A Manifest Destiny...Of Mass Destruction

There were these great hardwood and evergreen forests standing undisturbed for millennia

We invented clear-cutting efficiency and the gasoline-powered chain saw

The land we found was full of life and a thousand kind of plants

We created lawns of over-watered, chemically treated, heavily fertilized bluegrass

The rivers teemed with spawning salmon on both wild and lonely coasts

We built dams and cut down the trees that sheltered their tiny fry, and they disappeared

The buffalo, grizzly, wolf and elk roamed the plains in uncounted numbers

We devised agribusiness to monocrop and to hold our livestock as deathcamp prisoners

The land held great wealth in silver, gold, oil, iron and coal

We gave the greedy and shortsighted free rein to gouge it out and walk away for 7 cents an acre

Snow fell white and pure and lay undisturbed all Winter in the mountain valleys

We turned it black with exhausts and the oil spilled on our great roads

Aquifers deep within the earth stored up clean water for a million years

We pumped it out in a heartbeat to irrigate subsidized crops for cows & snack foods

Sometimes the smoke from great unchecked fires blanketed the land for weeks

Now every day we belch out more toxic, climate-changing gases in unimaginable volumes

Songbirds in their millions greeted each and all the spring mornings

There are many now who have never heard them and so, cannot ever miss them

The skies were darkened by flights of uncountable passenger pigeons over billions of acres

We wiped out these so-called free goods as a cheap and easy to obtain food source

Men lived in tiny bands whose small household messes soon healed over as they moved on

Now billions squat in their own wastes under thick, toxic clouds of their own making

A group could strike out on its own to lands where no one had ever lived

We installed roads leading to identical strip malls from sea to shining sea

Every spring the gentle showers would slowly wake the land from a long winter

During such rains now, a bolus of coal-fired acid rain poisons the lakes and stunts the trees

A myriad of frogs croaked from a million scattered wetland patches

Today a tiny fraction still linger, many sporting exotic deformations

Grasses, flowers, field mice and hawks lived in many meadows

Weeds, broken glass, rats and cockroaches share empty lots with drunks, prostitutes & addicts

The great cats padded along in their mystical silence throughout the world

Now we require the use of the entire habitat that once sustained them

The cetaceans with their huge brains flourished in the oceans for a million years

Fifty thousand dolphins are sacrificed as our factory fishing bycatch, every season

Orangutans spent untold generations adapting to their remote jungle habitat

Today we just cut the trees down right out from underneath them in their so-called preserves

In the past the wolves would howl and the loons would cry out in the stillness

Now we roar on by in our loud trucks with 150 decibel music blasting, tossing out burger wrappers

It used to be that our numbers made sense in terms of what the earth could bear

Now the researchers say our population will stabilize at around 10-12 billion immortal souls

Every parent could believe his child’s life might be better than those who came before

More and more grow up condemned to mine garbage and carry water in dirty plastic buckets

The sun was cool in spring and one could count upon a dark freezeup every November

Now each year is right up among the very hottest that man has ever witnessed, but we don’t care

There was a time before plastics when we already had electricity and running water

Today there are electronic chips implanted in our beloved pets and spyware on our phones

Just a little while ago my own grandmother rode in a horse-drawn wagon

Now you can make a reservation to travel as a tourist into space

As children we rode three across hating the back seat of that hot old sedan

Now our kids must have varied snacks, video games, DVDs and personal air conditioning

Man witnessed the parade of the charismatic late Pleistocene megafauna

Now we are told that we are responsible for the latest in earth’s great mass extinctions

The lakes were filled with fish and there was always a chance of hooking an even bigger one

The government now warns against their consumption due to the pollution of our waters

The great eastern forest stretched from New York to Chicago

Now the trees and wildlife survive there merely at our decorative pleasure

Man and the bonobo evolved together sharing 98% of their DNA and homelands

Today we eat them even as we destroy their remaining jungle habitat

Giant bluefin tuna raced with warm blood throughout the worlds oceans

Now, even as we catch the last of them, their market price just keeps on going up

Old growth forests sheltered complete ecosystems for ten thousand years

Our technology replaced them with sterile single species tree farms

Galileo was absolved by the church for his heretical notions regarding the universe

Our evangelical zealots engage in a religious debate over evolution, without science

Oral traditions and rights of passage guided young men to adulthood in the tribe

Our fatherless youth must invent a directionless but violent culture on their own

Children learned the phases of the moon, the constellations and the useful plants

Now they clamor for fast food and the latest in couch-based electronic entertainment

Just yesterday one-income families with children could afford a small summer cottage

At this time speculators from far-away cities have driven up all the prices

In the old days family farms dotted the plains for hundreds of miles

Modern agribusiness has consolidated its holdings for industrial efficiency

We paddled the lakes in rowboats and canoes, murmuring and laughing

Now jetskis and speedboats whine and smoke from late morning right through the long twilights

Previously there existed a social contract between workers and their company

Today the corporation discards people as quickly as their useless and polluting byproducts

In the past the New World was filled with natural mysteries and untapped potential

