npm 2022: humans helping humans solve the climate crisis

I'm a tree hugger through and through. I could easily write 30 days of poems about how glorious is the grand and minute beauty of our planet's nature, and there would be plenty of interesting metaphor and emotional connection to the flora and the fauna that is endangered by climate change--and not a lot of narrative, and not a lot of people on the scene besides myself. 

 "It isn't a matter of moving climate change further up our priority list. The reason we care about [climate change] is because it affects everything that's already at the top of our priority list: our health, our families, our jobs and the economy, the well-being of our communities... To care about a changing climate we don't have to be a tree hugger or an environmentalist (though it certainly helps); as long as we are humans alive today, then who we already are, and what we already care about, gives us all the reasons we need."

 

Katharine Hayhoe, "How to Talk About Climate Change,"

ALL WE CAN SAVE: TRUTH, COURAGE, AND SOLUTIONS FOR THE CLIMATE CRISIS

But as Favianna Rodriguez says in her essay "Harnessing Cultural Power," we need to

"Make human stories to move human beings.  Human stories are more powerful for inciting action than counting carbon or detailing melting glaciers."

 

So my challenge to myself this April is to center our fabulous, ferocious human stories in the poems I write in response to ALL WE CAN SAVE, the collection of essays and poetry edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson.  I'll work principally with narrative, bringing what I'm learning about how we can save our foolish human asses from ourselves by connecting to the people--including us--whose very existence is threatened, now and in the near future, by unchecked climate chaos.

 

Come on along, humans!

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April 1 - "Wakanda Doesn't Have Suburbs" - Kendra Pierre-Louis