Earth Day Poems for Every Day

Every day really is Earth Day. What else could it be? Knowing that, how will you choose to live?

As with all my collections of poetry I've chosen a few lines to excerpt, not necessarily the first lines in the poem. Follow the links to read the full work.

"Earth Day" by Jane Yolen

As long as life,
As dear, as free,
I am the Earth
And the Earth is me. 

"Make the Earth Your Companion" by J. Patrick Lewis

Make the Earth your companion.
Walk lightly on it, as other creatures do.

"Gravity" by Donna Hilbert

This is why we call the earth Mother,
why all rising is a miracle.

"Treat Each Bear" by Gary Lawless

Treat each bear as the last bear.
Each wolf the last, each caribou.
Each track the last track.

"School Prayer" by Diane Ackerman

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,

"For All" by Gary Snyder

I pledge allegiance to the soil
            of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
             one ecosystem
             in diversity
             under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.

"Love in a Time of Climate Change" by Craig Santos Perez

I love you as one loves the most vulnerable
species: urgently, between the habitat and its loss.

"Beginners" by Denise Levertov

-- we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision

how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.

"Untitled [Earth teach me stillness]" by Nancy Wood

Earth teach me caring
    as the mother who secures her young.
Earth teach me courage
    as the tree which stands all alone.

"When the Animals" by Gary Lawless

When the plants speak to us

     in their delicate, beautiful language,

     will we be able to answer them?

"2007, VI [It is hard to have hope]" by Wendell Berry

Because we have not made our lives to fit
our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded,
the streams polluted, the mountains overturned. Hope
then to belong to your place by your own knowledge
of what it is that no other place is, and by
your caring for it as you care for no other place, this
place that you belong to though it is not yours,
for it was from the beginning and will be to the end.

"Map" by Linda Hogan

This is the map of the forsaken world.
This is the world without end
where forests have been cut away from their trees.
These are the lines wolf could not pass over.

"Anthropocene: A Dictionary" by Jake Skeets

diyóół        : wind (

                         wind (more of it) more wind as in (to come up)
                         plastic bags driftwood the fence line 

"Makers" by Pamela Alexander 

We dried rivers or dammed them, made
music, treaties, money, promises.
Made more and more of our kind,
which made the cars and the wars
necessary, the droughts and hurricanes.

"Nimbawaadaan Akiing / I Dream a World" by Margaret Noodin

Nimbawaadaan akiing

I dream a world

atemagag biinaagami

of clean water

gete-mitigoog

ancient trees

gaye gwekaanimad

and changing winds.

"Dead Stars" by Ada Limón

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.

     No, to the rising tides.

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

for the safety of others, for earth,

                 if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,

"Mending Mittens" by Larry Schug

Blessed be those who have laced together

the splits at the seams of this world,

repaired its threads of twisted waters.

Blessed be those who stitch together

the animals and the land,

repair the rends in the fabric

of wolf and forest,

of whale and ocean,

of condor and sky.

Blessed be those who are forever fixing

the tear between people and the rest of life

"Testimony" by Rebecca Baggett

I want to say, like Neruda,

that I am waiting for

"a great and common tenderness,"

that I still believe

we are capable of attention,

that anyone who notices the world

must want to save it.

Walking in February: Of Woods and Water

February 2023 brought the opportunity for a weekend getaway to Lake Quinault Lodge in Olympic National Park to celebrate a friend's birthday. Some of the group drove to Montesano with their tandem and solo bicycles and rode the 50 miles from there to the lodge. Others, like those of us healing from a broken wrist who can't cover that much ground by bike right now, drove to the lodge.

As I drove out Friday afternoon, accompanied by the Eagles Live double album, the rain came and went and came again, reminding me with the watery blur and the slapping of my windshield wipers that I was heading into a temperate rain forest. (And, not incidentally, reminding me that I wasn't totally sorry I had to miss the bike ride in the cold grey wetness—cold makes my wrist ache even more.)

Friday dinner and Saturday breakfast meant pleasant socializing with some new acquaintances. We were going to gather again for Saturday dinner, and meanwhile the agenda was wide open for whatever activities appealed. For me, this meant a walk in the woods.

I headed first up the narrow, shoulderless road past the lodge to visit the World's Biggest Sitka Spruce. At 191 feet it's a neck-craning forest giant standing in a spot that felt sad, surrounded by the encroachment of spaces designed for tourists exactly like me. 

