Wallkill NWR June 14, 2018

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life on earth

Life on earth will survive any damage done to it

No matter what insults we inflict on the environment

Whether or not climate change melts the polar regions

And the ocean overflows garbage like a cesspool.

Chernobyl’s exclusion zone has become a wildlife refuge

Teeming with species that thrive in our absence

Where people cannot survive the perpetual radiation

The question is not whether we can save the planet.

The question is whether humans will inhabit the earth

When it is very well known that we are in the anthropocene

When harmful human activities are altering the biosphere

Threatening catastrophe for entire ecosystems.

The question is whether humans will rise up and force change

When capitalist profits drive production that despoils our world

In a system that makes laws to keep us in thrall to fossil fuels

In a decadent culture of conspicuous consumption.

The outcome will be socialism or barbarism for us all

The reality that stares us in the face imploring us

Understand the urgency of the times we live in

Come together right now and make the revolution.

the road ahead

One day almost all of these superhighways will be relics

Like the canal towpaths we walk now as ancient history

And the abandoned railroad lines repurposed into woodland trails

Transport will be transformed into something else again.

All those diesel tractor trailer trucks barreling along

Soon enough will get consigned to museums and scrap heaps

Though I can’t tell you just what will replace them

There’s no doubt their pollution must stop.

We live with temporary solutions that make life better

Until the unforeseen consequences make life worse

In a dialectic that pushes us to find a better way to do it

Overcoming the entrenched reactionary forces of the past.

In China they built a road covered with solar panels

To be able to recharge electric vehicles traveling on it wirelessly

Making possibilities for tomorrow beyond my wildest imagination

For sure something amazing is developing there.

The system of distribution is more than the goods we consume

More than the many varied services we provide to each other

As long as  inequality increases poverty and human suffering

We need a way to share the wealth equitably.

Science fiction these days paints a dystopian future

Set in the English-speaking capitalist world

Where the surveillance state monitors the population

Instead of socialism offering the promise of science for the people.

Kittatinny Valley June 12, 2018

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