Your beautiful lament is heartbreaking but necessary, Deborah. Thank you for noting that Mother Earth will indeed survive, as she has for eons. But man’s destructive reign will not. Earth has seen civilizations come and go in the past. But isn’t it a pity that too many of us failed to learn the lessons of the needlessly destroyed Buffalo.
Thanks also for including Jane Hirschfield’s poignant poem. She nailed it too. We need testaments like this—yours and Jane’s— as Rome needed Pliny and Cicero. We your poems for ourselves and also for archeologists of some future age who will ask inevitably: How in the world did they allow such a thing to happen. I’m sure they will find the answer soon enough in a single word. Greed.
Thank you, Andrew. I wasn't sure whether to post these, but I'm glad now I did, as sad and sobering the whole subject is. I think you are right about what those archeologists and historians will discover as the cause of our decline.
Deborah, I want to say something, but my heart is pounding too fast and it hurts. I was at Berkeley in 1970 and we discussed how the seas would rise and how to get people to move from the coasts; we talked about protecting Yosemite by not permitting cars in the valley; we knew we had a limited oil supply and had to switch to solar and wind; so many things we thought we could change for the good of the earth 54 years ago.
It does hurt. I wonder sometimes if things may have turned out better if Al Gore had won the presidency, instead of the Supreme Court giving it to Bush. Thanks for sharing your thoughts here, Barbara. I always love hearing from you.
Your beautiful lament is heartbreaking but necessary, Deborah. Thank you for noting that Mother Earth will indeed survive, as she has for eons. But man’s destructive reign will not. Earth has seen civilizations come and go in the past. But isn’t it a pity that too many of us failed to learn the lessons of the needlessly destroyed Buffalo.
Thanks also for including Jane Hirschfield’s poignant poem. She nailed it too. We need testaments like this—yours and Jane’s— as Rome needed Pliny and Cicero. We your poems for ourselves and also for archeologists of some future age who will ask inevitably: How in the world did they allow such a thing to happen. I’m sure they will find the answer soon enough in a single word. Greed.
Thank you, Andrew. I wasn't sure whether to post these, but I'm glad now I did, as sad and sobering the whole subject is. I think you are right about what those archeologists and historians will discover as the cause of our decline.
Deborah, I want to say something, but my heart is pounding too fast and it hurts. I was at Berkeley in 1970 and we discussed how the seas would rise and how to get people to move from the coasts; we talked about protecting Yosemite by not permitting cars in the valley; we knew we had a limited oil supply and had to switch to solar and wind; so many things we thought we could change for the good of the earth 54 years ago.
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It does hurt. I wonder sometimes if things may have turned out better if Al Gore had won the presidency, instead of the Supreme Court giving it to Bush. Thanks for sharing your thoughts here, Barbara. I always love hearing from you.