I tried to imagine it standing as one among many in a lush, unbroken tree canopy, birds and animals rustling in the brush that no longer grows around its feet, no signage prompting us to go visit other giant trees in the park, no people posing for a picture to put on Facebook.

From there, following the simple paper map available at the lodge, I headed back to the road and across, following the trail to Gatton Creek Falls.

I walked alone on the soft paths, surrounded by so much green! Mosses, mosses everywhere, reminding me of listening to the audiobook of Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer with its rich description of their complex lives, structures, and functions.

Every so often I passed a gigantic stump, quite possibly a mother tree cut down to build the lodge I had slept in the night before. I could not help but say softly, "I'm sorry, Mother." Saplings sprang from each stump to fill the space left behind, fed by their mother's body and watered by the rain falling all around.

I heard a creek chuckling off to one side. A small wooden footbridge provided a place to stop and listen to the water rushing downhill before continuing cautiously across on the slippery wet wood, then on up the hill.

This wasn't a hike to cover lots of ground quickly or get somewhere by a certain time. This was a walk simply to be in the woods. I gazed up, down, around and along the trail. Every minute gave me something to look at.

The very small: Delicate traceries of mosses and baby ferns. 

The very big: Those mother trees, downed logs, and tall trees soaring up, draped in long grey-green beards of Spanish moss. 

The pale: The underside of a patch of lichen, fallen from a trunk or limb above. Perhaps all that sogginess was too much to hold onto? It's so moist, like walking on thick sponges. Weblike masses of another moss shrouding a tree as if I were in Shelob's lair.

The bright: Rusty red maple leaves decaying into the soil, the contrast of a log's interior below the dark bark, pale orange dead ferns.

Life, life everywhere. The full circle, with green springing up from brown, climbing, growing, falling back to become soil again. Walking in woods and water reminding me that this world doesn't require me, or humans, to be whole and beautiful.

Lost Year. Lost Future?

Nothing anyone writes about 2020 can capture what it really felt like. Human memory doesn't want to hold onto horrors. We want to look away, look forward, move on. If we don't do that we risk sinking into existential dread, drowning in the realities that rise over our heads.

Because it was tragic, at a level we wouldn't believe if someone put it in a movie plot. It is still tragic. Even as I rejoiced in the amazing feeling of having coffee with a friend in a coffee shop--something I took for granted in January 2020, something I treasure as a special moment now--I have to live within these realities.

We still have deep, divisive, damaging racism embedded in everything about the way our world is structured. We've had it for far longer than white people like me recognized, even as we benefited.

We still have the devouring, thoughtless habits of careless consumption that will kill our species. Not the planet--it will survive, in some shape. The Earth doesn't need us to go on. We've lit the planet on fire and we're pouring more gasoline on it every day.

We still have the violent, strange, and polarizing politics that made the simple act of getting a shot--something most of us experienced as a child and yeah, I'm glad I didn't get measles, mumps, whooping cough, or polio, aren't you?--a dividing line.

We still have the yawning chasm between the wealth of a Jeff Bezos--who earns more in one second than some people make in an entire month of hard and thankless work that exposes them to the risk of a potentially deadly disease--and the desperation felt by someone who has to call the back seat of a car their bedroom because that's all they have left.

Historians describe turning points, which are easier to recognize in hindsight than in the moment. I have one particular turning point in mind, though there are many.

I remember my anger when 9/11 happened and I listened to then-President George Bush give us a rousing speech--about why we needed to show that we couldn't be beaten by going shopping. 

I'm the daughter of a World War II veteran. I know that when we were asked as a nation to rise to the challenge of the moment by changing our way of life we were able to grow victory gardens, save tin foil, reduce consumption at home so resources could go to our soldiers overseas. 9/11 could have been a turning point to ask that we reduce our dependence on foreign oil so we wouldn't end up making more enemies in the Middle East. We didn't have to put the lives of our own citizens and others into the tanks of our ever-larger vehicles.

We could have committed to a cleaner and greener future. We could have risen to the challenge. We still could.

And if we did that we would also be doing something to confront the terrible legacies of racism. We would be acknowledging and then reducing the greater burdens of pollution and death by traffic violence created by building an economic structure that asks people to spend more and more time driving farther and farther. We would be making healthier places for everyone. We would treat this lost year as a portal to the future that we want.

