Greta’s Lament

Posted on by Opher

Greta’s Lament

World leaders are letting us down.

The Green Deal is not enough.

So many loopholes.

The world is run by a bunch of clowns.

In search of the dollar;

Swirling down a wormhole.

A safe future for all our children

Within this existential threat.

No luxury of time.

The world on the run at the end of a gun.

No thought for tomorrow.

To ignore it is a crime.

We don’t have the decades;

Just ten years to get this right.

Giving up is not an option

Our future lies in the trades

As we balance the wind against money.

The future should not be an auction.

Connect the dots – we decide what to do.

To buy more and more stuff

Or save the planet.

A beautiful green ball with oceans blue

Or a barren rock;

A stagnant ball of granite.

If it were easy it wouldn’t be a crisis!

Listen to the science!

Act. Before it’s too late.

You all know what the price is.

Words are not enough.

Inaction seals our fate.

12.5.2021

Watching Greta on TV, full of idealism and determination. A frail girl who is using everything she has to highlight what we all know to be the case. The world is warming. The animals are dying off.

We are the cause. Eight billion of us consuming. Eight billion of us destroying habitat. Eight billion of us wanting more. Eight billion of us not taking enough care.

I have to question our priorities.

In this poem I used Greta’s own words for the first verse and answered them with a second verse. I repeated that throughout.

Our Future

Posted on by Opher

Our Future

This is our future.

                We tell it as it is;

                                As we see it.

For we know.

All the money in the world

                Is not worth the future

                                Of the planet –

Our heritage.

Opher – 22.4.2021

Too many people are making too much money out of destroying the planet.

They put profit before the future.

They do not care about the damage they do.

They spread their propaganda of denial.

They are evil.

Poetry – Greta’s Lament

Posted on by Opher

Greta’s Lament

World leaders are letting us down.

The Green Deal is not enough.

So many loopholes.

The world is run by a bunch of clowns.

In search of the dollar;

Swirling down a wormhole.

A safe future for all our children

Within this existential threat.

No luxury of time.

The world on the run at the end of a gun.

No thought for tomorrow.

To ignore it is a crime.

We don’t have the decades;

Just ten years to get this right.

Giving up is not an option

Our future lies in the trades

As we balance the wind against money.

The future should not be an auction.

Connect the dots – we decide what to do.

To buy more and more stuff

Or save the planet.

A beautiful green ball with oceans blue

Or a barren rock;

A stagnant ball of granite.

If it were easy it wouldn’t be a crisis!

Listen to the science!

Act. Before it’s too late.

You all know what the price is.

Words are not enough.

Inaction seals our fate.

12.5.2021

Watching Greta on TV, full of idealism and determination. A frail girl who is using everything she has to highlight what we all know to be the case. The world is warming. The animals are dying off.

We are the cause. Eight billion of us consuming. Eight billion of us destroying habitat. Eight billion of us wanting more. Eight billion of us not taking enough care.

I have to question our priorities.

In this poem I used Greta’s own words for the first verse and answered them with a second verse. I repeated that throughout.

Poetry – There is a War

Posted on by Opher

There is a War

There is a war raging

Using chemical and machine,

Counting the casualties

In numbers astronomically obscene,

Laying waste the land,

Hunting the helpless in fantastic amounts,

Spraying poison indiscriminately –

Where profit is the key

And the only line that counts.

Opher 13.9.2016

There is a War

There is a war going on. It is a war against nature. Pest and weed are being decimated. There is collateral damage.

A pest is a creature that we don’t happen to like. It wants to live. It eats our crops and lives on our land.

A weed is a plant we don’t like. It grows on our land. It takes nutrients and light from our crops. It makes our garden look untidy.

We have to eradicate anything that encroaches on ours.

We can take what we want but nothing should dare to intrude on what we have claimed as ours.

We wage war on it. With chemical poison and machine we slaughter in huge numbers. The bees, butterflies, frogs, newts, and toads are all collateral damage.

The invertebrate population has been decimated. 56% have gone. That’ll teach them! 10% of all wildernesses have been claimed by us in the last twenty years. We have laid waste to it all. It is now denuded, coffee plantation, palm oil or simply desolate.

There’s a war going on. We won’t be happy until we have beaten it all.

Poetry – The Game

Posted on by Opher

The Game

The game of avoiding catastrophe

                Played against an opponent

                                Who does not care.

What can be more important

                Than fighting for the future?

Jumping off a cliff

                Into the unknown

                                As the corals bleach.

Populations crash.

                An ecosystem

                                That took billions of years to build,

Destroyed in decades

As time runs out.

People are ready for change.

We are desperate for hope.

Opher – 22.4.2021

We are standing on the brink of that cliff.

We are unbalancing the ecosystems.

We are killing the wildlife.

We are destroying habitats.

We are polluting the world.

We put money before the future.

Enough is enough.

It has to stop.

We have to start to repair the world.

It is too beautiful to allow it to die.

Poetry – Our Future

Posted on by Opher

This is our future.

                We tell it as it is;

                                As we see it.

For we know.

All the money in the world

                Is not worth the future

                                Of the planet –

Our heritage.

Opher – 22.4.2021

Too many people are making too much money out of destroying the planet.

They put profit before the future.

They do not care about the damage they do.

They spread their propaganda of denial.

They are evil.

