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

100^th 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.