a forest fire haze turns the morning sun orange, down in the Village square dazed coffee drinkers nurse their hangovers too many stayed too late at the Dublin Gate here and there perky couples with dogs take photos for their blogs, jpegs spiral upwards into the cloud which is not a cloud it’s a bank of a billion hard drives humming hard in flat roofed, air-conditioned buildings somewhere I will always think of as Texas
no snow on the mountains the glaciers have retreated as if they’re afraid of something leaving behind bare granite
over on the islands there is talk of low water tables and no water for the table
we fiddle while forests burn
Nero….. Nero has nothing on us.
This is a response to Lindi’s excellent challenge over at earthweal
Early December, downtown Vancouver and it’s raining more than the usual cats and dogs, it feels like the city is trapped in a giant car wash.
All year long the weather has been acting like a child that hasn’t been taught limits.
Three months of summer drought.
We woke up one morning and white ash from forest fires covered the deck, and that evening down on the beach we were treated to a red ball sunset worthy of Beijing or Mumbai. The Indian guy in the coffee shop told me it made him feel homesick.
Something’s happening to the frogs.
The Oregon spotted frog is Canada’s most threatened amphibian, I saw that on TV program called “Canada’s Most Threatened Amphibians”. Also threatened is the northern leopard frog.
Sea stars have sea star wasting syndrome
We’re losing song birds, bats and bees
The world is an orchestra and the string section is leaving one by one.
Anthropocene Anthropocene Sixth Extinction, soon there will only be us.
****** At the corner of Georgia and Granville a pigeon waddles through a puddle created by a blocked storm drain
and I’m thinking: Who’d be a pigeon on a day like this? Who’d be a pigeon at a time like this?
Flashback to 2021 Cop Out at Cop26 Coal will be phased down but not phased out Down But Not Out
Semantic Antics
This late amendment was tabled by the USA, China and India but India took most of the flak.
India’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions are far lower than USA or China.
Canada’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions are higher than USA or China
But this is not a competition anyone wants to win.
Juxtaposition This is not a poem.
November 12 Toxic air enveloped Delhi making it the second most polluted city in the world. According to 2020 average data Hotan, China is the worst Delhi is the 10th so Delhi was having a bad day 50 percent of the pollution comes from vehicles. If you go down the list you have to get past the 200th most polluted city to get out of India and China.
Juxtaposition This is not a poem
The prosperity of the west was built on fossil fuels.
Carbon dioxide emissions are a subset of pollution
Pollution covers a multitude.
Imagine the human experiment as a black box emitting carbon dioxide. Reducing those emissions requires a collective approach. Is the human experiment capable of a collective approach. So far not so much.
Juxtaposition This is not a poem
four years after the Great Smog of London the Clean Air Act of 1956 prohibited the burning of coal in homes change can happen
juxtaposition we are beside ourselves
we have been burning fossil fuel to stay warm since the cave old habits die hard
we need speed bumps not fist bumps we need idealism and pragmatism we need strategy
For your challenge: Express your thoughts and feelings about how humankind has brought Mother Earth to this critical point in time, and what you think and feel about where we go from here
The moon is waning gibbous the pollen count is low and yet another atmospheric river is on the way, all that warm moist air all that water vapour looking for a place to condense; based on anecdotal evidence this is either normal for the time of year or a signal that we should start building an ark but one thing is starkly clear the data with which the calculated risks are calculated is no longer valid is in need of an update the paradigm has not shifted but the perimeter has been breached like a dike in need of repair.
Taking part in Open Link at earthweal….it’s raining again in British Columbia.
the bark of broken mufflers pickup trucks idle at the Starbuck’s drive through air con running a gang of bikers middle-aged and leather clad roar up the coastal highway
it’s been a long hot summer fun fun fun in the pandemic pause (is this the real life is this just fantasy?) and yes, it’s hot but it’s a guilty heat and there’s the nagging feeling that the future has arrived too early
that science fiction has become fact
smoke from forest fires silts the lungs of the town Daddy never did take the T Bird away.
(songs quoted and misquoted in the poem: “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen and “Fun! Fun! Fun! by the Beach Boys)
Ingrid Wilson of Experiments in Fiction has put together a collection of poems called The Athropocene Hymnal (63 poems in all, from 34 poets). Publication date is July 24th. Many of the poets, including myself are regular contributors to the blog earthweal. I have 2 poems in the collection (thanks, Ingrid, for including me!). All profits from the sale of the book will go to the World Wild Life Fund. So be sure to check out Ingrid’s blog on July 24th!
