Welcome to the mosh pit in the vale! Earthweal’s linking whamarama blasts off on Friday afternoon at 4 PM EST.  Share a poem, short or long, new or old, bluey or yahooey. Throw us a rope, for hope or nope!

Click on the Mr. Linky link which follows to add your link. Add your location after your name in the link so we know where on Earth you post from.

Be sure to visit your fellow poets and comment. Discussion as what on Earth your fellows are writing about is a renewable source; treat it as such.

Links will be accepted through Sunday night, followed by a Monday challenge focused on some aspect of our changing Earth and lasting til Friday.

Since the early earthweal challenges have all been an uphill slog into wrong & wronger, this coming Monday we shift gears with a challenge on Renewal.

Your fruitful and communal conversation is also welcome in the comments section.

—Brendan

Deep thanks and gratitude to Sherry Marr for her Animals of Climate change challenge here last week. It was a difficult challenge for many, but contributions were rich and diverse—quite a habitat for song. The animal toll from a violently changing atmosphere is immense—how to conceive of a billion animals lost to Australian wildfire, a million seabirds to ocean heat, whole ecosystems erased due to human intervention? One dead koala bids a thousand grieving poems; is there any way possible to sing the entire vanished population? Maybe our plural voices helped register the lament.

Some complained of how wearying and depressing it was to even try to write a poem under such weight. Silence is certainly one option, as much out of personal survival as not wishing to add to the burden of all.

But many of you did respond—it one of the richest forums for posting and comment at this new forum so far—and the result was love and grief and anger and sadness all reflected in a suffering animal’s eye.

Hard work, and it begs a difficult question: Why even bother? Does staring directly into catastrophe do anything to relieve suffering or provide hope?

It’s a good question, and the responses I’ve searched for are fragmentary at best.

First, we may not have much of a choice. It’s getting harder to find a space where poems can grow unaffected by climate change. Whether the prevailing winds of cultural mood are changing, or its weather driven by climate change, the interior landscape we write by seems less and less free to roam the former occupations of love, liquorish and languor. It’s said that when you make love to a 600 pound gorilla, the sex is over when the ape decides; climate change won’t go away, and the world it is remaking is the one we have to make poetry in.

The news has developed the ostinato cadence of catastrophe—what a week! Coronovius from a game market in China, volcanic eruptions in the Philippines and New Zealand, earthquakes in the Carribbean, flooding in Jakarta, wildfires edging close and closer to Australia’s parliament in Canberra as temperatures soar again. And now parts of Brazil are experiencing the most torrential rainfall ever recorded, with city streets turning into rivers and landslides knocking houses off cliffs and burying shanty towns. Meanwhile the jet stream wobbles ever more wildly as the Arctic melts causing unseasonable heat and cold; dangerous amounts of methane releases from melting permafrost as well as who knows what viruses, sunny day floods in coastal cities around the world, the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica melting fast and faster, Venice flooding, water shortages in major cities: Who doesn’t know the litany?

But where it once seemed like news from far away, indiscriminate events bring disaster nearer to us all—maybe not directly, but rounding ever closer.  Far fewer feel safe, and less have much confidence that the future will see any improvement. Why wouldn’t our poetry be similarly stained and strained, even maimed by such constantly darkening skies?

Should poetry be a haven from that—hunkering down into whatever relative comforts can be found elsewhere at hand? I could tell you about my history, my bad thirst, my love and loves, the grace of semi-wild things curled in my lap as I write: All noble topics, but is that really the news any more? Worse, do my occupations farther afield start to bear the ironic drone of the merely selfish, that very quality which now burns Australia and renders the poor of Brazil helpless against the assault of floodwater?

OK, but isn’t there a cost in writing for too long or deeply exposed to such harsh radiation? Despair of the theme of a damaged, fouling and heating Earth can become a telltale leitmotif, tocking inexorably like the footfalls of a reaping shadow. Lah de dah. What life that is still in us can feel squelched and drained. I sometimes wonder about themes which used to absorb me which I can’t find much interest in writing about. Where did my interest in them go? Maybe it’s true that I’m just getting to be an old poet whose drone suffices but cannot add; Helen Vendler once said that the peril of the lyric poet is a finite aging self. But then maybe the divining rod is pulling me toward a work I barely grasp. It feels like dying, but it also may mean renewal. New poems at least …

We can take climate change as a call to grow in ways we haven’t been willing to before. We can record nature with more love and devotion to think in its way, cherish what still remains.

