Reading Deep Green Resistance followed by Eco-Mind over the course of a few days is a great way to get vertigo. They’re both written by well-respected, well-known environmentalists and authors. They rely on many of the same facts: 90% of fish gone, global warming inevitable, hundreds of millions of human deaths to follow, screwy notions …
Category Archives: Prose & Poetry
Near IS the New Far (or: I Told You So)
I became very afraid last weekend about the potential apocalypse. There I was, going about my regular business, when I saw this giant yellow flaming ball in the sky. Then I remembered that it was something called the sun, and usually heralded a good day to spend outside. I obliged. Mostly this consisted of yard …
Plus ca change
It took me forever to get out to the woods today. I missed Frances, and I missed the boyfriend. And, I came to realize, I missed my old pond, near my old house in North York. I wanted deeply to just put on my shoes and head out the door for a long walk in …
floruit
Because Dennis Lee deserves a wider readership, and because I am finishing up a post about decision-making and scientific literacy. floruit Was a one, was a once, was a nothing: mattered and gone. And how cleanly our floruit will fade into moteflicker, starcycle, eddies of gloryfit ex. Where nothing will sing of us; build on …
You Must Believe in Spring
This poem by Jan Zwicky appears in her 1998 book Songs for Relinquishing the Earth–and I am running out of opportunities to post it this year, so here it is, with photos and everything. You Must Believe in Spring Because it is the garden. What is left to us. Because silence is not silence without …
All About Me. Plus Grace Paley. And Wind. And Theory.
I’m almost three weeks in to the new job, and it’s finally feeling real and settled enough to tell you a bit about it. I now coordinate environmental studies and approvals for wind energy projects. And oh, the hate mail that will eventually bring down on my head. But at the moment I am very …
Trout Lilies
(Mary Oliver) It happened that I couldn’t find in all my books more than a picture and a few words concerning the trout lily, so I shut my eyes. And let the darkness come in and roll me back. The old creek began to sing in my ears as it rolled along, like the hair …
Kneeling at Easter to the Season’s First Bloodroot
It’s Easter … and I saw the season’s first bloodroot … and I did kneel, as a matter of fact. And why not? Why shouldn’t I? I found myself thinking, even–without remembering the poem I posted last year, linked above–that if there is a god, it is a wild thing that lives in the woods. …
tale
Once again I am copping out with a poem, this time Dennis Lee’s “tale” from yesno: Tell me, tall- tell me a tale. The one about starless & steerless & pinch-me, the one about unnable now — which they did-did- did in the plume of our pride, and could not find the way home. Little …
Black-Eyed Susan
Black-Eyed Susan (John Gay) ALL in the Downs the fleet was moor’d, The streamers waving in the wind, When black-eyed Susan came aboard; ‘O! where shall I my true-love find? Tell me, ye jovial sailors, tell me true If my sweet William sails among the crew.’ William, who high upon the yard Rock’d with …
