February 28, 2004

External and Internal Wounds

The fifty species disappearing worldwide daily, may look external to me

But within, they leave a hole in the warp and woof of my life=s fabric

Dimming fatally its radiance, riotous colors, vibrant song, wild creativity

Outside me, a war is waged to rape and possess an oil-rich country

Inside, my heart bleeds. How would Earth have recycled its fossils

Had humans not prematurely drained its veins over a short 100 years?

As glaciers melt at a vertiginous rate to half their size in just a century

Ice settles in my soul. How many rivers and lakes will run dry, vanish?

How many innocents killed by spreading plagues of tropical diseases?

Scarcity of surface water forces a quarter of us to drink ground water

My mind is aghast. In 20 years, when the Earth is two degrees warmer

How will we and the additional 2.6 billion of us quench our thirst?

The drift of genes from genetically engineered organisms envelops all

I rage. Nature=s two billion years of work weaving life, is now marred

As scientists label us machines fortuitously planted on ball of resources

An imperial president promises his country the moon, Mars and beyond

I gasp. To this Orwellian Machiavellian, Adefense@ means Aoffense@

Space a commodity from which nuclear-based lasers can kill Aevil doers@

They cut down forests mercilessly, raise ugly oil rigs off every shore

ABut trees speak the language of the vertical, water, of the horizontal!

That redwood was 3,200 years old! Oceans are four billion years old!@

Men with a low sperm count, girls entering puberty increasingly young

My whole being revolts: AThose thousands of undegradable chemicals

You throw away daily are even now disrupting our own reproduction!@

Civilization? No, barbarism. The ultimate hubris of a cancer cell

Un-bonded to the good of all, rejecting modulation by its mates

Refusing its place in the web of life B and fated to die with its host

Nay, we ourselves are our primary weapons of mass destruction

As we foreclose our children=s chances to taste the elixir of life

My mind=s eye sees them as they gaze at the junkyard we bequeath

External and internal wounds merging into the silence of a dead Gaia.

References and Notes

The fifty species which disappear worldwide daily:

Buhner, Stephen, The Lost Language of Plants B The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines to Life on Earth (Chelsea Green, White River Junction, VT), 2002, pp. 212 and 214.

Buhner quotes estimates of one plant species lost every day worldwide. He quotes the 1997 Red List of Threatened Plants compiled by the Species Survival Commission of the Geneva-based International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The list includes 33,798 plants of the hitherto known global flora of 275,000 species (12 percent).

Myers, N, ABiodiversity and the Precautionary Principle,@ Ambio, Vol 22 (2-3), 1993, pp. 74-79; and Wilson, E. O, The Diversity of Life (Penguin books), 1994, p. 268. Both cited in Anderson, Luke, Genetic Engineering, Food, and Our Environment (Chelsea Green, White River Junction, VT), 1999/2000, p. 52.

These estimates are 30,000 species worldwide becoming extinct every year B some 82 per day.

How would Earth have recycled its fossils:

Lovelock, James, Healing Gaia B Practical Medicine for the Planet (Harmony Books, New York, N.Y.), 1991; cited in Buhner, Stephen, The Lost Language of Plants B The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines to Life on Earth (Chelsea Green, White River Junction, VT), 2002, p. 172.

Life is so closely coupled with the physical/chemical environment of which it is a part, that the two cannot legitimately be viewed in isolation from one another. Together, they constitute a single evolutionary process, which is self-regulating.

As glaciers melt at a vertiginous rate to half their size:

Barlow, Maude, and Tony Clarke, Blue Gold B The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World=s Water (The New Press, New York, N.Y.), 2002, p. 42

Gelbspan, Ross, The Heat is On B The Climate Crisis, The Cover-up, The Prescription (Perseus), 1998, pp. 139-140.

Scarcity of surface water forces a quarter of us to drink ground water:

Barlow, Maude, and Tony Clarke, Blue Gold B The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World=s Water (The New Press, New York, N.Y.), 2002, pp. 6-7, 12 and 40-41.

Gelbspan, Ross, The Heat is On B The Climate Crisis, The Cover-up, The Prescription (Perseus), 1998, p. 141.

The drift of genes from genetically engineered organisms:

Buhner, Stephen, The Lost Language of Plants B The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines to Life on Earth (Chelsea Green, White River Junction, VT), 2002, p. 172.

Plants began to appear on Earth some 700,000,000 years ago.

Kneen, Brewster, Farmageddon B Food and the Culture of Biotechnology (New Society, Gabriola Island, B.C., Canada), 1999, pp. 2 and 171.

An imperial president promises his country the moon:

Grossman, Karl

The Wrong Stuff -- The Space Program=s Nuclear Threat to our Planet (Common Courage), 1997.

Weapons in Space (Seven Stories, N.Y.), 2001.

They cut down forests mercilessly:

Buhner, Stephen, The Lost Language of Plants B The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines to Life on Earth (Chelsea Green, White River Junction, VT), 2002, pp. 172- 173.

The oldest redwood tree was 3,200 years old when it was cut.

Gaia is 4,000,000,000 years of age. Its 3,500,000,000 year-old feedback loops are so closely intertwined that there is always another cause underneath whatever cause one might begin with. Impacts at any one point affect every other point in the system.

Men with a low sperm count:

Buhner, Stephen, The Lost Language of Plants B The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines to Life on Earth (Chelsea Green, White River Junction, VT), 2002, pp. 94-96.

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