Category: Geo-poetica (page 1 of 2)

Woozy for Once

I. On an airplane

$9 gets you a tiny bottle, momentary remediation depending on your tolerance. A buzz off the up n’ up or the up-up and away — you’re choice? I somehow want to fly today. I spent yesterday flyering at a free concert at the Hatch Shell and it’s time to come down. “Have you heard about Extinction Rebellion?” “Do you have a minute to talk about climate change?” “Know about climate tipping points and positive feedback loops?” But nobody can hear one, quiet voice over classical music synced in the New England Aquarium.

II. My tipping point has past

The nature of this fact matter is that the poem will never end until positive feedback gets real. I’m not an alarmist or worse some melodramatic citizen recycling buzz words —jokes are “on you” because this is my poem with no special interest in disrupt-er-ing the privacy of your thoughts, piercing the membrane of mind, collapsing the final refuge. Still, as if we’re fossilized already, I demand that you demand that governments tell the truth of our climate trajectory. Our minds aren’t for the taking, but they are easily dismembered.

III. Everything anyone

believes in or fights for will be for nothing whether or not we are already nothing makes no difference — it’s called change for reason. How ever-layered your identity, we’ll all be in-situ-ationally sediment. The facets of ourselves won’t mean anything like a crystal. We can only “guess,” maybe that is our problem — “Do we die by guessing wrong?” — guess again, I’m neither conservative nor bright, but whatever grounds me will be grounded at the end of differentiation.

IV. We’re all so busy

driving, biking, grilling, slicing green with a club, fishing, farming, fish farming — it’s all alarming. Until governments of the world (buy the world for the world) declare a climate emergency like never before “I’m [whatever] and you’re not” is another distraction to collective action. Shaming, blaming, and defaming must be avoided at all costs, nobody has the money or time to fight time and time again. We’re all caught by a left and right hook, fish on an alluring line — painfully awkwardly — both sides refusing to hang out.

V. Warding off onward

You probably care about free, individually-wrapped Dum-Dums more than you let on. For the past thirty years, we’ve been told to take individual action to address climate change like a slowly forming climate gang, one for all being cooked into smiling rubber, both debunked and having already made our beds. We think like princes as the peas in an alien brain-pod. I took action, you took another, but individual freedom is only indivisible before it collides. Fulfilled with ideas from all of our travels — “Our stock clonked… should we rank the roots?” — I believe; that’s nobody’s business. Any-who, all plants come from where they are.

VI. The plane is landing

Now, I’m taking off again, remembering thinking about trees splitting — not by a logger, but by their side.

Interview with Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is an environmental activist and author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? Thirty years ago, he wrote The End of Nature, one of the earliest warnings of climate change for a mainstream audience. Like most writers, Bill is an introvert, and he was slightly uncomfortable on stage at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge on April 17th. He was clearly tired, and who can blame him? It was nearing the end of his book tour and he comes with grave news: “the end of nature” was too cheerful of a title.

Scientists were conservative in their predictions of climate change thirty years ago: now, there is half as much sea ice in the arctic during the summer months, the ocean is 30% more acidic, and the great barrier reef is half dead. By the middle to end of the century, land that people have been farming for thousands of years will be barren, billions of people won’t be able to survive outside in the heat for more than a few hours, farms anywhere near the shore will be salt fields, and entire communities will be submerged. We have taken the physical stability of the planet for granted.

As one of the founders of 350.org, Bill knows that planet-wide collective action must be both educational and confrontational, but the fossil fuel industry has invested billions of dollars in lying to control the climate of opinion and keep the infrastructure of the world as it is.

Thirty years ago, when Bill first warned us about what was happening, we might have made a lot of small changes to alter, rather than falter, our trajectory. Now, only a radical environmental movement can save us from extinction.


Nicholas Trefonides: I read in Falter that you took a trip to the Greenland ice shelf last summer, and you were with veteran ice scientists and two poets, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and Aka Niviana. You say, “Science and economics have no real way to value the fact that people have lived a millennia in a certain rhythm, have eaten the food and sung the songs of certain places that are now disappearing. This is a cost only art can measure, and it makes sense that the units of measurement are sadness and fury—and also, remarkably, hope.” Can you talk more about working with artists and the role that art could play in the environmental movement?

Bill McKibben: I think it’s crucial. 350.org has long had an artist in residence, David Solnit, and his passion is turning large numbers of people into part-time artists. Environmentalists have been pretty good at appealing at the part of the brain that likes bar graphs; not so much the other hemisphere.