When I say "we" here, by the way, I mean "we white people who still hold the majority of decision-making power in this country in every sector." Because "we" is me. "We" is you if you're not speaking up, speaking out, taking action. If we can't collectively learn from this lost year then we have truly lost our future.

If You Really Love Your Neighbor, You’ll Eat Local Food

It’s not often I riff on the Ten Commandments (it's much more likely to be the Eightfold Path). But a while back a friend of mine posted a “Suggested Addenda” on his Facebook page with things like “Thou shalt not use thy neighbor” and “Honor thy children.” The ensuing dialogue (boy, does he have an interesting mix of Facebook friends!) got me thinking a bit.

When it says to love your neighbor "as yourself" what does that mean in a society full of people who appear not to think all that highly of themselves based on what we accept and what we subsidize through our private expenditures and public policy priorities? 

This idea that we don’t think highly of ourselves might not seem obvious, since the people of the U.S. certainly appear to have a healthy sense of entitlement in many ways.

That may be true on an individual level, but look at our food as an example of how we so often fail to love ourselves.

We accept and in fact subsidize a food distribution system that brings us unhealthy, low-quality, synthesized food that doesn't nourish our bodies (think high-fructose corn syrup) and that is often grown far away--sometimes so far away that we disrupt local food production in another country so they can grow out-of-season (and tasteless) vegetables to ship to us. 

If I'm taking care of myself I make sure I eat healthy food. I buy it locally and in season so it has amazing flavor and all the vitamins and minerals it can possibly have. I lovingly prepare and preserve it so I can feed myself and my family.

If I love my neighbor as myself then I want my neighbor (and by extension the kids eating school lunches and poor folks on food stamps) to get the same kind of food value. I don’t want his labor exploited or her land and water poisoned with overuse of chemicals just to grow uniformly large, cardboard tomatoes that don’t have as many nutrients as foods used to have.

Cooking up a batch of jam with raspberries

I picked at Green Bluff.

If we loved ourselves, Red Delicious apples would not have turned into the hard and tasteless rocks you can now purchase at any grocery store. They would still have the juicy deliciousness of the less “popular” (but more authentic) varieties I pick at Green Bluff in the fall.

We would eat foods in season because that’s when they’re at the peak of deliciousness. Yes, this means we would—gasp—go without fresh raspberries in the middle of winter. Because fresh raspberries eaten within hours of when they left the plant are amazing. Raspberries shipped thousands of miles are not. The jam I make with raspberries within hours of picking them is pretty tremendous. Jam with high-fructose corn syrup is not. 

We don't love ourselves and we sure don't love our neighbors or we would grow, buy, prepare and eat better food.

Your turn

Do your food buying habits reflect real love of self? How about love of the other people involved in bringing food to your table?

Green Is the Color of Money: Growing a Sustainable Local Business Approach

Today I attended the monthly green business networking lunch organized by Sustainable Local Investment Partners of Spokane. The incredibly dynamic and inspiring speaker was Michelle Long, executive director of Sustainable Connections in Bellingham and also of BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies), a national "network of networks" for sustainable businesses.

She showed a quote from Wendell Berry; I found a longer version of it at the Unstuffed blog. It's from The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (here's an Amazon link but what you SHOULD do is go buy it at Auntie's if you're in Spokane or at your own local independent bookstore to support a truly local business).

"One of the primary results--and one of the primary needs--of industrialism is the separation of people and places and products from their histories. To the extent that we participate in the industrial economy, we do not know the histories of our families or of our habitats or of our meals. This is an economy, and in fact a culture, of the one-night stand....

"In this condition, we have many commodities, but little satisfaction, little sense of the sufficiency of anything. The scarcity of satisfaction makes of our many commodities, in fact, and infinite series of commodities, the new commodities invariably promising greater satisfaction than the older ones. And so we can say that the industrial economy's most-marketed commodity is satisfaction, and this commodity, which is repeatedly promised, bought and paid for is never delivered. On the other hand, people who have much satisfaction do not need many commodities.

"The persistent want of satisfaction is directly and complexly related to the dissociation of ourselves and all our goods from our and their histories. If things do not last, are not made to last, they can have no histories, and we who use these things can have no memories. We buy new stuff on the promise of satisfaction because we have forgot the promised satisfaction for which we bought our old stuff...

