Poetry is the ecology of memory. ~ David St. John
1. Remember when you were a kid on the first Earth Day, how you decided to celebrate it by
walking your neighborhood to pick up roadside trash?
2. It’s gone, the alpine lake where you and your dogs love to swim after a long hike on one of
Alaska’s endless summer days. It’s dried up, a moonscape of cracked mud where once the blue-
winged teal nested and Ptarmigan Peak reflected.
3. And remember in the 80’s during the first oil crisis, when everyone was talking about solar roof
panels, the government was giving tax credits for them, and you worked on that North Carolina
Solar Law Commission, on the legal implications of people shading their neighbor’s solar panels,
and we all thought that was the problem we needed to solve?
4. Now the Milne ice shelf has collapsed into the Arctic ocean, and the Thwaites and Pine Island
glaciers have broken loose in Antarctica.
5. You don’t remember the last time Beaver Lake froze, only when we were kids it did, and now it
would be considered a miracle that not even your entire Catholic grade school could conjure. All
those ice skates rotting in Asheville basements.
6. But do you remember how the frogs sounded in the marsh, the one kind of amphibian that
survives in Alaska, their lilting songs like the rounds at summer camp, and your boy’s hand in
yours as you stood at the edge and tried to count how long they sang?
7. You do remember when you were a kid like him, and the problem was roadside trash, and on
that first Earth Day, you walked your neighborhood, found one tossed can. How it shone in
sunlight, the glimmer like a ray to your heart telling you the Earth needed you, and what joy that
you could be of use.
8. The marsh is dried up, isn’t it? And your boy now a man who doesn’t want to think about what
used to be here, and why would you want to remind him of what was taken from him before he
could fight for it?
9. And remember, do not forget, that you knew forty years ago, we all knew about global warming
and habitat loss and extinction, we knew what we were doing and how to stop it, remember
Soft Energy Paths and Small is Beautiful and all those books we read in college showing us the
path out of this chaos. And now forty years later, you stand with your hands hanging by your
side, and look back at decades of working hard to help the Earth, and what has come of it, things
are far worse now than that ten-year-old girl who picked up a soda can could ever have
imagined.
10. But do you remember, do you remember, how thick the forests were, how many-layered and
fecund, how melodious the morning chorus, how dark the skies at night, how the Milky Way
arced overhead and fireflies lit the night, and you didn’t think about forgetting, you didn’t think
it could ever leave?
