Join the Revolution!!! I’m with the kids!!

Posted on by Opher

Today – right across the world – people are taking to the streets to protest!!

We should all be out there with them!

Today students are leaving their classrooms in tens of thousands to protest!!

We should give them our full support!!

Today the world is suffering from climate change, from species extinctions, from pollution and overpopulation!

Unless we stop the madness there is no future!!

Today Trump is ripping up the environmental protections and opening up the USA parks and sites of wonder for exploitation. He will ruin the beauty of the natural world and massacre wildlife for a quick buck.

Today Bolsanaro is repealing laws to protect the Amazon. The result is that the Amazon is burning and millions of creatures are being slaughtered.

Today in the UK we are building on greenbelt, filling in ditches and ponds, grubbing up hedges and chopping down trees.

Today the numbers of humans continues to grow, forests are cut down, seas overfished and animals hunted to extinction.

I want a future with elephants, rhinos, whales, gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans running free. I don’t want some plastic nightmare!

I’M WITH THE KIDS!!!  THIS GREED HAS TO STOP!!!! Nature matters more than providing the wealthy with more loot!

We can put it right. We need to stop this mad rush for growth, to reduce our population, to stop chopping down trees, filling in ponds and polluting the world.

We can live with nature and not against it!

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Poetry – Trees – a poem

Posted on by Opher

Poetry – Trees – a poem in my Anthropocene Apocalypse series about the senselessness of deforestation.

rainforest

This short-sighted destruction of the world’s great jungles is the most wicked vandalism of all. To sell the future for a handful of gold is plain stupid.

 

Trees are our oldest living organisms. Some are three thousand, five hundred years old. There is no respect. Thousand year old trees are senselessly chopped for profit.

 

Pristine rain-forest, teeming with life, is being cleared to provide food, cosmetics and beverages for a burgeoning human population. Our numbers are destroying the world. Coffee, palm-oil and short-term slash and burn farming are destroying the world.

 

The trees provide fruit, habitats for most of our planet’s land-based life, soil consolidation, carbon recycling, oxygen production, medicines, shade and water recycling.

 

Without the trees the soil is rapidly eroded, fertility declines, the wild-life dies, the oxygen is not released, the carbon is not absorbed and all life is the less.

 

The short-term gain is soon spent. The long-term loss goes on for ever.

 

Who is to say that these incredible long-lived life-forms are not sentient? Perhaps they think and dream in their own languid manner? Perhaps they feel fear and pain? Who knows?

 

Trees

 

Green sap,

Green leaves,

Oxygen, soil, fruit and shade –

Fine rewards.

 

Slow grow,

Tall trees,

Serene giants, majestic calm

Strong and broad.

 

Chain saw,

Short sight,

Dead to lumber and away

Cash in hand.

 

Bare soil,

Stark stump,

Arid rock, no life and now

Desert sand.

 

No fruit,

No leaf,

No oxygen, water, muse

Or rich life.

 

All poor,

No breath,

No food, animal, music

Drum or fife.

 

Gentle

Life-form

Savagely ripped apart

Without a thought.

 

Seas of

Green now

Now parched joyless rock; all life

Sold and bought.

 

Opher 18.7.2015

Poetry – Elefantasy – a poem in my Anthropocene Apocalypse series about the terrible tragedy occurring to the majestic elephants.

Posted on by Opher

Poetry – Elefantasy – a poem in my Anthropocene Apocalypse series about the terrible tragedy occurring to the majestic elephants.

elephant tusks 3

Elefantasy

Matriarchal tribe

Even with bull

In his prime.

Gestation lengthy

Baby suckles

Loved all the time.

 

For the love of a tooth

Ripped from a dying head

The family too is ripped

As father’s blood is shed.

 

Opher 4.7.2015

Only a decade ago I was out on safari in ecstasy as I watched the herd of elephants with calves stroll around us. The big bull stood in the centre of the track with ears spread wide, watching us intently. The driver had his hand on the gear and his foot on the pedal. I was enthralled as father twitched his tail and flapped his ears. He decided we meant no harm. The herd passed through following their old female leader and the Bull followed up the rear. I watched as they melted into the foliage and disappeared from sight.

I thought they were only disappearing from sight. They were disappearing from the planet. They are being slaughtered by the thousand and hunted to extinction.

The superstition of Chinese medicine and the love of ivory carving has created a market that is as obscene as it is stupid. Ivory is exactly the same stuff your teeth are made of. It has no magic power. But rhinos and elephants are being hunted and cruelly killed. Their tusks and horns are hacked out of their heads with machetes even while they still live. It is obscene.

Poetry – Elefantasy – a poem in my Anthropocene Apocalypse series about the terrible tragedy occurring to the majestic elephants.

Posted on by Opher

elephant tusks 3elephants african

Elefantasy

Matriarchal tribe

Even with bull

In his prime.

Gestation lengthy

Baby suckles

Loved all the time.

 

For the love of a tooth

Ripped from a dying head

The family too is ripped

As father’s blood is shed.

 

Opher 4.7.2015

Only a decade ago I was out on safari in ecstasy as I watched the herd of elephants with calves stroll around us. The big bull stood in the centre of the track with ears spread wide, watching us intently. The driver had his hand on the gear and his foot on the pedal. I was enthralled as father twitched his tail and flapped his ears. He decided we meant no harm. The herd passed through following their old female leader and the Bull followed up the rear. I watched as they melted into the foliage and disappeared from sight.

I thought they were only disappearing from sight. They were disappearing from the planet. They are being slaughtered by the thousand and hunted to extinction.

