If A Tree Falls...

From Earth in the Balance, by Al Gore

“Most biologists believe that the rapid destruction of the tropical rain forests, and the irretrievable loss of the living species dying along with them, represent the single most serious damage to nature now occurring. While some of the other injuries we are inflicting on the global ecological system may heal over the course of hundreds or thousands of years, the wholesale annihilation of so many species in such a breathless moment of geological time represents a deadly wound to the integrity of the earth’s painstakingly intricate web of life, a wound so nearly permanent that scientists estimate that recuperation would take 100 million years.”

“In the daily battle between a growing, always ravenous civilization and an ancient ecosystem, the ecosystem is losing badly.”

Gore adds: “The key to reversing the current pattern of destruction and beginning the process of restoration and recovery is to dramatically change attitudes and to remove the constant pressures exerted by population growth, greed, short-term thinking and misguided development.”

rain forest
mist and mystery
teeming green
green brain facing lobotomy
climate control center for the world
ancient core of coexistence
hacked by parasitic greedhead scam
from Sarawak to Amazonas
Costa Rica to mangy B.C. hills
cortege ribbon of fallen timber
what kind of currency grows in these new deserts,
these brand new floodplains?
if a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear?
does anybody hear the forest fall?
cut and move on
cut and move on
take out trees
take out wildlife at the rate of a species every single day
take out people who’ve lived like this for a hundred thousand years
inject a billion burgers’ worth of beef
grain eaters
methane dispensers
through thinning ozone, waves fall on wrinkled Earth
gravity, light, ancient refuse of stars
speak of a drowning
but this, this is something Other
busy monster eats dark holes in the spirit world
where wild things have to go
to disappear
forever
if a tree falls in the forest
does anybody hear?

- Bruce Cockburn, Toronto, 1988

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