This is dedicated to all who have read the three-inch thick Texas Master Naturalist training manual.
If you aren’t familiar with slam poetry, it is like some of Bob Dylan’s 60s/early 70s ballads in that it is born out of social consciousness.
Disturbances
by Anita Westervelt
Do I have a cause?
Did I ever have a cause?
Did I ever really have a WORTHY cause?
And I’m wondering, is a pet peeve a cause?
‘Cause I’ve got plenty of those.
Junk mail.
Landfills.
Cement.
Will the world someday be completely covered
By cement, concrete, or some other sort of pavement
We don’t know about yet?
Succession, progression, digression
The structure and function shift
Of biodiversity
Junk mail wasting our trees,
Junk mail filling our minds,
Junk mail filling our landfills
Trashing our streets,
Trashing our minds;
Cover it up, Cover it up
Cover it ALL up
With a layer of cement
Drought and doubt,
Riparian buffers, banks
Isolated distributaries
Interconnectedness of all living things
To each other and to their environment
Paleontology, biota, stratigraphic
Ethnobotony, coleopterist
Tectonic extant terrapins
Herbivores, carnivores, insectivores
Climate, weather and convergent evolution
Variations on
Structure, function and energy flow
100th monkey, the butterfly effect
Disambiguation deterministic
Competitive exclusion
Unintentional consequences
Subterranean termite blues
Junk mail wasting our trees,
Junk mail filling our minds,
Junk mail filling our landfills
Trashing our streets,
Trashing our minds;
Cover it up, Cover it up
Cover it ALL up
With a layer of cement
Ecological principles,
Of the earth’s ecosystems
Occur within a temporal setting
Of networks of interacting species
With far-reaching pieces.
Unique organisms and abiotic conditions
Influencing, constraining, predating
Disturbances
Ubiquitous ecological events
Influence population,
Community and dynamics.
Size and shape and spatial relationships
Of habitat patches on the landscape
Affect the structure and function of
All the tiny ecosystems.
Junk mail wasting our trees,
Junk mail filling our minds,
Junk mail filling our landfills
Trashing our streets,
Trashing our minds;
Cover it up, Cover it up
Cover it ALL up
With a layer of cement
or
an invasive species.