Poetry – Greta

Posted on by Opher

Greta

We’re on a crusade to change a world

Made worse with every tree that’s felled

With every ditch that’s filled

And every war-cry yelled.

Of all this greed I’ve had my fill.

A selfish species with a lust to kill.

Beauty and love replaced by sorrow

Without a thought for tomorrow.

They’ve got nature on the run.

Too much junk from everyone.

Too many people taking too much room.

Too much violence, doom and gloom.

They are still pumping carbon into the air

With climate change deniers everywhere.

From arid desert to melting iceberg

The future rests with Greta Thunberg.

Opher – 20.4.2021

In the course of my lifetime I have seen such destruction. The world has been consumed by wars, famines, droughts, genocides and massive environmental destruction.

When I was born the world population was 2.5 billion. It is now 8 billion.

Great swathes of rainforest have been cleared. Billions of animals have been slaughtered. Sea, land and air have been polluted.

Instead of living in harmony with nature and looking for a sensible life of love and beauty we are racked by selfish greed.

Billions live in poverty while a few live in opulence. Billions are traumatised by cruelty, violence and war.

People are consumed with a lust for power and wealth and are willing to destroy the planet in order to get it.

We need a new idealism.

Green – A Sci-Fi novel – The character Elspin Murkedly.

Posted on by Opher

Green – The character Elspin Murkedly.

Green

This character was formed out of the central philosophical idea of the book. What is reality? I was obsessed with both reality and infinity. It led me to reading up a lot of psychology and astrophysics.

I wondered if the universe inside one’s head is infinite, as infinite as the world outside.

I wondered if that world of imagination was real.

I wondered what reality would be like if there was no connection to the outside reality.

I created Elspin Murkedly. I placed her in the future. She was conceived on a fabulous planet but a fault with the hyperdrive on the return journey created a major catastrophe in the developing embryo that would become Elspin. While her central nervous system developed her peripheral nervous failed. She was incredibly intelligent but that well-developed brain was not connected to any sensory apparatus. She had no knowledge of the outside world, what we call reality. Her reality was in her head.

Elspin was kept alive on a life support machine. To the outside world, she was lifeless but inside she had a vibrant life in a colourful internal universe. The trick was to make her a real person even though she could not interact with people or the world outside, she still had to have a personality. Elspin moved in a world of vibrant colours – and she was green.

I enjoyed writing about that world. I used a poetic style. I also enjoyed giving her a personality. Elspin is playful, inquisitive and contented. Elspin was the entire reason for this story. I built everything else around her. She came to life. One of the plots involved the care and love of her mother. Could she be contacted? What would happen?

Interestingly, the subplots also came to life. Outside, in reality, there was a world of strife and catastrophe.

Who would prevail?

Available in both paperback and kindle from Amazon.

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Buy the book – click here

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Or from your local Amazon Store.

Donald Trump – A major threat to the environment?

Posted on by Opher

Donald Trump may turn out to be a major threat to the world’s environment, putting hundreds of thousands of species under threat, promoting major climate change and putting many communities at risk of such things as flooding, drought, extreme weather, hurricanes, crop failures and starvation. This could result in mass migrations of people and mass extinctions of plants and animals.

President elect Trump claims that manmade climate change is a hoax. He is threatening to pull out of the Paris agreement and reverse the Green Energy programmes. He says that he will promote economic growth by returning to fossil fuel programmes (coal, oil and gas), reopen plants and to hell with the carbon dioxide output or pollution.

He is solely concerned with the economy and jobs. The environment is not an issue.

This runs contrary to all the evidence accumulated on climate change. In the long term it will not only be an environmental and human disaster but also turn into a major crisis for the economy. I cannot help thinking that this is extremely bad news for the whole world.

In a worrying new development his administration has asked for the names of all the people involved in the Green Energy programmes and who have promoted Green Energy and been involved with climate change talks. The fear is of a witch-hunt.

Anyone who is involved with the environment should be anxious. If he goes through with his stated policy change, the USA, instead of leading in the clean up of carbon dioxide, will be greatly increasing its carbon output. This could be a disaster for the world and impact on the whole initiative to prevent global warming and protect the dwindling rainforests and animals.

If there is a continued increase in global temperature, created by human activity through the burning of fossil fuels (as most scientists now believe), it would have a devastating effect on wildlife and human populations. There would be radical changes in weather patterns leading to droughts, heatwaves, floods, desertification, hurricanes and extreme weather, melting of ice-caps, a rise in sea levels, changes in animal and plant distribution, death of corals and sea-life, changes in conditions for crops and have a colossal impact on wildlife and human populations.

For nature, already under extreme attack, this could be catastrophic.

This also does not bode well for other environmental initiatives. It would appear that the environment and wildlife do not feature in the world of Trump. All that matters is money.

Hopefully the experts will convince Mr Trump that he is wrong and the risks are far too great.

Hopefully he will not go through with his withdrawal from environmental agreements and a return to dirty energy.

The world is at stake.

Why not read up my views on the devastation of our natural world in my book Anthropocene Apocalypse. It tells the story of what is happening to the planet through our burgeoning numbers and destructive practices.

IMG_2124

In the UK:

Or check out my other books:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Opher-Goodwin/e/B00MSHUX6Y/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1481965953&sr=1-2-ent

In the USA:

Or check out my other books:

https://www.amazon.com/Opher-Goodwin/e/B00MSHUX6Y/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1481966173&sr=1-2-ent

For all other countries please check out your local Amazon.