"The problem of our dissatisfaction with all the things that we use is not correctable within the terms of the economy that produces those things. At present, it is virtually impossible for us to know the economic history or the ecological cost of the products we buy; the origins of the products are typically too distant and too scattered and the processes of trade, manufacture, transportation, and marketing too complicated. There are, moreover, too many good reasons for the industrial suppliers of these products not to want their histories to be known...

"If the industrial economy is not correctable within its own terms, then obviously what is required for correction is a countervailing economic idea..."

What was so exciting about Michelle's presentation: They have demonstrated in Bellingham that encouraging businesses to connect with other local businesses genuinely grows the local economy. 

After having a much higher unemployment rate than the rest of the state, they have had a lower unemployment rate over the past five years. They were recently certified by the EPA as being #1 in the nation--in the nation--for green power. They're working with local government to change permitting processes so a green building isn't a problem that goes to the bottom of the stack to be processed.

National numbers are quite clear: There's more job creation in small businesses than in the giants. In Bellingham they appear to be learning to think first about whether there is a local source for something they're used to importing, whether it's food or anything else.

This idea isn't the least bit anti-business--it's pro-good-business-we-can-live-with-over-the-long-haul.

Here's another take on our economy (and how the financial system is not the same thing as the economy), from someone far more knowledgeable on finance than I--Leslie White, a Wall Street veteran:

"Let's get to the task of facilitating the efficient exchange of goods and services, which, in the process, employs people in productive capacities so they can then afford to buy what they need. It sounds simple, and it is simple.... Every one of us can take a leadership role in some aspect of our local economies. We can buy local food, shop at locally owned stores, enjoy neighborhoods and communities, and engage in financial transactions at the local level."

Nearly 80 people at the lunch thought Spokane is ready for this kind of approach (with a few who aren't sure we'll tackle it). I hope we do.

A little light reading: Transportation and health, Summer Parkways, and the density of smart people

How do we pay for our transportation system? Surprise: In our health care system. At least in part, that is.

Choices to drive rather than walk to the transit stop or ride a bike are choices in favor of a sedentary life. When you say yes to the car you say no to moving yourself with personal power and burning a few calories.

Cost shifts are also hidden in food prices thanks to agricultural subsidies for low-quality calories (think high-fructose corn syrup). Cheap bell peppers grown in Chile and shipped to Spokane undercut locally grown produce that doesn’t travel nearly as far. Soda costs less than fruit juice, which at least has some element of real food in it. Ever stop to wonder how that happens?

As Tufts University nutrition researcher Christina Economos said at a recent conference on childhood obesity at WSU Spokane, “We should subsidize the foods we want people to eat.”

This week’s fodder:

• Grist magazine on the American Public Health Association report assessing the hidden health costs of transportation
• A statement from the Centers for Disease Control on transportation policy
• The recently announced move by DOT/EPA/HUD to work together on funding criteria for sustainable communities--a step in the right direction. Let’s call on our elected officials and agency heads to expand this effort to include the Department of Education (Safe Routes to School and local food sources for school nutrition programs, for example)
• Grist on food prices and why Whole Foods shoppers are thinner than shoppers at your average neighborhood grocery store (yes, income explains some of it—but not all)
• Local Year of Plenty blogger and biking pastor Craig Goodwin on the food pyramid and federal agricultural subsidies (source of the image above)
• Planetizen blogger Steven Polzin on The Cost of Slow Travel: Boy, did I ever have to comment on this one.

Next American City panned the idea of “summer streets” efforts that don’t get people to think much, much differently about street design. What’s wrong with plain old fun, I ask? Our Spokane Summer Parkways will be plenty of fun, thank you very much.

The Density of Smart People: Back in my teenage days Dad used to say, shaking his head gently at me, “For someone who’s supposed to be so smart, you sure don’t have much horse sense.”

That isn’t what the Creative Class folks mean by density—they’re looking at how many smart people (college-educated) per square mile cities have as a measure of their human capital.

Their piece is based on the original analysis by Rob Pitingolo, which turned out to have comments by people asking whether walkability scores and income-based mobility played any role in where smart people choose to live. Maybe everything is ultimately about transportation….