NT: You said renewable energy sources like solar and wind would disperse global power and balance much of the wealth inequality. Could a renewable future also be post-industrial, and do you think a network of small, community-based governments would be more sustainable in the long run? How do you see renewable energy as a source of environmental and social healing?

BM: I think it puts us on a trajectory toward a more localized and more democratic energy system, and this will correct some of the power and wealth imbalances on the planet, but trajectory is mostly what I worry about—my best thoughts on an optimum outcome are in the last part of Deep Economy, but I don’t spend much time on it.

NT: In Falter, you mention a study that found a French person sees more photos of a lion in a year than there are actual lions left in West Africa. The internet enables organizations like 350.org to reach more people around the world, but it often disconnects us from what is near and dear. How did our emotional relationship with nature go awry?

BM: Screens were certainly a big part of it, beginning with tv (I wrote a book on this once too, The Age of Missing Information). But now it’s accelerated insanely with the internet.

NT: For a while, fossil fuel corporations broadly claimed that their business was in energy. But it was, and still is, just about carbon. In Falter, you mention an interaction with a fossil fuel lobbyist at the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. In terms of the human game, do we need to distinguish between scientists, policy makers, and lobbyists when we’re all just people, climate deniers or not?

BM: I think the forces are larger than people—empowered corporations are the problem, because without effective regulation they have no real off switch. And we’re seeing the results of that.

NT: You’ve said that if Ayn Rand had focused on writing essays and manifestos, then she would have been dismissed as a crank and forgotten. But instead, she wrote stories. Can you talk more about the danger of melodrama and also Rand’s long-term influence in Washington?

BM: She’s immensely powerful because her ideology appeals to the powerful and the rich—it glorifies them at the expense of everyone else, and turns their greed into an ideology, albeit a dumb one.

NT: Could storytelling be used to reverse or counteract some of the damage, and would these stories be hopeful or apocalyptic?

BM: There’s an increasing amount of good storytelling going on, fiction and fact. Check out everyone from Kim Stanley Robinson to Naomi Klein, Margaret Atwood to Rebecca Solnit. It’s crucial. A new metaphor is as useful as a new engine design.

NT: You said that artificial intelligence is where climate change was thirty years ago, back when you wrote The End of Nature. With computers having brainpower surpassing that of humans, we could also be witnessing the end of human nature. What limits should we create as AI technology and genetic engineering develops? Is it possible for the ethics community to keep pace?

BM: It’s very hard, especially with the huge amounts of money on the line. The germline should be the red line for genetic engineering; for AI it’s harder to say with specificity, though a kill switch on everything seems like an awfully good start.

NT: Computers are already producing art, fooling concert hall audiences and selling at auction houses, because they can analyze what we like and reproduce it. I like to think of art as the process of making, that is, making something new, something that people didn’t know they found beautiful until the artist created it. Poetry is sometimes described as the embodiment of a human feeling that, until the point that the poem was written, hadn’t been put into words. This question might come down to whether or not you believe the future can be entirely determined by analysis of the past, but how are computers creating art if they aren’t conscious and can’t act intuitively?

BM: They aren’t creating art. They’re just mimicking things others have done—art is the reflection on the condition of being human.

NT: Why does the environmental movement require the breaking of binaries like progressive and conservative?

BM: Because it’s going to take a huge majority of us to finally gets done what needs doing!


Technological innovations in renewable energy systems such as the solar panel seem to give Bill hope. It’s magical to him that we can face a piece of glass to the sun, and then out the back flows the now mundane modernity that was introduced by industrialization. The fossil fuel industry and “conservative” politicians (who Bill points out have surprisingly little interest in conservation) are obviously scared of a postmodern era in which “power” is freely available. Trump recently signed two executive orders, one that keeps people from slowing down the construction of pipelines and another that stifles the fossil fuel divestment movement. The environmental movement will not move fast enough unless it operates through a network of communities that can proliferate sustainability as a form of liberation.

At the talk in April, Bill said he has hope that the climate crisis will occupy more of the political conversation. But then in July, during one of the recent democratic primary debates, the moderator asked only one question about the climate crisis, and most of the candidates didn’t have detailed plans. They are clearly in denial that business as usual will lead to starvation, disease, and even war. A sustainable initiative must bring renewable energy infrastructure to small communities, but localization of energy is converted to political power that depends on previously imagined lines around continents, countries, states, cities, and countless jargon.

Bill more than admits that the profitable growth imperative of capitalism is accelerating global warming into what is now accepted as an “Anthropocene” or a climate “crisis, ” but he also acknowledges what he calls the “failed soviet experiment” of state-led communism. For the past several decades, we’ve been acting hyper individually, believing that markets would solve everything.

