Environment Day

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TAKE ACTION

This Environment Day Let’s Show Leaders We Care

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Photo credit: Stephanie LeBlanc on Unsplash

Hi

It’s Environment Day — a day to kick-start action for our ecosystems! 

Our natural world faces threats from every direction. Oil spills have caused coastal catastrophes and climate change poses an existential threat to humanity and species alike. But powerful G7 leaders are meeting next week and climate is on the agenda.

While we can’t undo all the harm done to our planet, we can still protect it and our future. Let’s create a deafening roar for action on the environment.Take Action

Every fraction of a degree of warming can lead to the extinction of entire species. From cheetahs to coffee, climate change is wreaking havoc on our natural systems and on communities worldwide.

We are reliant on natural systems and when we transform or destroy them, we all suffer. This environment day, let’s show our leaders that we’re looking to them for action — join the call.

Poetry – There’s no space

Posted on by Opher

There’s no space

Amid the debris and the trash,

Scummy water,

Oil and fumes,

There’s no space.

Amid the bare rock and sand,

Scavenged land,

Concrete blocks,

There’s no place.

Amid the dreams and schemes,

The planning office,

And the plans,

There’s no space.

Amid the smoke and acid rain,

Climate change,

Effluent and crime,

There’s no place.

Amid the gunfire and the fire,

Bulldozer tracks,

Chainsaw and mire,

There’s no space.

Among the houses and the roads,

Amidst the cities,

Fields and farms,

There’s no place.

Opher 13.4.2018

There’s no space for Nature to live and there is no space for us to grow. The wilderness is managed. The revitalizing spaces are going.

We have no space to be free in, no space to breathe and they have no space to live. It all comes down to the lowest common denominators. We only have space for rats, seagulls, pigeons, crows and foxes – the ones that can live off our garbage.

Poetry – Amid the wreckage

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Amid the wreckage

Amid the palm oil and the stumps;

Amid open mines, plastic in clumps,

Concrete and lawn, culverts and dumps,

No place to eat,

No place to drink,

No place to nest,

No time to blink.

Opher 13.4.2018

It seems that we no longer have room for nature. We swat the flies and put up our electrocutors, we manicure our lawns, mow the grass, sanitize the landscape. We chop down their habitat to grow our crops and shoot them if they dare to intrude. We hunt them for food, pleasure and ivory. We dig them up and bait them with dogs.

As our world expands theirs contracts.

Soon there will not be room enough for them. They are hanging on as tourist attractions. How long can that go on? What a miserable plastic world we are creating. Nature has to try to claw a living between the wreckage we have left behind.

Poetry – Northern Lights

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Northern Lights

Psychedelic cascades

In scintillating clouds

Streaming through the sky

With mesmeric majesty

In illuminations of gaudy display

Of glorious flourescent waves.

Magnetic colours

Wafting on the solar breeze,

Crashing on the seas

Of the moon

As electrons shine

Particles charge from the sun

To excite the eye

And flow across the retina.

Opher 17.3.2018
Living in the North of England we are fortunate to occasionally get to see the Northern Lights. The sky puts on a lightshow of scintillation with sheets of fluorescent colour like a psychedelic lightshow. The sky glows and shimmers as the solar stream hits our outer atmosphere in a rage of ions, electrons and magnetic fury displayed in beauty.

Poetry – Meditation Medication

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Meditation Medication

Meditation medication

In the midst of the forest

With the slanting sunlight

And pink anemone.

Recuperation rehabilitation

As the sun sets over the sea

Turning rocks ruddy

And birds swirl in glee.

Recovery discovery

As the deer raises its head

Sniffs the breeze and relaxes

To snack upon the fragrant herbs.

Content portent

As the bee and butterfly

Play with the nectar-sweet flowers

Who always give.

And the air is electric

Once again.

Opher – 23.2.2018

There is nothing more rehabilitating than the power of nature. To sit alone in the midst of the business of a flower-filled meadow and soak up the warmth and wonder as reality connects with infinity before your eyes.

Sitting still among the buzz of insects, with the scent of flowers and grass, with creatures rustling in the hay; as the sun shines from a blue sky and the planet turns in harmony with the heavens.

To be part of that natural world connected to the cycle of life in all the glory of its evolution and the wonder of the cosmos.

It is the perfect meditation.

Poetry – Tiger, Tiger you thrill me.

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Tiger, Tiger you thrill me.

Tiger, tiger, slithering by

With scaly skin and glittering eye

What strange thoughts do you employ

To gauge the depths of all your joy?

Lying coiled beneath the sun

Until the warmth within is done.

On what dreams do you journey?

To places strange to the likes of me?

And what would move you to tread

To another life to the one you’re wed?

For when you’re roused enough to bite

Do you experience alien delight?

Could you leave that ecstasy

To taste another, and be free?

To choose a gentler road to roam

And find pleasant refuge to call home?

Could you trust one such as me

To gently rest in complete safety?

Or must it always be this way

That you’d attack or slink away?

For tiger, tiger, I wish it were

Different for this scale and fur.

That we might sit beneath this tree

And share this moment of beauty.

Opher 10.2.2018

When I was staying with our friends Dylan and Julia in Tasmania I had the good fortune of coming across a Tiger Snake. I believe they are the world’s sixth most dangerous snake and are renowned for attacking on sight.

At first I thought it was a coiled up hosepipe. It was quite large. As I approached it suddenly uncoiled and slithered off into a hole under the cabin. It gave me quite a shock. A little later I crept back and found him out and sunning himself. He let me get quite close to take a couple of photos. He was beautiful.

Poetry – Greta’s Lament

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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.

The last segment of the walk to Grosmont.

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The Yorkshire countryside is so beautiful. The remnants of its industrial past are evident. The old railway system is still there and a steam train runs for tourists!

Into The Bluebell wood at Grosmont

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We climbed up higher in Snake Woods where the Bluebells formed a carpet of blue. Beautiful. Like pieces of the sky had fallen to the ground.

Poetry – The Green Wonder

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The Green Wonder

There is a green wonder

That runs on light

To create splendour

In sheer delight –

An array of colour

Shape and grace

Exceeding imagination

Cramming this place.

Who could have dreamt of such magnificence?

Evolved through time to sate every sense.

Taken for granted until it is gone

At this rate, that will not take long.

The saving grace is that long after we are long gone

The green wonder will right every wrong.

Opher – 11.2.2017

The Green Wonder

Plants are the highest form of life on this planet. Their complexity outshines all else. Their photosynthesis provides the oxygen we breathe and their manufacturing of food provides the basis for nearly all life. It is thanks to the wonderful green organic machines that life has evolved in all its multitude of forms.

Plants are the fundament on which all life builds.

As we inexorably destroy nature and busily turn the planet into a plastic tourist Disneyland of concrete and garbage we will reduce the diversity to nil and pull the rug from under our own feet.

When we have finally succumbed to the inevitable virus there will still be plants to work their wonders. Over the millennia their roots will break through concrete and their biochemical processes will cleanse the planet.

Over a few hundred million years the remaining animals will evolve to exploit the food and habitats created by the green wonder. Once again there will be an array as varied and beautiful. Hopefully, once again intelligence may arise and this time really be intelligent. But even if it does it could never eclipse the most wondrous organism of all.