Oldest North American feathered friends,
Bigger than ducks, longer, thicker necks than grebes,
Splendiferous sculpted aquatic bodies,
Land walking nah,
Lifetime in water, save mating, nesting ashore.
Part submarine, part fighter jet,
Long open water runways,
Pattering into wind across watery faces,
Head down, hunched back, nose of jet.
Powerful wingbeats, impressive 112kph aeronautics.
Credulity, naiveté, vanity, confidence,
Irresponsibility, greed, planet-killing.
Men, money, power, immortalise,
The long game, high stakes, illusions.
Name your price? More!
Unctuous fossil fuel conmen seep assuredly,
Mustn’t leave anyone without,
Such slithery goop duplicity bathed.
Asphyxiating pollution, black gold drying up,
Price ever-rising, people alert.
Oppressive deathful hideous heat,
Combusting subsidised fossil fuels, wood pellets,
palm oil be damned.
Fire Age dire, so strange, past irrelevant,
No-narrative, no-analogue tomorrow.
So immense unimaginable coming upheavals,
Inherited knowledge arc, past to future, broken.
No precedent forthcoming,
Impossible to triangulate accumulated wisdom.
A future never known.
Hale diminutive warm-blooded hummingbirds,
Joyful, bathing, fearless, 80kph speedsters,
Heard before seen, iridescent metallics.
Brush-tipped tongues French kiss flowers,
One thousand to two thousand sexy daily osculations.
Rolling shoulder joints, wingtip figure eights,
Two hundred beats per second, the perfect hoverer.
Altering wing angle, forward, backward, sideways,
Enthralling upside-down airborne acrobatics, finesse.
Practise. Forty million years. Stupendous!
Highest animal oxygen requirements,
Nine thin-walled air sacs,
Supreme lung gas volume.
Three hundred breaths per minute rest,
Five hundred breaths per minute flight.
Copious nectar rich water, 160 per cent body weight, daily.
Gnats, flies, aphids, beetles,
Delectable spider silk-wrapped prey, proteinaceous insects!
Overnight food cache, crop satiates caloric needs,
Autumn gorge doubles body weight.
Sailing a twenty-seven hundred kilometre-migration!
Fulltime Pacific Northwest residents, Anna’s.
Unexampled Arctic climate storms frostbiting, deadly.
Lifeless looking miraculously still alive!
Urban rescuers warm feeders thrice daily,
Recipe in hand: one thumb sugar, four fingers water.
Blest be ye fine feathered friends!
#UnearthlyWails
#ZeroCombustionEconomy2030
#GoVegan
#RefuseStuff
#BoycottChineseGoods
#RefusePlastics
#WalkMore
#ForestBathing
#LoveNature
#LoveIsTheSolution
#GenZEmergency
Reese Halter is a bees/trees/seas defender.
His latest book is GenZ Emergency.
Email: HalterBooks@gmail.com for your autographed copy.
In Australia, order from the Bob Brown Foundation by emailing: Contact@BobBrown.org.au
If you’re like me and was coming of age when the first Matrix dropped in 1999, this was more than just a film. It was a paradigm shifting experience. From the storyline – a reality bending what-if, to special effects never before seen on the big screen, and a theme that would later lead me to question the very existence I knew which – is still evident today, in my adult career as a journalist. It was complete with the perfect pairing of angry, thought-proving, tracks from Rage Against the Machine.
SPOILER ALERTS!
By now, most of you have probably seen at least the first of the original Matrix trilogy. But if you haven’t – I suggest you stop reading now.
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O greatest long distance earthly wanderers,
Travelling limits of seemingly limitless seas.
Superlative endurance, Olympians of the sky,
Extreme in size, Royal’s tip-to-tip 3.5 metres.
Hale wise airborne centurions!
Light as a feather, lifetime at sea,
Furthermost range, pure gliders, windiest oceans.
Lifting force to air resistance astoundingly 40:1.