I can become a more faithful disciple of the difficult, a quality which has always aided poets in writing better poems. Imagine a forum where that work is essential.

Besides, I owe something to the dead—remembrance, redress, amends—making the effort to numerate the species lost, elegize days which won’t return, listen to the lament of ghosts on a cold night’s breeze. The contributions this week to Sherry’s challenge brought us polar bears and river dolphins, wild horses and orcas, butterflies and joeys and careening birds: I’m grateful there is soapbox for that choir.

I also owe something to the future. Doubtful that anything I say or said will endure, I am still part of the moment’s conversation which others down the road—to future generations who will have to contend with ever-more dramatic losses—who will examine cultural remnants like this, asking, Did they know? Did they speak out? Was their grief loud enough to have the resonance of apology? Was their work an amends? Did it have enough substance for forgiveness, or at least was willing to be target for rage?

Most importantly, such poetry would be suffocating and pointless if it were only about a common problem and peril. We all can see where this is going. Is there also a common solution? Poets are solitary animals, singing alone on distant branches: community and communion we have more with dead poets than our living fellows. Poetry is also a vanishing art in the age of brassy online noise. The world is vanishing too. Can poetry be a celebration of both the living and the dead, the blooming and failing world?

We can all see pretty well how we got here and grieve the resulting affects. But does the work stop there? Nature is a cycle of death and renewal; is there a way of working poetry through its despair into an embrace of new possibilities? Jedidiah Purdy writes in After Nature: A Politics of the Anthropocene,

It is true that climate change, so far, has outrun the human capacity for self-restraint. As greenhouse-gas levels rise and the earth’s systems shift, climate change has also begun to overwhelm the very idea that there is a “nature” to be saved or preserved. If success means keeping things as they are, we have already failed, probably irrevocably. This is why climate change is the emblematic problem of the Anthropocene: It is both a driver and a symbol of a thoroughly transformed world.

We need new standards for shaping, managing, and living well in a transformed world. Familiar ideas of environmental failure and success will not reliably serve anymore. We should ask, of efforts to address climate change, not just whether they are likely to “succeed” at solving the problem, but whether they are promising experiments—workable approaches to valuing a world that we have everywhere changed, and to thinking how we will change it next. Climate change gives us a model of how familiar approaches to environmental problems can break down, and how the problems that disintegrate those familiar approaches can become the seedbed of new approaches. The old adage was never truer or more relevant: we make the road by walking. (249)

Can our weal turn a welted world into a well of new possibilities? It’s what the old shaman-poets did: made wombs out of wounds. Our words can become new worlds.

A poem by Wendell Berry suggest how to crack that door and begin to see what’s next:

THE SUPPLANTING

Wendell Berry

Where the road came, no longer bearing men,
but briars, honeysuckle, buckbush and wild grape,
the house fell into ruin, and only the old wife’s daffodils
rose in spring among the wild vines to be domestic
and to keep the faith, and her peonies drenched the tangle
with white bloom. for a while in the years of its wilderness
a wayfaring drunk slept clinched to the floor there
in the cold nights. And then I came, and set fire
to the remnants of the house and shed, and let time
hurry in the flame. I fired it so that all
would burn, and watched the blaze settle on the waste
like a shawl. I knew those old ones departed
then, and I arrived. As the fire fed, I felt rise in me
something that would not bear my name—something that
bears us
through the flame, and is lightened of us, and is glad.

from Farming: A Hand Book (1970)

‘Tis now the witching hour! Earthweal’s linking free-for-all kicks off every Friday afternoon at 4 PM EST.  Share a poem, new or old, long or short, hopefully in the theme of this forum but all wells are really open for business as long as your contribution is a poem.

