Up & Down
Or Cutting
Across Chess
Boards Which Aren’t Best Metaphors, Hear Songs Of Our Earth While You Can.
Just as Technology
has shifted from
being a vertical —
organizationally
in a stack above or
below other usual
equal silos such as
HR, Finance, Ops,
Sales & Marketing
all reporting up
most likely to big
picture CEOs —
to worming into a more powerful horizontal fundamental throughout entire enterprises,
so has Climate
Change moved
out of its recent
confined box
now to clearly
affect almost
anything that we
have named as
highest priorities*
ranging from
Jobs/ Economy,
to Health Care,
to Education
to Terrorism, SSI, Inequality, Immigration so has become a second controlling horizontal.
Food-system
collapse, sea
level rise, sick
our good Earth
ruined, we few
drop in on Mars
then a couple of
Jovian moons
before set out
to roam stellar
prairies trapped in
dead-end tin cans:
Flailing memory, once stars of our past now at half-glimmer soon fade to total darkness.
*State of the Union 2019: How Americans see major national issues
Pew Research Center
End As Beginning As...?
99.9999% lifeforms
died today*.
75% known species
went extinct.
If you looked up
a “star’”s
luminosity grew
very large.
The previous lush
warm planet
just teeming with
organisms —
an asteroid plunged
Earth from
Cretaceous Period
into dark
deep freeze Palogene.
It was as if
we took a billion
Hiroshima
bombs’ lone bullet:
peaks rose
much higher than
Mt. Everest.
Temperatures
higher
than our sun’s.
Wildfires
consumed 70%
of forests,
set subcontinent
India ablaze.
Oceans emptied.
Ash covered
all – only ferns
thrived.
But vagabond
debris sown
into space had
microbes
which make it
promising
2 Jupiter moons
contain life.
And 66 million
years pass
bark beetle bits,
paddlefish
conifers blossom
as dinosaurs
give way to
previously trivial
mammals which’s
what allowed
us a short time to
thrive ‘til now?
*thanks to Douglas
Preston’s The Day
the Dinosaurs Died, New
Yorker, 8 April 2019