When I was 9, the old Oregon forest behind my home was invaded by bulldozers making a new housing area. I later published a poem about it in Mobius – The Journal of Social Change included below:
Initiation Poem
“Corporations spend $2 billion each year targeted specifically on the young, intending to lure them into a life of unthinking consumption. [. . .] Young people on average can recognize over 1000 corporate logos but only a handful of plants and animals native to their places.”—David W. Orr, quoted in Children And Nature
Our goal was not to save the forest
and animals we knew
but to give them more time
so we jacked up pickups
and stole the wheels,
turned a tractor upside down
in the creek,
moved survey markers
around already-built homes.
We were nine so we painted our faces
like warriors and, at the end,
when developers destroyed our valley
we were still whole enough
to sit on a hill and cry.
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I knew an awful feeling of solastalgia before I had a word for it. Now, it’s becoming widespread in the Pacific Northwest, Australia, India, Spain, and other places.
For example, Nick Breeze interviewed Guillermo Díaz Agras at the Marine Biology Research Station in La Grana in Galicia, Spain in the April 22, 2024 YouTube “Massive Marine Ecosystem Crash Along Galicia’s Coast Due To Prolonged Atlantic Heatwave.” Diaz Agras said, “My main concern is about the water temperature [ . . . . ] Probably my daughter [ . . . ] is not going to see the rias [estuary system] as I saw the rias when I was young.” Breeze included text below the YouTube: “Guillermo showed me a long stream of images of dead dolphins, turtles and otters, saying simply: ‘That was just last week!’. He then explained how much of the indigenous shellfish are dying. The mussels no longer forming in this stretch of coast, the seaweed that bound the mussels to the rocks and the floating platforms, no longer there. The ecosystems that were embedded within them, gone.”
Near the end of the YouTube, Diaz Agras was asked, “Is there anything that you see that we can do?”
He answered, “A global strike, I mean against our politicians.”
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