World Climate March
PublishedSeptember 18, 2014 CategoryArts Social Action

World Climate March

The signs are that, on 21st September, unprecedented numbers of people will march for decisive Action on Climate Change in New York, London and over 2800 locations world wide.

Arts and Social Action will be there, on both sides of the Atlantic, and we urge our brothers and sisters , individually and in arts communities across the world, to take part, stand up to be counted, on this most pressing issue of our times.

We have commented before on the significance of Rachel Carson’s 1962 ‘SilentSpring ’ – now over 50 years old – for the first stirrings of a world ecological movement; and suggested the special sensitivities and obligations which it implies for us in the world of arts. We know now that the count-down to potential disaster has already begun.

Here, from my poem ‘ All Shades of Green’ are three stanzas which attempt to capture the deeper human origins of the problem. Feel free to use it but, above all , March for the Birthright of our Children on Sunday …

What ignorance induced the guilt
On which our marketeers have built
Such parodies of what we know
We humans are, can be, and owe?
On what naivety the telly
Prescribed this primacy of belly?

What idiocy oiled the plunder,
Too little wisdom with our wonder?
Robbed ‘freedom’ of that saner stuff,
Which knows ‘excessive’ from ‘enough’ ?
To dream our dreams without the meanness
That mocks the green-horn in our greenness.

Not one more child to die of famine,
Dolphin of our filth he swam in,
Penguin from our oily spillage,
Jungle, strangled by our pillage;
Not one more endangered species
Suffocating in our faeces,
Tributary, beach or skua
Asphyxiated in our sewer!
All die, bequeathing last regards
To our rapacious credit cards;
To ‘choice’ that lives on borrowed worth
And debts, long underpaid to Earth.

From ‘All Shades of Green
Ralph Windle . World Climate March, 2014.

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Synopsis: Arts Social Action