When the climate “debate” (perhaps the debate is the crisis) began, the first thing we were told was to take individual action, but that didn’t work, and now, we must either engage in sociopolitical reassembly or prepare for social collapse amid extinction and political upheaval(s). We need collective action from small communities working towards a common faith, what Bill might call “human solidarity.”

Beguile

Plight of land in hindsight
stripping to a house on the end

Dynamic power imparts partition,
partial status, quo unquo,
“Excuse me” and stuffy like that

Nonetheless no face is out of place
I woke up wiping the twitch
from my eye to no avail

Vapid rapids go
over the rabid top
down the rabbit hole

React, shun the act
but just in time, go back
by chainsawing down
the oldest tree diagonally

Glance at the warped cross section
with wider rings, stroke against
the coarser grain like pixelated years
for those living back then

Mountaintop Bunker

Suppose what you dispose
will be nurtured by nature
Maybe wiped clean
by a proper god

come again?

Use clay, land and water, for making
flutes and pots for growing
pot on top

Flags don’t have the wind
any which way as it toys
with the symbol and chimes
flailing what you grip

Take a trippy trip, crowd
the lonely woodland cabin
Distress is vintage
these days are mint

The world perks, turns and listens
through a ruptured drum

To Well,

We’ll need more staples
to build a bridge with this page
in stacks and glue, columns
beneath a long folio

Plastic hands, oh welling
in the garbage bin of ink
Hands standing without a body
like sunrise pancakes

Some pressure jam
Screeching bolt
zigzag echoes folio
Cloudy echelon
Sketch along

Braised brace
Gum wad of equilibrium
End of the whirl

Knot dying to undo
the masthead
Floppy sail, but not sad
Remembers the wind
in all it knows
too well

Love,
Nick

P.S. psst

Feels

Maybe next time
around the pole
the bowling earth
will turn to face
the impact

I’m a pin
you’re a pin
Who’s a needle
whose a thread?
We’re all pins
biting the inevitable
felt tomato

While I’m leaning against a mirror

in my field of view
another mirror flourishes

the mirror I’m falling into turns out
it was all my fault

I depend on instability
reflecting movement

allegorical sunbeam
flossing mountain range

and boulders pop out
to land again

rain swooning moon
muddying the tunnels

worms learn to breathe
timeless invisible climate

crater cradling in light
of the meteor flashing back

trees don’t mind
writing with leaves

I don’t pretend to do work
just had work done

pillow of interlocking hands
spine of a flatlined book

Patch Work

Rot is crawling in a log like a bug riot by the fire pit. I sit and read whatever I choose as news, but it doesn’t sit well. When I was allotted land, the first thing I did was cut a path and crop a field. The wood stove burns what doesn’t build my home. Inside, buds on stem are arraigned by a vase for their sheared beauty, and in the fireplace, shine cackles. Smoke clouds up and out where the sun beams on the prettiest trees to show my privacy. Nearby, a water wheel winds-up the river, and now, the tributaries can only find mud. Streams are pressured into steam. Every trap is set free. Animals come to drink, but the wires they trip trigger revelations, so I shoot only scavengers come to kill some catch in a cage. The prey of my prey can limp away. Let that be the will of the wild. I’m breaking news with rock. There’s open-source farmland in the unpaved city. Without a plot, I plant my shovel, do what I can like the sun. Caves dwell on the potential, but I staple flyers on trunks, hike or bike through glades as if I’m never far from where I go, and sacrifice the flares. From afar and above, Google Earth can hardly understand what’s going on, so I ask that it save me from direction.

Serious about play

With moon’s gravity, earth can unknot fault lines, break the quake from the inside out. When fault splits magma bellows like the cherry on top is a wave. The ground’s hot bleeding cools and solidifies in the meantime before it overturns, a layer cake of sediment crepes and creams alternatively, most agree that the difference between is the sweetest. There are fondant stars and cyclop sprinkles slow-blink twinkling. Love is more than a four letter-littered word, more than a noun or a verb, but is it more than human? Might as well assume a zoom (meteor (metaphor*) burning up in earth’s atmosphere) and shoot bullets through stained glass at stars like candles in cathedral sky blown out by a wish that magma tastes like fudge, but it’s glue.


*A shooting star is a common name for the visible part of small dust or rocks from space, as it travels through the Earth’s atmosphere while burning up, which gives it the commonly known name of “a shooting star.” If large enough, the meteoroid will fall to sea or land and be considered a meteorite.

Enacting Forces

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