The Wordsmith's Forge

Here's an article about the rise and fall of Mayan civilization, likely due to climate change.

If you are a Torn World supporter, you can now read my poem "Neighboring Attractions."
When barriers fall, ecosystems meet.

If you like this poem and want to see more like it, please consider sending me credits or karma through Torn World's crowdfunding options.  Not a Torn World member, but still want to support the work? I have a permanent PayPal button on my LJ profile page.

Up for discussion over at torn_world is the article "Waters of the North" that ellenmillion and I are developing.  Feedback is welcome.

This poem came out of the October 2-3, 2012 Poetry Fishbowl.  It was inspired by a prompt from DW user jjhunter.  It has been sponsored by mdlbear.  You can read more about the thermohaline cycle and its potential for Epic Doom.

Humanity was warned of gluttony,
Yet still they drain the Earth and foul the Sea
Until the changing climate sets things free.

Leviathan awakens from her sleep
And rises from the cold and drowsy deep
With scores to settle, promises to keep.

The thermohaline cycle goes awry.

Humanity is left both high and dry.

This poem came out of the September 4, 2012 Poetry Fishbowl.  It was inspired by the_vulture.  It has been sponsored by Anthony & Shirley Barrette. 

Read about problems caused by clearcutting.  Explore the morality of tree spiking.  Understand how conservation creates jobs.

Choices branch out from each moment
like the twigs of a tree reaching toward the sky.
There are always options, alternatives
other things that might be done.

There is nothing wrong with harvesting trees
so long as the forest survives;
but level the forest and soon there will be
neither trees nor logging jobs.

Sabotage is the fine art of knowing
where to insert a monkeywrench into a system
without getting anyone hurt in the process.
It is safer to steal the chains from the saws
or pour sugar into the gas tanks of the bulldozers
than to pound spikes into tree trunks.

Begin, then, with the least damaging option --
but if the forests are going, going,
then start spiking trees before all of them are gone.

This is the most basic rule of self-preservation:
Don't saw off the branch you're standing on.
You must understand how your actions
will affect the future as time forks and unfurls.

The economy is not in competition with the environment.
The economy exists within  the environment;
without a healthy environment, there can be  no economy.
The economy is made of numbers, but so too
are the infinite fractal branches of the trees.

This poem came out of the August 7, 2012 Poetry Fishbowl.  It was inspired by a prompt from ellenmillion and sponsored by the general fund.

Legends warn of
the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,
but none of them are horses.

Mosquitoes fill the air with their angry whine,
carrying tropical diseases on the warming air.
Some of the mosquitoes are said to be genetically engineered,
or even mechanical, but the news insists those are only stories.

Fire ants build their hills with dust and tiny dinosaur bones,
sometimes three or four queens together in their fierce empires.
Apparently no one told them it was impossible,
and investigation faces formidable opposition.

Alligators submerge themselves in park ponds,
slink into sewers, drift northward like silent logs -- but
these logs have eyes, and they are always watching for a new niche.
A sewer is not so different from a swamp after all.

Emerald ash borers conceal themselves under bark,
hitching a hidden ride in firewood and craft projects.
They chew their way through whole forests, unchecked,
carried by mutters of "nobody will notice a few little sticks."

Myth cloaks the world like fog,
truths and half-truths and falsehoods
wandering lost in the lazy haze after twilight.
Boundaries shift and bend,
bringing forth monsters.

This poem came out of the August 7, 2012 Poetry Fishbowl.  It was inspired by prompts from the_vulture and rhodielady_47.  In case you're wondering about kudzu, it rapidly does this to forests.  The poem has been sponsored by laffingkat. 

While curious scientists
were probing Loch Ness and the Marianas Trench,
the kraken slunk away to the sunken city.

It emerged in a different form,
leafy and green as seaweed,
hairy as an otter pup.

It crept out of the water
and up the beach,
prehistory repeating itself.

It slogged through the forests,
wrapped itself around treetrunks,
and swallowed them whole.

Left in its wake were the shambling mounds
of the krakenwood, diversity strangled
and rotted into a homogenous green mass.

The krakenwood lifted its tendrils
to the warming wind, and shifted
inexorably northward.

In R'lyeh, the sunken city,
Dread Cthulhu gurgled a laugh
and beckoned to leviathan.

Food prices are expected to rise 3-4% next year due to the drought, a higher increase than usual.  Note that the government has been cutting funds for food stamps, too.

Western forests could see a century of drought, in which case, much of that territory will change from forest to scrubland.

Looking at my yard, I expect to lose some trees and shrubs.  I'm currently watering the contorta willow and the rowan tree, in hopes of salvaging those.  But I won't be surprised if they die anyhow, and there are other things turning brown too.  When I replant, I will probably choose different species. There's no point trying to grow something that can't withstand whatever the local conditions now are.  I'll discount things that were newly planted, though, and only count established plants as drought vulnerable.

 A skeptic finally decides that he has enough data to support humanocentric climate change.  So he's a real scientist after all.