Tag Archives: extinction

Voting Our Destruction

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Voting Our Destruction

Some birds will still sing and flora abide
no matter what human might reside
in the colorless house with the POTUS inside.
But not so for those that have already died.
In the past year, seven more
have ceased to run or swim or roar.

The outcome of our land and sea,
each animal , insect and tree
depends on policies they make.
Will Earth survive or will we bake
on the spit of reckless choices,
protests made by unheard voices?

Will we find, at end of day
we’ve voted our kids’ lives away?
These are the species lost to us
in last year’s sparring, useless fuss:

                      • Sumatran Rhino. …
                      • Chinese paddlefish. …
                      • Yangtze giant softshell turtle. …
                      • Indian Cheetah. …
                      • Spix Macaw. …
                      • Catarina Pupfish. …
                      • Indochinese tiger

What new denizens will perish
from this Earth we say we cherish?
Yet we vote its life away
And we’re the ones who’ll have to pay.

 

Today the loss of species is estimated to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times than that of the natural extinction rate. WWF reports that between 0.01% and 0.1% of all species go extinct every year. Considering the fact that there are around two million species on the planet, it means between 200 and 2,000 extinctions occur every year. And note, we are talking about species of which humans are one.

As per the 2018 report of World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), there’s a 60% decline in the population of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians in just 40 years. As per the IUCN Red List, more than 30,000 species are threatened with extinction, which means 27% of the nearly 1,12,000 species accessed so far are under grave danger.

In the past ten years, 33 plant species have become extinct. The species listed above in my poem all vanished in 2019. I was unable to find a list for 2020.

 

Prompt words today are flora, outcome, fated and reside.
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Once by Ice and Once by Fire

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Once by Ice and Once by Fire

Once by ice and now by fire, erasing her mistakes,
Mother Earth must wonder how many times it takes
to finally get the world planned right, for once the lot is cast,
how can she watch sufficiently  a planet that’s so vast?

Her hope is that but rarely she must resort to extinction
to control a species risen to such great distinction
that it uses up more resources than it can provide.
How many times must she restore a planet that has died?

She casts a might yawn and then breathes fire once again—
cancelling out excesses that they can’t see as sin.
Caught in a clinch as they resist all means of education,
perhaps the only answer is mankind’s eradication.

 

IMG_0970 (1)

 

Prompt words today are extinct, rarely, clinch, vast and hope.

Human Conditions

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Human Conditions

What some see as a plank, others see as a sliver.
What starts out as a rivulet can swell into a river.
But there is a dead center closer to what’s real—
a place optimists overlook and pessimists overfeel.

Some may have solutions that others find absurd
and as a result, simply let go unheard.
But as we spend time bickering o’er who is right or wrong,
more sinister plans of nature flow rapidly along.

There’s a reason we are labeled as the human “race.”
Most problems exist because we cannot slow our pace.
We speed too quickly forward, not considering the end
of all the natural balances that we choose to bend.

The food we grow is excess and we throw away
forty percent of it, every week and day
while people starve around us. We can’t find a solution
to world hunger, extinct species, global warming or pollution.

Each plastic bag we use is the beginning of a motion
that takes it down that rivulet to river to the ocean
where it will join the others—the flip flops and the dishes
that are killing off our coral and our mollusks and our fishes.

We choke our air and wonder why we cannot breath.
Our youths lack a direction. They question and they seethe.
What choices have we left them as we export all their jobs
and give them all devices that turn them into blobs?

If there were a grand plan for ridding Mother Earth
of every single species that had a use or worth,
I think it would be planned by man and not by evolution.
Increasingly we seem to be mounting a revolution

It’s as though we’re pre-conditioned, as though we have a need
first of all, to bring an end to every other breed,
and then to do ourselves in to restore the motion
of evolution once again. To see what is her notion

of what might work the next time in building a global order
that knows its place in things without straying ‘cross the border.
Perhaps billions of years from now, nature will proudly flout
another scheme for nature that this time will work out!

The prompt words today are dead, center, rivulet and globe. Here are the links:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/rdp-tuesday-dead/
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/10/30/fowc-with-fandango-center/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/agnostic/(actually, rivulet)
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/10/27/daily-addictions-2018-week-43/globe

Endangered Species

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Endangered Species

It bore investigation, the gods all seemed to think
to see what’s happening on Earth that’s raising such a  stink.
The clouds of poisonous vapors seemed to obscure their view
so they had to come much closer to see what they could do.
Here everyone seemed eager to screw the other guy,
sure that complete happiness was something they could buy.
They’d have to think of something to divert them from their wrath,
to deflect them from their lust for fortune to another path.

What if they gave them something to redirect their thought
from this mania for wanting what the other fella’s got?
They created Martin Cooper and made two guys named Steve,
gave them creativity and something up their sleeve
to invent these gadgets to connect us all together
so we could help each other in times of stormy weather.
But the plans of men and deities often go astray.
Even gods in heaven do not always know the way.

How could they know that iPads and tiny little phones,
the Internet and Facebook would turn us into drones
staring at our open hands or clicking selfie shots,
intent more on ourselves than in helping the have-nots?
While skulking in the background, cronies of corporation
plotted most unnoticed in corrupt cooperation
to keep the masses busy with their puzzles and their games,
their TV and their movies and their lists of contact names.

We all would be so busy staring at our palms
that no one would be worried. No one would suffer qualms
about what was happening—the greed and the pollution.
Our leaders all the problem and never the solution.
We sold our world for cyber toys, believed their staged reality.
Traded in our real world for scheduled banality.
Kardashians and Candy Crush, sitcoms and solitaire,
Twitter, selfies, Instagram—a virtual nightmare.

Have we really botched it? Will no one come to aid?
Will our species all die out? Sicken, fall and fade?
They say after Chernobyl the animals returned.
The grass and tees grew back where they formerly were burned.
Only humans can’t abide the mess that they have made.
as though they have created their own end by their charade.
It’s the way of evolution. Species come and species go
Those who do not worry as they vanish tell us so.

The thing that they don’t realize, just waiting round the bend
as species after species is herded toward its end,
of all endangered species, another they have hexed
may be homo sapiens, whose extinction may be next.

The prompts were below, investigation and eager. The links are below:

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/08/08/fowc-with-fandango-below/

https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/08/08/investigation/

https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/eager