Paying a (Heavy) Price for Climate Change, 3000 AD
As regular readers will know, I am revising some poems that appear in my collection. An earlier version of today's poem first appeared in an anthology, Free-Falling, Poetry Now [Forward Press] 2006 and subsequently in my collection the following year. While there is a strong argument for leaving well alone, as I look at poems from a distance of several years or more, I sometimes feel the need to 'get it right'. Some readers, of course, will always prefer the original.
Now, we hear and read about climate change all the time.Yet how seriously do we take it? How committed are we to future generations?
Fatalism is humankind's worst enemy; we cannot blame our shortcomings on fate, only ourselves.
As for the planet, I suspect nature has ideas of its own ...
Whatever, there is no room for complacency; the well-being of future generations is at stake. Governments of the world and certain politicians with an invested interest in fossil fuels need declare those interests, get their priorities right and log into some positive thinking ... NOW.
Copyright R. N. Taber 2006; 2013
Labels: climate change, complacency, culture, economics, excuses, future, global, greed, history, human nature, humanity, life, mind-body-spirit, nature, poetry, politics, pollution, population, society, time