Problem:

Sometimes prose is not enough to wake us up.

Solution:

Poetry

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When in the early 1800s the English poet William Blake saw the pollution caused by the nearby Albion coal-fired stream-powered flour mill, he included these verses in one of his poems.

And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.

Many others have followed him

In his15-stanza poem “Song of the Open Road, first published in 1856, American poet Walt Whitman, famous for his work “Leaves of Grass” writes

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,
It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

Tom Paxton an American folk singer-songwriter wrote “Whose Garden Was This?” for the first Earth Day in 1970. It was originally recorded on the album “6”, and was later covered by John Denver and was the first in a long line of songs that Denver recorded about the environment.

In 2018, Amanda Gorman, National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States wrote and declaimed “Earthrise” for The Climate Reality Project about the climate emergency and the action we must take to end it.

She also read out “The Hill We Climb” at the inauguration of President Jo Biden in January 2021. (Video at the top of this post)

What you can do: Write and communicate poetry about solutions for our Planet.

Visit us tomorrow for Solution 236: glass from oyster shells

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