Beautiful Pit Viper, 2011

from Serpentine by Mark Latia

I couldn’t take my eyes off them, from the spade-shaped wedge of head to the tapered tail, and all that sinuous muscle in between. These predatory geometries made me want to stroke the snake-laden pages. As Mr. Laita writes: “Their beauty heightens the danger. The danger amplifies their beauty.”

And when we focus on their sheer, alien otherness, we feel more human — as Mr. Laita acknowledges at the end of “Serpentine,” when he quotes the poet Rainer Maria Rilke:

“Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that needs our love.”

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Climate warming greenhouse gas reaches 400 parts per million for the first time in human history

The Guardian Friday 10 May 2013

 For the first time in human history, the concentration of climate-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has passed the milestone level of 400 parts per million (ppm). The last time so much greenhouse gas was in the air was several million years ago, when the Arctic was ice-free, savannah spread across the Sahara desert and sea level was up to 40 metres higher than today.

These conditions are expected to return in time, with devastating consequences for civilisation, unless emissions of CO2 from the burning of coal, gas and oil are rapidly curtailed. But despite increasingly severe warnings from scientists and a major economic recession, global emissions have continued to soar unchecked….

But the extreme speed at which CO2 in now rising – perhaps 75 times faster than in pre-industrial time – has never been seen in geological records and some effects of climate change are already being seen, with extreme heatwaves and flooding now more likely. Recent wet and cold summer weather in Europe has been linked to changes in the high level jetstream winds, in turn linked to the rapidly melting sea ice in the Arctic, which shrank to its lowest recorded level in September.

“We are creating a prehistoric climate in which human societies will face huge and potentially catastrophic risks,” said Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics. “Only by urgently reducing global emissions will we be able to avoid the full consequences of turning back the climate clock by 3 million years.”

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee . . .Emily Dickinson

Why are bees dying? The U.S. and Europe have different theories.

The mysterious collapse of bee colonies around the world has turned into a real crisis. In the United States, domesticated bee populations have reached a 50-year low and keep dwindling. The situation is just as dire in many other countries.

And that’s bad news for all those crops that depend on bees. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that “out of some 100 crop species which provide 90% of food worldwide, 71 of these are bee-pollinated.” Around the world, these crops are worth at least $207 billion.

EU Bans Pesticides Thought Harmful to Bees…

EPA does Nothing…

Breakdown: Death and Disarray at America’s Racetracks

See also For Whom The Bell Tolls: Three Dead per Day

“You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“… Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many – they are few.”

~from The Mask of Anarchy, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1819

The Peace of Wild Things

By Wendell Barry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

 Keeping Quiet

by Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

This one time upon the earth,
let’s not speak any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be a delicious moment,
without hurry, without locomotives,
all of us would be together
in a sudden uneasiness.

The fishermen in the cold sea
would do no harm to the whales
and the peasant gathering salt
would look at his torn hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars of gas, wars of fire,
victories without survivors,
would put on clean clothing
and would walk alongside their brothers
in the shade, without doing a thing.

What I want shouldn’t be confused
with final inactivity:
life alone is what matters,
I want nothing to do with death.

If we weren’t unanimous
about keeping our lives so much in motion,

if we could do nothing for once,
perhaps a great silence would
interrupt this sadness,
this never understanding ourselves
and threatening ourselves with death,
perhaps the earth is teaching us
when everything seems to be dead
and then everything is alive.

Now I will count to twelve
and you keep quiet and I’ll go.

-from Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon
Translated by Stephen Mitchell

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tck tck tck:13 Oil Spills in 30 Days

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