The superstition of Chinese medicine and the love of ivory carving has created a market that is as obscene as it is stupid. Ivory is exactly the same stuff your teeth are made of. It has no magic power. But rhinos and elephants are being hunted and cruelly killed. Their tusks and horns are hacked out of their heads with machetes even while they still live. It is obscene.

Poetry – The Horn – a poem about rhinoceroses and their imminent extinction. An Anthropocene Apocalypse poem.

Posted on by Opher

Poetry – The Horn – a poem about rhinoceroses and their imminent extinction. An Anthropocene Apocalypse poem.

rhino dead-rhino-645X430

The Horn

I’ve got the horn

Ripped straight

From the Head

Does wonders in Bed.

An explosion of lead

Stagger

And dead.

 

Hacked clean

Into something

Obscene.

 

Poor eyesight;

It never saw us

The very last

Rhinoceros.

 

Opher 4.7.2015

 

We are rapidly wiping out the wild things, the forests, the wilderness as we increase in number and extend our range. Soon the whole world will be a huge concrete and plastic jungle.

We may keep the DNA safe so that in saner times it might be reconstituted into living organisms.

One day, when we’ve become wiser and more civilised, there might be a programme to reinstate nature. I’m not sure I would completely approve. Designed wilderness is a poor substitute but perhaps it will be better than nothing.

If we survive that long.

The rhino is doomed because of superstition and money. You may as well use nail filings as rhino horn. They are exactly the same keratin. There is no medicinal value. It does not give you the horn. Yet the customers will pay. The rhinos will pay and the hunters get paid. That is how decision in this world get made.

Anthropocene Apocalypse – 3.6 billion years of evolution – all interlinked.

Posted on by Opher

Anthropocene Apocalypse – 3.6 billion years of evolution – all interlinked.

deforestdolphins2IMG_5916idyllic-stroll-through-the-norwegian-fjords-by-kayak-1-638

It has taken a staggering 3.6 Billion years for life to have evolved from one single cell in the glutinous soup of oceans that came out of a Billion years of heat, lightning, UV and gamma to create fourteen million species.

We cannot imagine those magnitudes of time. That is why so many people have difficulty understanding evolution.

All life on this planet has evolved to interact and support each other in one huge global web. The variety and splendour is breathtakingly awesome and we should celebrate it with all our hearts.

The green plants process our carbon to produce our food and oxygen.

The animals have feelings and senses analogous to our own.

We all have our habitats and niches and are interlinked.

Together we have changed the world dramatically. We have altered the climate, the atmosphere and weather. The world is how it is because of what life has done to it. There would be no oxygen without plants, no ozone to shield us from radiation, no fire to keep us warm.

Without an array of insects there would be no birds or insectivores.

Without the animals the flowers would lack pollination and fruit would not be dispersed.

We should value, respect and love it with all our hearts. This fragile web is what sustains us. Without all those plants and animals interacting we would not survive. They are our past, present and future.

Build a positive zeitgeist. Protect them all. Preserve our future.

The population crisis – threatening to destroy the planet.

Posted on by Opher

7.7 billion and counting.

Increasing by 81.7 Million a year!!

Every one of which requires land, water, food and space to carry out their life.

Every one of which is responsible for forest clearance, habitat destruction and the death of nature.

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/

This is a madness that is destroying the planet!!

Anthropocene Apocalypse – 7.29 Billion and counting – heading for 12 Billion

Posted on by Opher

Anthropocene Apocalypse – 7.29 Billion and counting – heading for 12 Billion

humans H44-10819350 - © - Allgöwer Walter

There are now 7,293,000,000 people on this planet.

We all require water, food and fuel. We take up room; we destroy the habitat, pollute the water, air and soil and we will soon be 12 Billion.

The natural resources are being used up. The fossil fuels are being used. The climate is being affected. The forests are being destroyed all over the planet.

It is relentless.

If there were ten people they could eat, burn, slaughter and produce waste to their heart’s content. It would not make a speck of difference.

When you have ten billion all requiring wheat, rice, meat, fish, space, shelter, vehicles, fuel, gadgets and the rest it is destroying the natural resources.

Surely everyone can appreciate that this is simply unsustainable? Or are we blithely going to proceed until the last tree is chopped, the last wild animal butchered, the last insect poisoned, river besmirched with sewage, sea made stagnant and climate transformed into a greenhouse cauldron?

Will someone then say ‘Hey – I liked it better before’.

If we do not do something to stop it the politicians in hand with the businessmen will sell off the future to finance their yachts and penthouse suites; only then will they discover that they have to breathe the same air as us!

Anthropocene Apocalypse – A terrible death for Turtles.

Posted on by Opher

Anthropocene Apocalypse – A terrible death for Turtles.

 

Historically the poor large sea turtles have been hounded and tortured to the point of extinction. It’s eggs were stolen, its shell used for ornament and it was boiled for oil (sometimes alive). The turtles were heartlessly stacked alive upside down on decks of schooners so they could slaughter them for fresh meat when needed. One can only imagine the agonies they went through for weeks on end.

Today the situation is not much better. Their eggs are still stolen, their shells still used for decoration and their meat still eaten. On top of that they get caught and drowned in fishing nets, poisoned in polluted waters and die from ingesting plastic. Their breeding beaches are taken over by people and climate change is ravaging them.

They are beautiful and just one of the many, many thousands of species that we are destroying through our overpopulation, thoughtless, greedy action and callous brutality.

Action needs taking before we lose them forever.