One of my most-visted posts August 4, 2023 quotes Graham Readfearn at The Guardian, July 29, 2023, and others, “[In Antarctica] an area bigger than Mexico has failed to freeze, worrying scientists.” Jess Thomson reported at newsweek.com July 26, 2023, “Eliot Jacobson, a retired professor of mathematics and computer science, using data from Japan’s National Institute of Polar Research” noted, the recent Antarctic melt is “about a 1-in-2.7[million] year event.”
I am grateful to Amsterdam Quarterly for publishing my poem about Antarctica in the September 2023 issue which I hope doesn’t come true.
I also had a poem in their Autumn 2016 issue on Climate (Change), a poem in May 2014 called “Of Whales and the Hinckley Hunt on Christmas Eve, 1818,” and a poem in September 2013 called “At Lake Absarraca” about rewilding buffalo and elk.
My favorite recent climate article is “A climate of the unthinkable on a burning Earth” by Andrew Y. Glikson October 26, 2023 at arctic-news.blogspot.com. I also appreciate the article he noted about Antarctic ecologist Dana Bergstrom and others silenced and/or punished for speaking. That article at abc.net.au/news notes, “Ecologists and climate scientists have told the ABC of a widespread culture of suppression and self-censorship. [par break] Sometimes it’s insidious, driven by the fear of losing funding or contracts. [par break] Sometimes it’s overt, through active gagging or academic careers being threatened. [par break] All of that for attempting to ‘speak the truth’ about environmental damage, ecosystem collapse and climate change.”
I recently told a group where I was invited to speak that watching University of Manchester professor Kevin Anderson interview Johan Rockström, co-director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, made me grateful to be a climate poet because “Rockström seemed restrained by his position, but a poet is free of what I call The Four Horsemen of Distraction: stakeholders, funding sources, constituencies, and agendas.”
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