Brendan over at earthweal has published an interview with Ingrid and also more details about the publication, so check out Brendan’s post here.
The collage on the cover was contributed by the very talented Kerfe Roig.
In his earthweal prompt this week, Brendan says :
For this week’s challenge, let’s take up her (Ingrid’s) call and write a poem of the Anthropocene which does not compromise.
This is a poem I wrote a while back (it appeared before on earthweal) and previously published on this blog, but think it fits the challenge.
Fracking Song
You’re standing on the corner Watching the trucks go rolling past Pumping out their diesel fumes Pumping out that carbon gas
It’s the middle of winter And it’s twenty below And that gas just sits there With nowhere to go.
Something’s wrong in the valley Babies stillborn Ten in one year And they call that the norm
Something’s wrong in the valley Something toxic in the ground Something wrong in the valley Since the frackers came to town.
That rock’s been down forever With its hydrocarbon payload When they blow it all apart They can’t control where it goes
And that water that’s left standing Evaporating in the sun The residue will be with us Long after they are gone
Something’s wrong in the valley Babies stillborn Ten in one year And they call that the norm
Something’s wrong in the valley Something toxic in the ground Something wrong in the valley Since the frackers came to town.
You can blame the politicians The special interests groups Blame the fracking company They all don’t give a fuck
There’s only one thing they understand One thing that they know Keep riding that fossil fool train As far as it will go.
There’s something wrong in the valley Babies stillborn Placentas like ribbons And they call that the norm
Something’s wrong in the valley Something toxic in the ground Something wrong in the valley Since the frackers came to town
In the café below
the locals talk about the old times
about Eve and the apple
about Paradise lost
about how all the bottles
washed up on the shore
carry the same message.
pelicans plummet into the bluebottle sea sting rays undulate
out on the coral reef
tiny organisms
fret about climate change
and that damn carbonic acid
I fink the pH is dropping, I really do
meanwhile, over in San Pedro
on the Redneck Riviera
hermetically sealed resorts
march north towards Mexico
and thin, blond soccer moms
mingle with sun-damaged matrons
dedicated to the preservation
of floral print muumuus.
in the café below, Bob Marley’s still jammin’.
This poem has had a few lives. Participating in open link over at earthweal. Head over and check out Brendan’s thought provoking and eloquent post .
What’s that?…….no, no, it’s all rubbish,
climate change is a Deep State hoax.
By the way, forgot to mention
I have some ocean front for sale in Florida,
are you interested?
I hear you’re a good swimmer.
Ha, that’s just a joke,
God controls the climate
the rivers, lakes and seas.
Look what he did for Moses.
Our local preacher has a direct line,
just send a donation
before he gets arrested.
Joking again! Those rumours
are just not true.
Besides, our supreme leader, Donald, says
we are going to have a great climate
the best climate ever.
Do you know any Dutch people?
They’re good at handling all this water stuff.
Another thing, does anyone else
really miss the dinosaurs?
I had this rubber brontosaurus
when I was kid, I kind of liked it,
a velociraptor too…where was I?
Yes, this oceanfront property in Florida
it comes with a row boat.
The word of the week over at earthweal is water. Got the idea for this poem while reading Sarahsouthwest’s poem “Water Again”.
Also participating in open link night over at dverse.
“Danish Oil and Natural Gas…….has transformed itself into the world’s largest offshore wind farm company spurred on my Denmark’s aggressive efforts to decarbonize its economy.”
“BMW prepares to mass produce electric cars by 2020”
“China plans to spend $360 billion on renewable energy capacity by 2020”
“in May, India cancelled 14 gigawatts of proposed coal-fired plants, while seeing a steep dropoff in coal imports…”
Quotes from Corporate Knights Magazine , Fall 2017
Slim and I are logging some early evening deck time chowing down on barbecued steaks from ‘What The Cat Dragged In’, our local artisan butcher shop, and partaking of a balls forward red, having already polished off a growler of craft IPA – slightly over-hopped with a hint of camel’s breath.
It’s hot. Rivulets of sweat trickle down Slim’s face forming a damp half-moon at the neck of his white tee shirt which carries the message “IT’S NOT IMPORTANT”. I’m telling him about how I spread moth balls all around the base of the shed at the end of the garden in a vain attempt to deter the two skunks who have set up home underneath it.