One hundred and twenty-thousand kilometres annually,
Eleven million eight-hundred thousand kilometres lifespan!
Before year 2020, what does not kill me makes me stronger. After the year 2020, it mutates and tries again. Freedom in the Unites States means you can choose to die if you wish. You have the right to refuse to wear a mask, and the organizations that you visit have the right to refuse you entry into their property if you decline to wear said mask. The reason these organizations have the right to refuse your entry is because you do not have the right to infect other people. When your rights impose a risk to other citizens, it becomes a societal problem.
Historically, free speech in the United States has seen limitations. You cannot shout “fire” in a crowded theatre. Free speech ends when it threatens lives of other citizens. Citizens have been tried for manslaughter when they urged other citizens to kill themselves. The great thing about the United States is that you may listen and follow the advice, no matter how naïve, of other citizens. If that advice results in your demise, then the mistake is yours, a decision you are free to make.
You may believe that you have the right to consume intoxicants and operate a vehicle, but if your behavior threatens the safety of other citizens, that right impinges on other citizens who have the right to be protected from your behavior. As a citizen, you have the right to refuse vaccination, which in some cases, has cost people their lives. Social media has become saturated with uncredentialed self-proclaimed “experts” who have found numerous reasons why you shouldn’t be vaccinated. These experts have reasons too long to discuss in this essay. Statistically speaking, there is, and I will not deny it, a small amount of risk if you get vaccinated, since the vaccine has not been tested on millions of people, but that risk is very, very small.
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Welcome to Witsuwit’en territory!
Keepers of the great watershed Widzin Kwah,
Generations immemorial honouring yin tah, earth.
Land living, breathing beings, intelligent creatures,
Respect, understand, harmony, the natural world.
Mysterious adventurers, epic long-distance voyagers,
We landlubbers marvel at your Royal Highnesses.
Marbled gray, sleek tapered head, streamlined robust body,
A dozen knuckles supporting eighty thousand pounds,
Barnacles, sea lice, ecosystems within gray’s ecosystem. Hallelujah!
The “Alfred Burt Carols” are a marvelous collection of fifteen Christmas songs. They were written by Alfred S. Burt from 1942 and 1954 and annually distributed to friends as Christmas Cards. After learning about them in high school choir, my buddy Dave and I decided we would follow suit. We each wrote a little ditty, hand-copied ten or twelve copies, and mailed them out, vowing to continue to do so every year hence. I’ve lost touch with Dave, but I know I haven’t done it again since.
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O pinnacle of piscine evolution,
Pointed snout, plump middle, crescent caudal,
The ultimate predator, bluefin tuna.
Counter-shaded, dark topside, light below,
Blue, green, silver befitting only the regal.
Olympians inhaling ramjet oxygen-loaded seawater,
Travelling a distance equal to length each second.
Sampson-like heart 10X other’s size.
Gracefully cruising 46 knots, top-end 55 knots!
Night schooling, slower, musing, bunched.
MEXICO CITY – Our comrades, the bees, are intriguing wee creatures and vital to a healthy natural world.
Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch (1886-1982) was the first to discover that the elaborate language of honeybees revolves around complex dances. In addition to deciphering their communications, von Frisch was also able to train honeybees to arrive at feeding stations in three, four and five separate periods within 24 hours. The fact that bees possess a memory for time is astonishing.
Years later, my colleagues from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama showed that social bees have a bigger brain area for both learning and memory compared to solitary bees. And like people, bees show the effects of aging. For example, honeybees’ memories fade and their ability to learn decreases. One way we both can slow down aging is by getting restorative sleep.
Terrified Asian honeybees, just like us, other primates, birds and meerkats, shriek when faced with a life-threatening situation. When giant Asian hornets attack the hive, honeybees release a “rallying call for collective defence”. It eerily sounds like bloodcurdling human screams. When these colossal merciless hornets storm the colony, they feast on larvae, decapitate adult bees and feed severed body parts to their young.