Click on the Mr. Linky link which follows to add your link. Add your location after your name in the link so we know which corner of Earth you hail from.

Links will be accepted through Sunday night, followed by a Monday challenge focused on some aspect of our changing Earth and lasting til Friday. This coming Monday, Sherry Marr takes over the reins with a challenge on The Animals of Climate Change. Let’s build an ark of verse!

As always, your fruitful and communal conversation is welcome in the comments section.

—Brendan

Photo: Jenny Evans / Getty

After a lull which brought cool and wet relief to some but not all of Australia’s drought-stricken, fire-ravaged regions, dry heat and stiff winds have returned and so too the brushfires. Suburbs south of Canberra were threatened and a 600,000-acre blaze burns out of control near the south coast towns of Moruya and Bermagui.

It’s hard—very hard—to go on with this, even from this distant porch in Florida, but imagine the daily dose of climate reality for most Australians, where the smoke of 25 million burning acres of homeland infiltrates everything and -body with dread and the dead.

One survey showed that more than half of Australians have been directly affected by the blazes, with a quarter experiencing health effects and a third changing their daily routine as a result of the conditions. The ultrafine particles in smoke can bury in the lungs and enter the blood stream, causing infection and an increased chance of heart attacks, lung disease, urinary tract infections and renal failure. Several players at the Australian Open have required medical care for breathing problems, while NASA reports that Australia’s wildfire smoke encircles the globe, resulting in a dense haze in South America and redder sunsets around the Southern Hemisphere.

For Australian journalist Amy Coopes, the last round of fire around the New Year was too much: “We all know someone who has lost something; everything. Photos from friends of a wall of fire racing across paddocks, engulfing life as it was once known. Everything is gone. The scars on our landscape will heal, but will we?”

Before we can take in the depth and damage of those scars, the fires return.

Elsewhere, American President Donald Trump and Greta Thunberg had at each other at the World Economic Forum in Davos, with Trump scolding Thunberg and other climate activists for peddling doom in an age of deregulated economic prosperity.  To which Thunberg tartly replied in a separate venue: “Our house is still on fire.” She said world’s investors have a choice between pulling their money out of fossil fuel stocks or face telling their children why they failed to protect them from the climate chaos they created.

Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin came to his boss’s rescue a few days later by saying Thunberg ought to study economics before offering climate proposals, which is rich, because Mnuchin keeps a steadfast gaze away from economic facts by saying that the Trump 2017 tax cuts were paying for themselves, even though the federal deficit has climbed over $1 trillion. “His defiance of reality probably pleased President Trump, who likes lieutenants to pretend everything is going according to plan,” said a New York Times editorial on Jan. 23. “But Mr. Mnuchin would better serve his country by encouraging his boss to confront reality.”

But why bother with that? Take a cue from Craig Kelley, the conservative Australian politician who “argues that the fires are no worse than in the past, that arsonists and socialists are to blame for the blazes, that coal is winning, that Arctic ice is not melting — and that those who disagree are no better than the censors in Orwell’s ‘1984.’ (Damien Cave, New York Times).

Denial is the opiate of the asses, for sure. And when the truth gets tough for these jerks, they commence twerking all the more wildly.

Rather than throw more of those stones at the painfully obvious, today I’d like to turn instead to the pot I’m a-boil in. One of the most maddening things about life in the Anthropocene is the sense of how pervasively, perhaps inextricably, all of us live in the problem, so much so that me talking here is a criminal waste of juice, breath, and care. It makes any sense that humans can work their way out of this climate dilemma rather absurd.

In order to blunt and lower the curve of rising heat (and keep all the tipping-points from springing on us like the Devil’s Jack-in-the-Box), fossil fuel extraction has to stop—now. But what a task that is! Billions of humans now clamor for the basics of beyond-survival living — fresh water, good housing, a fridge stuffed with food, a/c for the heat, a streaming TV and cellphone and gas-guzzling conveyance, the bigger and more fumous the more elegant.

All of the standard conveniences of modern life demand power—lots of and with more and more billions clamoring for it, the load is nigh impossible. An upward spike: half of the nearly 2 degrees C temperature rise we’ve seen since 1880 is the result of consumption during the past 20 years.

