawmakers who aren’t already saturated
With other issues in the system.

Yet, offering no solutions
To climate change, is to ignore reason –
Allowing a corrupt system
To saturate
Public airways with, more than smog but also, ignorance and lies instead of knowledge,
Further delaying solvent policies.

Take on the system!
Saturate
The world with knowledge
And reason.
Demand solutions.
Propose new policies.

Promote honesty and knowledge.
Earth deserves solutions
Based in science, and reason.
-SamanthaTerrell.com

A soap bubble…

…was blown
so long ago,
the wide-eyed, Wonderland-oblivious,
toddler of humanity blew
clumsily through the loop gripped
in one chubby fist

—billions of people will die—

and the soap film hesitantly bulged out
powered by bronze,
steel, the horse collar, crop rotation.
Sailing ships and steam engines
smoothed into the fragile sphere,
as were pickaxes, dynamite, production-lines…
industrial farming, the Haber Process,
internal combustion engines and the fractional distillation
of crude oil… Fast-breeder reactors…
embedded in the almost imaginary skin
of this bubble we blew,
this quintessentially breakable world
we knew through all our lives,
and implicitly assumed was real

—and billions will start to die—

when it turns out it is not. We built
a civilization on stuff we borrowed. We assumed
that fossil fuel in the ground
was a permanent state:
a natural condition forever. We thought
fertile topsoil was a given,
and clean water another gift, temperate climate,
fish-filled oceans, the very air…

—billions of people are starting to die—

as our assumptions start to crack along fine lines
and this is a bubble in the purest economic sense
because it actually worked through all the time
during which it seemed to work,
until one day, suddenly, boom!
It’s always been a lie.

If this island earth were a spaceship:
power failing, the food limited,
life support pumping dodgy air;
we’d get all of engineering there
and have a meeting to decide
who can be stuffed in lifeboats,
who can be stuffed in freezers, and who
—because engineers are nothing if not completely realistic—
won’t reach their destination.
You can try to get that one
before the United Nations, good luck with that!
And not to be a bore, but…

—billions of people will die—

and I don’t trust that lot to do much about it.
Although, also, I, with my slightly less than human head on,
—because I have one of those—I say: OK,
billions will die, it is hard to overestimate the size
of disaster facing us, but it’s not the end of the world,
it’s just the end of the world as we know it
and as long as we don’t completely blow it…
and as long as we weather the change
ride the tsunami
take what life remains us, as and where we find it
and not go end-of-days-fucking-crazy
with a Mad Max style weapons stash
and supercharger
on everybody’s Christmas list, then…

—for the billions who by chance do not die—

there will be some loss of privileges.
We won’t be eating meat;
we won’t be mining bitcoin; may not be driving personal cars
but we can hope still to be here
in some form.
We haven’t been attempting the impossible
it’s not that a planet cannot support an apical species
with a silly headcount.
It’s just that we didn’t do our homework.
We don’t have all the required tech,
have not closed the carbon curve,
balanced the energy budget, or worked out
what happens when ageing plastics want to retire…

…not produced a society that can keep its calm
on pressure-cooker starship Earth…

…but it can be done. Still, not a comfortable thought,
and it’s going to take some time

—during which billions of people will die.

It’s not the end of the world,
it’s just a soap bubble,
it’s the end of the world as we know it:
pop.

-Ian Badcoe

Carbon Footprint
MAY 06, 2019
I’m your deadly carbon footprint

Lurking spectre grim and grey

Growing larger, never smaller

I will never fade away

Stalking stealthily behind you

While you live your life on Earth

I’m your stain, your deep impression

I’m your legacy, your curse

I’m your dirty carbon footprint

Don’t ignore my warning sign

I’m your carelessness, your cancer

Soon consuming humankind

As you use your power electric

Coal and petrol, oil and gas

Killing nature with pollution

While you’re counting up your cash

I’m your lethal carbon footprint

Leaving you a bitter taste

Eating up all of our planet

Thriving on your piles of waste

I’m your rubbish not recycled

I’m the sting that’s in your tail

If you want to see tomorrow

Then you need to shrink me…now

-Neal Zetter