Environmental Realism A La Ska

Pombo

Pombo woke up last morning
in temperate Alaskan wilderness.
Crude oil was bubbling through
the oaken hardwood floorboards.
He knew the water heater rusted
but never thought unpleasantries
would happen to him there. Outside,
another hurricane was sliding by,
the third one of that work-week.

The government had lately banned
all demonstrations of the alphabet
from public schools and picture books
preventing citizens the means to count
how many storms had struck that year.
But Pombo carved great slashes on the wall.
His cabin was a philosophic hybrid now,
a mix of timberland and emptiness.
Outside, the Ketchikan Bridge to nowhere

hummed with sounds of sky and earth
beyond directions of their human era.
Rivers of glaciers come and go.
He couldn’t hear his neighbor burning
fossils in the barbeque next door
but knew from past life regressions
how sizzling they would be. He coughed,
and like the butterfly in Africa that flapped
its wings, the CO2 exhaled was just
the final straw. Then Pombo starts to dust.

~Son Rivers 2005

Today’s Bunch of Footnotes:

Pombo; Sierra Club: RAW Survey: 2005's Top Environmental Event; “It's been a busy year for House Resources Chairman Richard Pombo (R-CA). He wants to rewrite the 30-year-old Endangered Species Act to eliminate critical habitat designations. He's leading the charge to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to destructive oil drilling and wants to end a 25-year-old moratorium on oil and gas drilling off our coasts. He's worked hard to overturn a ban on ozone-destroying pesticides and recently drafted a bill in which he proposed selling 15 national parks to generate revenue.” (link via Gristmill)


demonstrations; Sister Earth: Mark 13–16: The End; “So I not only recommend reading one of the Gospels all the way through, I also recommend a dose of magic realism as an aperitif. Clear the mental palate of Western European rationalism and scientific causality and the Gospels seem to speak much more clearly.”


come; Stoat: The Economist on Climate Change (sigh); “The Economist has a good reputation in general, and is widely read by business-politician type folks, so we have to care what they say and how they say it. (snip) THE climate changes. It always has done and it always will.”