Liz’s Weekly Poetry Series: Damn Environmentalists!

June 11, 2012 in Montana

by lizard

Environmentalists are easy targets. They conjure quick stereotypes of hippie activists divorced from reality. They also act as self-appointed sirens of crisis, trying to point out how destructive our species’ impact has been on this planet.

Environmentalism itself is a global call to action for humanity to act collectively before it’s too late. Such a brazen declaration will inevitably lead to angry responses, like this fragment from a longer comment @ Intelligent Discontent:

Pseudo intellectuals posing impossible and illogical arguments about “pristine” wilderness disgust me because not one of them recognises the reality we are faced with everyday. They would rather pound their chests and scream at the sky about the “inhumanity” of it all rather than find real life solutions.

The humans who fight to mitigate the negative impact their fellow humans are having on this planet must sometimes feel they are put in the position of defending every misguided step to protect something from destruction.

I poked around a bit in my library for some fodder for this post, and found something from Can Poetry Save the Earth? by John Felstiner (Yale University, 2009):

Yet ecological zeal can backfire. Preserving Yosemite National Park meant first evicting Ahwahnee and Miwok Indians, while Yellowstone got rid of Shoshone and Lakota. Arizona’s Black Mesa Mine, shut down for fouling the air, draining the water table and thereby sacred springs, had also provided jobs for Navajo and Hopi Indians. Cleansing the air may itself hasten global warming because pollution haze absorbs and scatters sunlight. Curtailing ranchers and loggers drives them to sell land to developers. In Canada, the 1980’s campaign against slaughtering seals, beaver, and fox for fur coats and scarves left native trappers strapped for a living. They had to turn their land and themselves over to companies building gas pipelines through a pristine valley, flooding the land for a hydroelectric plant, drilling for oil in teeming offshore waters.

Also, it should be mentioned, the book I’m referencing is constructed of mostly paper.

When you push too hard about the cataclysm of our species’ insatiable consumption of this finite earthly bounty, it’s very easy to point out the inherent hypocrisy of humans who consume criticizing our collective consumption.

It doesn’t make the unsustainable trajectory of our collective behavior any less true, but it does muddy the waters, tarnishing the “hypocrite” messengers of responsible planetary stewardship.

With information at our fingertips—with no excuse NOT to know—I find myself thumbing through my twitter scroll and NOT selecting articles like the Mother Jones piece about the decline of microbes in the Gulf of Mexico, post-BP.

I don’t want to know. I choose to ignore many things (like the World Population Clock). Because I know I’m intimately involved in the destructive processes set in motion a long, long time ago.

The disdain for those righteous tree-huggers offering themselves as convenient scapegoats is sadly predictable, but it doesn’t make what they’re warning about any less dire.

Anyway, this week’s selection is from a cute little publication from New Directions, edited by Jeffrey Yang, titled BIRDS, BEASTS, AND SEAS: Nature Poems from New Directions (New Directions, 2011).

It’s a strange little poem by Lorca, translated by W.S. Merwin. Enjoy!

*

Casida of the Dark Doves

Through the branches of the laurel
I saw two dark doves.
The one was the sun,
the other the moon.
Little neighbors, I said to them,
where is my tomb?
In my tail, said the sun.
In my throat, said the moon.
And I who was walking
with the earth at my belt
saw two eagles of marble
and a naked girl.
The one was the other
and the girl was no one.
Little eagles, I said to them,
where is my tomb?
In my tail, said the sun,
in my throat, said the moon.
Through the branches of the laurel
I saw two naked doves.
the one was the other
and both were none.

—Frederico García Lorca

***Bonus Video, Modest Mouse: