29/30, Environmental Voices Poem

Note: Can’t find the comment box? Friends, WordPress has had an “update” which disabled my fancy comment platform (allowing font features and images, allowing me to control where the comment box rests). Now we endure the default commenting app. Alas, you must now scroll, scroll to the bottom to craft your poem or hit CTRL+END. This concludes my note but not my embarrassment. — SJD

Our Host

Susie Morice spent 30 years in classrooms in the St. Louis, Missouri area. After retiring, she worked with professional development in writing, taught education classes at local universities. She continues a bit of writing/editing for the Santa Fe Center for Transformational School Leadership. Susie has been writing with the ethicalela.com teacher poets since April 2019. Through the grim pandemic days, she writes poetry when she’s not writing/playing/singing her Americana compositions.  

Inspiration: Environmental Voices

As spring unfolds, we are called to pay attention to the natural world around us, Earth Day and Spring at hand. Flowers and trees step into gear and display their metamorphoses. The cardinals, robins, mockingbirds, chickadees…all our feathered friends are in a frenzy to nest and nurture those fragile, near weightless fledglings into flight. It’s a glorious time.  It is also a time to honor the protectors of our natural world.  The heroes of ecology, natural environment, our sacred lands have marked a course for our tending the beauty and the health of our planet.  Some planted trees, some archived photographic images of the landscapes at stake, and some fought hard battles to preserve a sustainable way of living that protects the future for those yet to come.

Quotes from 8 Environmental Voices:

• “The generation that destroys the environment is not the generation that pays the price. That is the problem.” ― Wangari Maathai
• “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” – John Muir
• “I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.” Greta Thunberg
• “Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.” – Aldo Leopold
• “Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.” – Vandana Shiva
• “At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rain forest. Now I realize I am fighting for humanity.” – Chico Mendes
• “It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.” – Ansel Adams
• “In the old days they said you were measured by your generosity, not how much money you earned… you were measured by how you could feel the people, how you could house them, how you could take care of them.” – Faith Spotted Eagle
• “After I learned about the disparities of pollution problems in poorer neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color, people who looked like me, I dedicated my life to overcoming these injustices …people of color and the poor (specifically where I live, African-Americans) are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and therefore their involvement in the solution is critical.” – Dr. Beverly L. Wright
• “There is no level playing field. Any time our society says that a powerful chemical company has the same right as a low income family that’s living next door, that playing field is not level, is not fair.” – Dr. Robert Bullard

More information about these heroes’ contributions to our planet — your students could pursue research on one of these figures perhaps and teach us more about acts these people took to help the planet:

• Wangari Muta Maathai – Kenyan – tree planting – Nobel Peace Prize 2004 — https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2004/maathai/biographical/
• John Muir – father of our national parks — https://www.nps.gov/jomu/index.htm
• Greta Thunberg – teen activist who campaigned for global reduction of greenhouse gasses – Time Person of the Year 2019  https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2019-greta-thunberg/
• Aldo Leopold – the father of wildlife ecology — https://aldoleopoldnaturecenter.org/about-us/all-about-aldo/who-was-aldo-leopold/
• Vandana Shiva – scholar —  biodiversity in agriculture – ecofeminism to change the dynamic of what constitutes sustainable agriculture (the errors we make because we see only through a male-dominated lens of what farming should be) –from India — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandana_Shiva
• Chico Mendes – fought for the preservation of the Amazon rainforest and the indigenous peoples who lives in the Amazon – environmental pioneer — https://www.edf.org/chico-mendes-living-legacy
• Ansel Adams – photographer and environmentalist – capturing the beauty in natural landscapes – images that speak to what we must preserve — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansel_Adams
• Faith Spotted Eagle – Native American environmentalist – South Dakota – fighting for the water rights and preservation of native lands — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_Spotted_Eagle
• Dr. Beverly L. Wright – environmental justice scholar – Mississippi River Chemical Corridor work – Hurricane Katrina enviro justice — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverly_Wright
• Dr. Robert Bullard – father of environmental justice — https://www.climateone.org/audio/dr-robert-bullard-father-environmental-justice

Process

Select a voice that reflects care for our environment, a voice that resonates with you.  It can be from ANYONE who holds our natural world precious/anyone who inspires us to care for the natural world.  Perhaps, use a voice from one listed above or another that you have in mind.  It might be your Aunt Susie who built bluebird houses or your grandpa who founded a catch-and-release fishing program at the park or a neighbor who tends all the flower/tree beds on your street.  

Share an image of this earth-keeper, letting us see the person in the act.  

Wordplay:  Help us see and hear this person; help us visualize the person’s strength. Earth-keepers understand the importance of Place; they see and feel the movement in Place.  Play with sounds in your word choices, echoing the tone you want to convey…hard sounds (k, x, ck…)… soft sounds (uff, mm, wh, sh…) … oozing sounds (ooo, moo, udg…).  Have fun with words.  

Finally, go back when you get to the end and cut words that the poem can live without.  I am always so darned wordy, and doing this really helps the whole economy idea in poetry…make each word count; do a word-ectomy.

Begin by bracketing a quote from that person.

Susie’s Poem

[Greta Thunberg (Time Person of the Year 2019) – “I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.” …. on the perils of climate change spoken to the United Nations.]

Greta Thunberg’s House is On Fire

As the sun crests, she stretches,
fills her lungs with air that scratches,

her throat catches,
she feels her burning axis,

knows she must speak,
eyeball to eyeball with the aged clutches of power;

a child feels the sting of wrong,
senses the lies and heat of broken promises;

Greta knows and takes the UN dais,
etches her words in the stone

of a planet that smolders and courses
the molten lava of her truth.

by Susie Morice 2021©

JOY HARJO’S POEM — https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/141846/once-the-world-was-perfect  (there’s an audio recording of her reading this poem; she is our first Native American Poet Laureate of the U.S.)

Once The World Was Perfect

Once the world was perfect, and we were happy in that world.
Then we took it for granted.
Discontent began a small rumble in the earthly mind.
Then Doubt pushed through with its spiked head.
And once Doubt ruptured the web,
All manner of demon thoughts
Jumped through—
We destroyed the world we had been given
For inspiration, for life—
Each stone of jealousy, each stone
Of fear, greed, envy, and hatred, put out the light.
No one was without a stone in his or her hand.
There we were,
Right back where we had started.
We were bumping into each other
In the dark.
And now we had no place to live, since we didn’t know
How to live with each other.
Then one of the stumbling ones took pity on another
And shared a blanket.
A spark of kindness made a light.
The light made an opening in the darkness.
Everyone worked together to make a ladder.
A Wind Clan person climbed out first into the next world,
And then the other clans, the children of those clans, their children,
And their children, all the way through time—
To now, into this morning light to you.

Time for you to write – as always, writing a poem is an act of freedom. Write what you care about. We are here to share in each other’s word world.

[Note:  In 2020 alone, in the states of Washington, Oregon, California, and Texas, wildfires burned more voraciously than ever before: Washington burned 330,000 acres, Oregon burned 1.07 million acres, California burned 4,399,808 acres, and Texas burned 171,204 acres.  Nationwide, wildfires burned 10.3 million acres.  Smoke travelled as far as 2500 miles across the nation from the CA disaster. “…our house is on fire.”]

[FYI: These are hosted poetry contests dedicated to promoting a safer environment; you might have your students enter.  Check out these websites:

• https://poets.org/text/poetry-creative-practice-enhance-engagement-and-learning-conservation-science
• https://poets.org/text/investing-poetry-interview-team-treehouse-investments
• https://lamorindaarts.org/events/2021-river-of-words-youth-art-poetry-contest-inspired-by-the-natural-world/
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/kidspost-poetry-contest-poetry-of-the-pandemic/2021/02/05/6550ee22-63e8-11eb-8468-21bc48f07fe5_story.html
• https://www.artandwriting.org/awards/how-to-enter/ ]