(rivulets,
Romulus,
amulets)
“Napthalene” Slim announces “is the chemical name for moth balls. By the way, I was out on an eHarmony date last night and I mentioned to the lady I was having dinner with that I used to work in the chemical industry….”
Slim on eHarmony, this is news to me. I wonder what his profile is like, what hobbies has he listed? I know he doesn’t kayak or go for long walks on the beach at sunset, his main interests outside of poetry are Premier League soccer and playing bass in a Clash tribute band (not coming to a venue anywhere near anybody, soon). Plus, he hasn’t dated anyone in years and his wardrobe consists of faded jeans and white tee shirts that are too small for him and usually carry some nihilist, dystopian message.
“What did you list as your hobbies on your eHarmony profile?” I interrupt, to his annoyance.
“Cooking, now let me get on with my story. As I said I mentioned to the lady I was having dinner with that I used to work in the chemical industry and she grimaced and said: ‘Ooh, chemicals, bad!’ So I told her that at least 50% of what she was wearing was synthetic material made from petroleum by products; that behind the walls of the restaurant that we were sitting in were miles of electrical wire covered in plastic insulating material made from petroleum byproducts; that the phone she keeps checking contains plastics, not to mention lithium, probably mined using child labour in Africa; that the toilet seats that we plonk our over-privileged arses on are made from plastic; that all these materials are products of the chemical industry and are manufactured in some shit hole of a town far from our blissed out home; that we are not going back to an agrarian society, we are too soft and distracted, the work is too hard and we would be bored out of our fucking skulls; that we have to regulate industry, not get rid of it and how we can we possibly move forward if we don’t understand where we stand, or sit”.
“What was her response?” I asked.
“She said that she was going to the washroom to plonk her over privileged arse on a plastic toilet seat, and she never came back.”
In a recent interview in the New York Times Book Review, Jeffrey Toobin (author of ‘American Heiress’), when asked the question “How do you organize your books,” replied that ‘he was romantic about reading not about carbon byproducts’. He apparently does most of his reading for pleasure on an iPad.
This statement bothered me for a couple of reasons. A byproduct is “an incidental or secondary product made in the manufacture or synthesis of something else”, a book is not a byproduct of anything, it is produced using paper which contains carbon, but it is a product in itself unlike carbon which is an element and not a product.
But more than the semantics, there was something else. There was a sanctimonious whiff to the statement, a hint of greener than thou, a suggestion of the moral high ground, an implication that Jeffrey is a greater friend of the environment than all you Luddite book lovers out there (myself included). So, I set out to try and determine whether reading a book on an Ipad is greener than reading an actual book.
Strike one against the IPad is that it consumes energy every time a page is read, whereas a book once it is produced consumes no further energy (for the purpose of this discussion let’s assume that the energy or power required is generated by the combustion of fossil fuel and therefore energy consumption or the need for energy results in the generation of carbon dioxide). How much energy does it consume? To find out I used my iPad to google the question, which proves that I am not adverse to using technology (I just like books). It turns out, it can all be explained using light bulbs. It takes 1 kWh to power an iPhone for a year, that’s the equivalent of powering a 100 watt incandescent light bulb for 10 hours. The iPad consumes about 11 times that or the equivalent of the energy consumed by a 100 watt incandescent light bulb in 110 hours. Of course, not all that iPad time is spent reading a book, so in the end, relatively speaking, it is not a lot of energy; but for the purpose of establishing greenness , a small amount is still too much. In the end, using an iPad to read indirectly results in a finite amount of carbon dioxide being released to the atmosphere; whereas the act of reading a book results in zero carbon dioxide emissions.
When it comes to recyclability, the moral high ground gets more slippery. Martin LaMonica of CNET’s Green Tech says only about 10% of US electronics get recycled and, according to Greenpeace not always properly, whereas paper is more likely to be recycled. Plus you can loan that book to a friend or donate it to your public library.
There are additional energy implications, all that data has to be stored. According to Greenpeace, data storage centers are the single largest driver of new electricity demand worldwide.
This is all, of course, just to make the point that it’s called the “moral high ground” because it is difficult to attain and to say to all you book lovers out there keep on reading those paper books with a clear conscience.
By the way, by all accounts Jeffrey Toobin is one hell of a writer.
Stopdraggingthepanda 