To wit, my daily life is threaded and connected to fossil fuels in too many ways to count. I have a 50-mile daily commute to work. I’m on a computer all day.  (Data centers around the world now consume annually some 650 terawatt hours of electricity, and that number surges every year in the demand for more and more cloud computing. ) My wife and I go through mountains of packaging every week getting to our food. Suburban life is the ultimate fossil fueled convenience with its vast vista of single-family houses inured from summer heat and winter cold, stocked with food, with one room dedicated to entertainment—comfy chairs, low lighting, a media system comprising of TV, computer, streaming device, stereo, MP3 player, old video and DVR players, etc.

I don’t have to go anywhere, I just hang out at home and consume. But then, most suburbs lay a distance from urban centers where most work is found, which means you drive for everything.

This dream is repeated millions– billions—of times around the world, in increasing numbers, density and heights of consumption.

The modern convenience dream is so complete that there’s a Matrix-like blindness to what’s happening just outside that shimmering wall. Truth is, humans are devouring the world fast and haven’t a clue how to live in any truly sustainable way. Our lifestyle and cloud of conveniences work only with a much, much smaller population—500 million or less–and there isn’t any way to teach that but through the hardest lessons.

But we are a long way from learning that—decades maybe, though the timeline sure seems to be compressing as wildfires take off around the world.

Meanwhile we hunker down in our addictions, at rest and complete in fictive baths where warnings don’t sink in, climate truths are denied, powers that be steal what they can for their few and a president is denied due process and a fair trial just so things can stay as they can’t be. That contingent is not leaving the Titanic’s ballroom, no matter how crazy the angles.

Back in Australia, locals are sorting out that they aren’t in Kansas anymore. “Sometimes you can see the end of the old world and the beginning of the new one as clearly as a seam,” Brigid Delaney writes. “Transformations that were once barely perceptible, recognisable only after the fact, this summer have become akin to a crossing. You can see the line as you step over it.”

Maybe the seam is still hard for some to perceive, but then there’s so much smoke getting in our eyes these days. We can’t see the carbons overpopulating the atmosphere; nor does the surface of the sea belie the growing emptiness below. But we can see the smoke, and through it our invisible fate is coming into view

Back to Amy Coopes for a close: “As our climate becomes more hostile, perhaps the single greatest risk is that, in tandem, so do we. The learned helplessness of neoliberalism not only invites us to believe that we, as individuals, are powerless, it depends on it.”

Here our poems don’t have to be helpless.

And so let’s dance!

Icelandic poppies. Photo by my brother Timm, who loved filling his camera lens with flowers.

NOTE: For those of you came by first thing to link, sorry that Mr. Linky was expired. FIXED.

Welcome to Earthweal’s third open link weekend. Our linking free-for-all kicks off every Friday afternoon at 4 PM EST.  Share a poem, new or old, long or short, hopefully in the theme of this forum but all doors are really open as long as your contribution is a poem.

Click on the Mr. Linky link which follows to add your link. Add your location after your name in the link so we know where in the Earth choir you’re singing from.

Links will be accepted through Sunday night, followed by a Monday challenge focused on some aspect of our changing Earth and lasting til Friday. The Jan. 20 Monday Challenge will be WATER.

Would love to read your thoughts and responses in the comments section. Conversation has fruitful and communal.

—Brendan

Poet Mary Oliver, who joined the deep blue fray a year ago today, 1/17/19.

Thanks again to all who have been coming by to link and comment. You magnify the hive with so much charged pollen in the form of dreams, angst, insights, rants, grief, poetries. It’s still very early, but earthweal shows promise as a place to hurt and heal under the canopy of changing Earth.  We have much, much work to do …

In his new book This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth, Jedidiah Purdy (a professor of law at Columbia University) makes the case for “a new narrative of civic friendship” of shared resources and common purpose which is based on land—the very thing which holds us together and tears us apart. The wealth of the land is something we have shared and fought over; in many places, our common weal has become the wealth of the few. As we waken to the nightmare produced by our extractions, the way forward is the way back—toward a renewed sense of bonding, not only by the human community but with the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms we reside among.

