Sunday, October 2, 2016

An audition for Apocalypse, The Musical



Thanks for the memory
Of butterfly and bird
Whose songs we barely heard
Our propensity for multiplicity
Our egos so absurd
How selfish it was

Thanks for the memory
Of nature that we spoiled
How determinedly we toiled
For acid seas And dying trees
Stewardship we foiled
How greedy it was

We thought we were the crown of creation
Or at least the pinnacle of evolution
We wonder if we’ve destroyed it
That’s extinction I guess
There’s no redress

Thanks for the memory
Of atmospheric pollution
Of climatic dissolution
And delicious megafauna
Who knew of any limitation?
Thanks Earth, so much

Thanks for the emptiness
Of hope that springs eternal
Ignorance infernal
Absurd WooWoo Tribal ballyhoo
Escape from the paternal
How meaningless it was

Thanks for the fantasy
Of free will inspiration
When biological determination
Lacking any shame
We’re all to blame
A divine abomination

We thought that agriculture
And our marvelous innovations
Made us homo sapiens sapiens
But our consciousness
Made mockery of us

Strictly entre nous
We Doomours are so blue
To think of all Our children’s dreams
That never will come true
Awfully glad Gaia we met you
Even though we’re through
Thank you
Thank you so much

~ The Three Doomours

With fond thanks, gratitude and apologies to the inimitable original...

 
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11 comments:

  1. UnknownOctober 3, 2016 at 2:08 AM

    LMAO. The boomer doomer swan song. Gawd love ya Gail.

    ReplyDelete
  2. PhorusOctober 4, 2016 at 4:20 AM

    Gail it is Phorus here. Thanks. I play this song on the piano all the time and have thought about new lyrics. Yours are the best. Love to Anne too!

    ReplyDelete
  3. RemonsterOctober 5, 2016 at 2:41 AM

    Absurd WooWoo Tribal ballyhooHa! Now THAT is how to write a lyric. Thanks for the chuckles, this is a tonic for the hurt.

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousOctober 13, 2016 at 7:42 AM

    Waxing lyric, a great antidote to despair! Thanks so much for all your work and posts, Gail.

    Tom

    ReplyDelete
  5. UnknownOctober 17, 2016 at 1:50 PM

    In New Ozone Alert, A Warning
    Of Harm to Plants and to People
    Scientists are still trying to unravel the damaging effects of ground-level ozone on life on earth. But as the world warms, their concerns about the impact of this highly toxic, pollution-caused gas are growing.


    http://e360.yale.edu/feature/ground_level_ozone_harming_plants_humans/3044/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Gail ZawackiOctober 17, 2016 at 2:21 PM

      Oh jeez those guys!!! - Thanks!!

      Let's see if they let my comment through moderation:

      "We just don't know".

      Yes, we do. The BACKGROUND concentration of ozone is increasing everywhere, and at over 40 ppb has crossed a tipping point which trees can no longer tolerate. Forests are dying all over the world from biotic attacks of insects, disease and fungus - epidemics that are taking advantage of vulnerable trees damaged from absorbing ozone. No wonder the CO2 level is increasing irrespective of decreasing emissions. The authors of "An Appalachian Tragedy" called it in 1998, and then were disparaged and muzzled by some of the very scientists quoted in this article as being too "alarmist". I, for one, have been alarmed for years at the extremely frightening GLOBAL trend of tree decline, an existential threat which those quoted above (with the exception of Dr. Fishman) have been poo-poo-ing to me personally since at least 2009.

      In 2014 I wrote them:

      I am aware of the EPA's call for stricter standards, but the reason they aren't forthcoming and aren't going to be is that scientists who know about ozone - like Dr. Jack Fishman who wrote "Global Alert" and gave the attached lecture titled with the rhetorical question "Tropospheric Ozone - Are We Creating a Toxic Atmosphere" - stop short of telling people exactly how dire and imminent the threat is...exactly as climate scientists ignore the rapid amplifying feedbacks and potential for methane hydrate escape. This fosters the dangerous fantasy that we have time - decades even - to reduce emissions, consumption and population growth.

      You and your colleagues are not only letting humanity down, you are letting down all the countless other species that face certain extinction due to pollution and climate change.

      So I stand by my words, "shame on you". You and others who study ozone are the only credible voices and you are not using them. Dr. Fishman is constructing butterfly gardens for children, and you are working with a useless political process in a handcuffed agency. I hope you can sleep at night once it becomes unavoidable even to you that the forests are rapidly dying before our eyes and pollution is killing them, sure as smoking cigarettes causes cancer.

      Delete
  6. AnonymousOctober 18, 2016 at 5:57 PM

    Hey Gail:

    others are beginning to say what you've been going on about for years now

    In new ozone alert, a warning of harm to plants and to people – ‘We are on track to return to the maximum ethane levels we saw in the 1970s in only about three more years’

    http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2016/10/in-new-ozone-alert-warning-of-harm-to.html

    [begins]
    For the last four years Jack Fishman, a professor of meteorology at St. Louis University, has guided the planting of five gardens in the Midwest, gardens that have a distinct purpose: to show the impacts of an invisible gas that is damaging and contributing to the premature death of forests, crops, and other plants — and also humans.

    "The idea of the ozone garden is that it is a canary in the coal mine," said Fishman, who recently planted one of the gardens at the Missouri Botanical Gardens. The snap beans, milkweed, coneflowers, and other plants that turn brown and sickly from exposure to ozone when it occurs at ground level, he said, are "natural bio-indicators showing this pollutant is harmful to anything that lives — a human, a squirrel, or plants. It's the only way to show the real-time impacts of something that's happening to our planet." [more]

    Tom

    ReplyDelete
  7. AnonymousOctober 18, 2016 at 5:57 PM

    Ah - someone beat me to it!

    Tom

    ReplyDelete
  8. Gail ZawackiOctober 18, 2016 at 6:33 PM

    Thanks Tom - I wrote back and forth with Dr. Fishman when I first discovered his book, which is recounted here along with some transcripts from his book and his youtube lecture:

    http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2014/07/there-goes-neighborhood.html

    While I respect his work tremendously I still think he is being too meek but then, I watched him ask a question about ozone and trees in a seminar with his colleagues and they basically shot him down. The peer pressure to not be "alarmist" is overwhelming.

    ReplyDelete
  9. AnonymousOctober 22, 2016 at 10:26 AM

    http://m.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=88980

    ReplyDelete
  10. michele/montrealNovember 7, 2016 at 10:43 AM

    I know this is a useless message. Just an excuse to say hi in my near total isolation but with elecytricity still. http://www.alternet.org/environment/theres-growing-ozone-crisis-flying-under-radar-and-it-could-be-disastrous-life-earth

    still "it could be disastrous". Until the end, nobody has the courage to say "IS disastrous".

    The actual total non-refreezing of the Arctic is certainly announcing freakish events very very soon. Until the end, not one word about it in the MSM.

    ReplyDelete

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