Many years ago I read Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on the ferry between Haines, Alaska and Seattle. I had recently stood at close range to a tall grizzly in the Chugach so my ego was sufficiently destroyed which allowed another part to listen. This quote from the novel resonated, “I’d think, That ain’t me, that ain’t my face. It wasn’t even me when I was trying to be that face. I wasn’t even really me then; I was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted. It don’t seem like I ever have been me.” Regarding climate issues, this inability to honor one’s true voice seems to be the case with far too many academics and scientists (notable exceptions include Nasa scientist Peter Kalmus, former Nasa scientist James Hansen, and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Founding Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)).
Another novelist, Upton Sinclair, losing the 1934 California governor’s race, wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” After writing and publishing fact-based fiction The Jungle (about his undercover work revealing real food safety issues such as deliberate use of toxic chemicals to mask spoiled meat, and rats, and rat droppings, getting into melting pots and becoming meat products, etc.), Sinclair likely had low tolerance for anything less than truth. His bid for governor was too reality-based and politically naive to overcome systemic bias and corporate financing of falsehood. His concrete solutions to overcome Great Depression hunger and poverty, he painfully discovered too late, had nearly zero chance in the public sphere. This situation is similar to early days of the Ford Pinto case I wrote about, and the shocking debate between climate scientist Kevin Anderson and Johan Rockström, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. To be clear, I’m not saying Rockström lied, but rather he revealed how current political and economic incentives do not tolerate any global “rude truth” climate science policy.
Specifically, as I wrote May 25, 2021, a June 16, 2020 press release about a paper led by Anderson in the journal Climate Policy noted he “draws a damning conclusion from the research: ‘Academics have done an excellent job in understanding and communicating climate science, but the same cannot be said in relation to reducing emissions. Here we have collectively denied the necessary scale of mitigation, running scared of calling for fundamental changes to both our energy system and the lifestyles of high-energy users. Our paper brings this failure into sharp focus.’”
Maybe this is why Norman O Brown’s Love’s Body, Chapter 1, “Liberty,” notes, “For the reality of politics, we must go to the poets, not to the politicians.”
Speaking of poetry, I’m grateful Empty Bowl Press accepted three of my poems for their 2026 anthology Cascadia Works (previously Working the Land, Working the Sea). I am also grateful to be part of their previous anthology edited by Rena Priest I Sing the Salmon Home: Poems from Washington State. Congratulations to the fine writer/teacher Jerry Martien, who visited my Poetry Seminar, for his new book at Empty Bowl Press titled Waveshock: Ed Ricketts, the Voyage of the Grampus, and Our Biopoetic Future about how in “1932, a cohort of four questing souls made its way north to Alaska aboard the thirty-three-foot cabin cruiser Grampus. Pioneering intertidal ecologist Ed Ricketts needed fifteen thousand tiny jellyfish Gonionemus for his biological supply lab; unemployed scholar Joseph Campbell sought philosophical direction and a clue to his future; early environmentalists Jack Calvin and his Russian-Tlingit partner Sasha Kashevaroff wanted to live free on a homestead in wild Alaska.” The press notes, “in essays collected by marine biologist Jan Straley, poet and writer Jerry Martien draws its collaborative lessons into a field he calls biopoetics.”