Purdy writes,

In a commonwealth—which we might also call a democratic Anthropocene—value will lie in work that does what is necessary and sustains its own conditions of possibility, in rest that contemplates a broken but still wondrous world, in play that keeps joy vivid among monuments and ruins and helps ensure that new life will grow there. No one can choose these values alone because they depend on the shared commitments of others and on the shape and terms of a built and shared world. The heroic work of building that world must clear the space for living humbly. (150)

Heroic work, perhaps, but as I’ve previously quoted Wendell Berry, “its hardship is its possibility.”

The thought of a building a world for humble living gives me hope in the face of so much climate despair there is to carry. I read a piece in The Guardian online yesterday, “How scientists are coping with ‘ecological grief.'”  In it, Steve Simpson is a professor of marine biology and global change at the University of Exeter. For decades he participated in diving expeditions into the Great Barrier Reef, studying marine life and the coral ecosystem. Though coral reefs take up only .1 percent of the ocean’s surface, more than a quarter of marine species live in them. “They’re rainforests of the sea,” he says.

But the oceans have been warming due to climate change, and in 2006 he observed the first great bleaching event. A vast and vibrant ecosystem “had turned into a graveyard.”  “It looked weird,” said Simpson, “because the fish were still brightly coloured, like someone had gone in and painted them on an otherwise black-and-white photograph. It was completely devastating to see individual corals that we knew and loved and had spent so long studying, now dead.”

Asked how he was dealing with his grief, Simpson replied,

We come back from our field seasons increasingly broken. You can either think: I can’t do this, I’m going to have to change the science I do; or you might try to internalise all of that pain that you feel. Lots of scientists do the latter – they feel we should be objective and robust, not at the mercy of our emotions.

Increasingly, we’re realising that we can use that emotional response to form new questions. Working on the bleached and dying coral reefs is enormously important to understanding how those environments are changing. There is a real urge to want to do something about it, rather than just chart the demise. And that’s where our research is heading now. We’re trying to restore some coral reef communities, or a fishery, or replant a mangrove forest. We’re just trying to find ways of protecting pockets of really diverse, vibrant life, which might reseed much larger areas when we tackle the big issues.

Grief of loss on such a scale we’re seeing also in the Amazon rainforest and global smokedrift from the burned Australian bush, in mountains whose gracious crowns have been ripped apart for clearcut mining and the polluted haze of New Delhi. Pick a place, you don’t have far to go. Lovers of the Earth today have to be tough-minded, like scientists, understanding that raw sights and sad vistas are part of life everywhere on the planet. But along with that damage there is much still to embrace and love and work to save.

Simpson was then asked what advice he could offer to those also experiencing climate grief:

It’s really important that we find ways of communicating the grief that we’re feeling and work together to support each other. Then we can become stronger, we can start to develop the science that takes our knowledge and turns it on its head – turns it into a solution, rather than just a negative story.

I think that finding any way of fostering a love of the natural world in the next generation is critical for them to be part of the solution.

Earthweal’s despair is also its possibility. It is a place to shoulder our common grief and then turn our eyes onto the world which is still alive and present and embraceable.

In that sense, venting that despair is like singing a sad country song—heartbreaking but you feel better after listening through, less alone and strummed by something wild and deep inside. I don’t know about you, but it makes me feel eager to get back to work.

So sing your despair, ask your questions, praise the world and give some hope!

POPPIES

Mary Oliver

The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation

of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
There isn’t a place
in this world that doesn’t

sooner or later drown
in the indigoes of darkness,
but now, for a while,
the roughage

shines like a miracle
as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course nothing stops the cold,

black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.

But also I say this:  that light
is an invitation to happiness,
and that happiness,

when it’s done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
Inside the bright fields,

touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed
in the river
of earthly delight—

and what are you going to do—
what can you do
about it—
deep, blue night?

(from New And Selected Poems: Vol. 1, published 1992)

(Looking for Mr. Linky? Top of the post.)