We have successfully built an unbroken network of convenience stores and fast food outlets

The old folks helped stitch the children into the tapestry of their families

Now the elderly are seen as useless, drooling fools to be ignored, swindled and locked up

We minded our own business until called upon in times of great world crises

We protect our freedom and democracy thru preemptively defensive wars of liberation

Left alone, rivers meandered, sheltered fish, birds and frogs and left rich farming sediment

Now channelized, they provide no shelter for anything but trash and their runoff fouls the sea

The grasses, swamps and woodlands caught and held the precious rainwater

Acres of concrete now drain their oily burdens straight into vile but pathetic creeks

Every small town had its own hardware, grocery, pharmacy and feed stores

Merged and downsized corporations provide for our every modern need, straight from China

Bakers, butchers and small marketplace vendors were part of our everyday lives

Super stores stock shrink-wrapped factory feedlot steaks shipped inside dirty semi-trailers

Polar bears and seals shared the dance of life for thousands of generations

As we melt the ice, the bears must disappear right along with their prey

Tigers stalked for eons in the shadows of the volcanoes on the cold Kamchatka peninsula

The last of their penises are downed in expensive oriental soups as a purported aphrodisiac

Humans thrived while covered by a multiplicity of microfauna

Now household sanitizers speed the evolution of disease organisms & autoimmune disorders

For uncounted lifetimes worms, bacteria, plant detritus and silt tended to the soil

Pesticides, fertilizers, pivot sprinklers and massive machinery are now its uncaring stewards

For eons the earth and its atmosphere danced out their many graceful, interlocking cycles

In a hundred years we have altered the CO2 balance, along with the entire climate

Men took creatures as guiding spirits and thanked them for their sacrifices

We assume a dominion which permits atrocities on any and all animals, with our god’s blessing

In a delicate choreograph, chicks hatched just as their insect food appeared

With spring arriving earlier every year, the insects have gone and baby birds must starve

For centuries tropical mountain glaciers have served as natural reservoirs for the people below

With their melting people will go thirsty during the long and hot dry seasons

Coral reefs sheltered ecosystems for millions of underwater generations

Dynamite, cyanide, high temperature and UV rays have devastated them

Fetid swamps were known to reek with highly poisonous, miasmatic vapors

The cities built in their drained places fill infants brains with mercury and lead

Man was viewed as the measure of all things during the Age of Reason

We now rely upon faith-based initiatives to light our paranoid and superstitious way

Astronomers have mapped the universe and can see 14 billion years into the past

11% of our population cannot find our country on a globe of the earth

Our forefathers were amazed at the teeming schools of cod in the Atlantic

experts wonder if there yet remains even a viable breeding population

The mighty Colorado crossed the desert and fertilized the diversity of its delta

Now it is sucked dry in the desert, leaving behind only salt, chemicals and fertilizer

The Grand Canyon offered awe-inspiring, crystal clear, panoramic vistas

Nearby coal-fired generation plants now obscure the view on a quite regular basis

For centuries the Anasazi lived in cliff dwellings and grew enough food to live

Now the water is all spoken for and the great droughts that doomed them have returned for us

The Kwakiutl people competed to give away more than their neighbors at their potlatches

Our government subsidies the poor, enabling them to care for the needs of the rich for very little

The orcas and cetaceans have longer histories and brains as large as our own

Studies have shown that we have contaminated their blubber and their milk with our toxics

The Plains Indians were marvelously transformed all too briefly by Spanish horses

Electricity, running hot water and the automobile have also only briefly been part of our lives

We conquered, tamed, surveyed, cleared, settled and developed the New World

But, we lecture the Third World on their sacred duty to preserve their precious natural heritage

The press as the fifth estate was admired for its ever-vigilant role in democracy

The government and the press now produce ‘news’ stories that are shown without attribution

Scientists spoke slowly and carefully, always admitting to a measured uncertainty

Now pundits urge a small leap of faith to the literal truth of scripture and their fake news

We created the worlds first national park, the clean air act and banned DDT

We disavow global warming, drill in all wilderness areas and ignore coal-fired mercury and lead

30 million or 99% of native peoples perished in a brave conquest of the Americas

Yet all of our recrimination is targeted at shaming the Europeans over the Holocaust

Great storms came in off the pacific for millennia and gentle trade winds kissed the Caribbean

Presently, smog from china and sandstorms off Africa sullies their cars and lungs

Over thousands of generations the indigenous discovered medicinal plants

Big Pharma patents these as profitable drugs and keeps all the profits as the forests disappear

During a process of millions of years organic material was converted into fossil fuels

Every day we litter a blizzard of petroleum-based packaging and walk away without a thought

The bible provides rich examples of a broad and humane philosophical wisdom

We pick and choose our quotes to justify our venal and self-serving philosophy

A myriad of species from mammals to bacteria intertwined in the wondrous web of life

A leveraged corporate oligarchy of producers and suppliers greedily noses us all into poverty

Humans spoke with thousands of languages each supporting a different culture

Advertisers and politicians use Spanish as a sales tool and we all text in a pidgin English