PLAYA Climate Change Discussion July 7, 2016

Another Wild Rainbow

Paintbrush

Lupine

Wood Worm

Jason Box, Greenland ice climatologist and professor at The Geologic Survey of Denmark, said at PLAYA two nights ago out of the ten possible scenarios on climate change, nine result in loss of society as we know it.

Reflecting on this, I drove to a trout stream and had climate change conversations with ghosts of Socrates, Ed Abbey, Mother Teresa, and Charles Bukowski which I will put in my book-in-progress Hawk on Wire: Ecopoems. I recalled my Outward Bound rock climbing course in the Okanagan Mountains when I was 16, and my instructor Dick Stokes, who later fished with me, saying if the world falls apart he will get his "last sweet breath in wilderness."  In addition to my teaching, and activism, I spend as much time in wilderness as I can.

Of the above-mentioned ghosts, Bukowski was least willing.  "Remember, you asked me so I'll speak when I'm damn well ready and not before," he said.  I forgot about him while catching rainbow trout on a size 10 peacock / mallard nymph, then I rounded a canyon corner past a huge boulder and there he was:

Ghost of Bukowski Speaks on Climate Change

Yes, it's sad,
bleaker than sheep snot
on barbed wire

but, hope or no hope,
we must find
some way

to make joy
no matter what.