Future Haikus, Future Poems

Addendum to the Haikus

The same oceans that nourished human evolution are poised to unleash misery on a global scale unless the carbon pollution destabilizing Earth's marine environment is ended.

Destructive changes already set in motion will see a steady decline in fish stocks, a hundred-fold or more increase in the damages caused by superstorms, and hundreds of millions of people displaced by rising seas.

As the 21st century unfolds, melting glaciers will first give too much water and then too little to the billions who depend on them for fresh water.

Without deep cuts to manmade emissions, at least 30 percent of the northern hemisphere's surface permafrost could melt by century's end, unleashing billions of tons of carbon and accelerating global warming even more.

In addition to releasing vast quantities or C02 the melting permafrost will pump the ever more dangerous gas, methane, into the atmosphere, leading to even more rapid melting and leading to Earth become a second Venus, covered in thick clouds of greenhouse gases, where even lead melts on the planet's surface, making all life, even the most privative, impossible.

What can you do?

1. Eat little or no red meat, to keep Earth's remaining forests from being cleared for cattle ranches.

2. NEVER travel by air. One jumbo jet taking off releases more pollution than a quarter of a million cars.

3. Don't drive a car, if you can help it, or if you must, as little as possible.

4. Support alternative energy and demand your country pledge to rid itself of fossil fuel burning.

5. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER. vote for "business as usual" political parties that dismiss or belittle climate change as a "hoax." It is such parties, and the lies of creatures like Donald Trump and the Koch brothers, who are the real hoaxes, and evil incarnate.

6.  Refuse to have children until humankind rises to overcome the grasping tentacles of the fossil fuel industry. If you insist on having children, do so in the knowledge that you bringing them into a dying planet and what are likely to be miserable and hopeless lives, unless by some miracle mankind becomes enlightened and acts.

6. Speaking of acting, I have a proposition for you. Why not act like you have a conscience, even if you don't have much of one. Acting like you care about the future is the best way to develop your sense of right and wrong and actually do something about what this world is becoming

7. All these personal actions that each of us can take would change the world overnight if enough people embraced them. But as important are collective acts. The powerful agents of extinction, the fossil fuel companies and the politicians that support and protect them, will not change willingly. As Frederick Douglas said, "Power cedes nothing without a struggle. It never has and never will." 

We have to make it more expensive for those in power to ignore us than to act. Only massive civil disobedience can achieve this, short of violent revolution. The powerful have to fear that they will pay dearly if they con't change their ways. Unless we can instill this fear in them they will do nothing. Every major city must be filled with tens of thousands of determined people who will shut down business as usual until those in power ceded their grip on history. Such actions have succeeded over and over again, and are the only means by which change can be assured to come in time to save this generation, and live on Earth itself.