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ALICE SPRINGS – Are you fed-up with the worst, least qualified and most unscrupulous citizens, the world’s leaders, lying about reducing emissions and failing to address the climate emergency?
Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison just greenlit two humongous fracking mines in the Northern Territory (NT) and Western Australia (WA). Morrison blatantly disregarded the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) warning that there can be NO more new coal, oil and gas extractions if we are to limit temperature increases to below the critical threshold of 1.5 degrees.
Morrison’s most recent planetary destructive fracking decision followed on the heels of U.S. President Joe Biden’s move to auction off oil and gas leases across 32.4 million hectares (80M ac) of the Gulf of Mexico. Old boys business as usual.
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MELBOURNE – Native forests need wildlife to thrive. We “wise apes” need native forests to save us from the man-made climate crisis. If we lose those forests, we die.
At the recent twenty-sixth climate talks in Glasgow, the world’s leaders refused pleas by environmental groups and forest biologists to protect earth’s best climate stabilisers, its native forests. Instead, the world’s negotiators delayed an agreement greenlighting another decade of forest plunder.
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Almost 400 million metric tons, or, the equivalent weight of the human population, of subsidised petroleum-based plastics are manufactured annually. Thirteen million metric tons of those plastics are entering the oceans and poisoning everything.
About 12 per cent of the world’s petroleum {12 million barrels daily (mbd)} is poured into plastics. By mid-century, unless corrective action is taken, that figure is predicted to grow to be almost 18 mbd.
Meanwhile, petrochemicals are expected to account for more than one-third of global oil demand growth by 2030 and approximately half of demand growth by 2050, according to the world’s energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency (IEA). At the current pace of consumption, plastic could surpass coal’s emissions by 2030.
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The Great Forest is a stunning book that is loaded with intriguing information and many beautiful images.
Ecologist David Lindenmayer along with photographers Chris Taylor, Sarah Rees and Steven Kuiter have presented the finest tabletop forest book that I have ever read.
These skilled Aussie forest defenders help us understand the mesmerising wet forests of Victoria’s ancient Central Highlands, and that the Indigenous Peoples are the rightful caretakers of these lands. This exquisite book showcases the majestic oxygen-making mountain ash, the world’s tallest flowering trees and many of its unique animals.
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GLASGOW – Old-growth forests are the planet’s largest and most carbon-rich biodiverse assemblages. Protecting these earthly temples is central to the survival of all life.
As the twenty-sixth United Nations climate talks get underway, the only issue that matters to Mother Earth and the two million known species is, how to slow down the infernal man-made climate heat, climate droughts, climate fires, climate floods and strengthening climate hurricanes and climate cyclones?
The answer is really quite simple. Reduce combustion emissions immediately. Dovetail all industries to produce a zero-combustion global economy by 2035. And end all fossil fuel subsidies, $5.9 trillion annually, without any further delay.
LONDON – Each year, fisheries are annihilating as many as one hundred trillion creatures. Additionally, fisheries’ bottom-trawlers are destroying the ocean floor, accelerating the man-driven Sixth Mass Extinction and unlocking the largest planetary carbon storehouse to cook everything alive.
This terrible hatred of marine life must come to an end otherwise all life is doomed. Thankfully, there is a salubrious alternative.
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O Forestry, second oldest crafty occupation,
Masterful gameboard manipulators, corrupters, evil planet-killers.
Timber barons rejoice, Mother Earth impoverished.
Destruction and bedlam in the afar,
Yet few will endure or ever witness irreversible desecration.
CHICAGO – Since 2000, the American bumblebee population has crashed and burned by 89 percent. These handsome, big, black and yellow bees are abandoning Earth en masse. Scandalous.
Once upon a time, their range encompassed southern Canada, much of continental United States and northern Mexico. Today, American bumblebees have died out in Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, Idaho, North Dakota, Oregon and Wyoming.
In New York State their population has plummeted by 99 percent. In nineteen other states across the Southwest and Midwest populations of American bumblebees have plunged by more than 50 percent.
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