How Much Progress Is Sustainability Worth?

“This proposal places too much burden on working families in terms of jobs and money” – Senate Majority Leader

How much sulfur emission will it take to keep our happy little family safe and warm

Sweetheart, is that nest of songbirds really worth Daddy’s job down at the cube farm

We don’t actually need any of these butterflies to keep the kids in school, do we, dear

Won’t they still make those happy-ever-after children’s movies even if all the frogs have disappeared

Honey, it really is a choice between our family and those cuddly-looking little bunnies

You see, if they get to live then we might have to change our traditional happy family lifestyle

Nature is real nice and all but daddy’s got to make money to buy us all of this nice stuff

And, you know I would chop forests, bulldoze meadows, poison rivers and stripmine hills just for you

How many good jobs is it worth to dump sex-changing chemicals into the little stream by our house

Just ask lucky pig farm employees where their antibiotics are building stronger MRSA for us all

What do the unemployed loggers say even as their clear cuts still silt up rivers and kill the salmon

How many caribou would I wipe out to still be able to commute alone to work to keep you happy

Little darling, we’re ripping up the fields to plant fake grass to help you grow up safe and secure

Daddy’s got to run that bulldozer so Mom can buy our white bread, chips and hot dogs

Environmental preservation is one of those luxuries our family just can’t afford right now, sweetie

After all, how many steady jobs is an inedible and ugly little desert fish really worth to us at home

Yes my daughter, the roof I put over your head today may indeed add a bit of PCB to your breast milk

But, if we don’t get food on the table today, our kids wont even be here to enjoy what we preserved

So we eat this tortured beef to help bring costs in line with our ever-decreasing spending power

What’s a bit more Grand Canyon smog if it helps attain coal-fired energy independence for our kids

Right, so we should regulate commerce because some exotic mussel may unbalance the Great Lakes

So what should we give up for soil microbes some study contends are so important to agriculture

Look, we’re barely getting by and you say we need to sacrifice more just to clean up the rain

I’ll trade a years work now for your sake against your distant future, my bright-eyed son

Hey, we’re just folks trying to get by and we got to eat and drive to work. Well, don’t we?

That 5 billion lbs of poultry waste drained into the Chesapeake each year keeps chicken in our pot

In the meantime, we only know the house loan just readjusted and the kids need new school clothes

So what if my job doesn’t really yield more than just cheap, takeout environmental destruction

Its worth building shoddy, overpriced dream homes if I can make the payments on the family pickup

Baby, we’re voting for coal and oil so you can grow up and have kids of your own

What percent unemployment would we tolerate just to make the wetlands safe for frogs

How many need go hungry so a few elitists might get to see the stars and experience natural silence

Sing along with Mommie now Drill-Baby-Drill, that’s it honey, once again, Drill-Baby-Drill

Look, we can barely afford our Cell and Cable bills, much less some liberal wacko’s carbon tax

OK, so we just turn down our air-conditioners, keep the windows closed, burn coal and vegout

After all, if we cant put food on the table what’s that fairytale ecosphere worth anyways?

Aliens Judge Earth And Humans From Space

This whirling green and blue planet, sparkling with white clouds, bright and shimmering seas,

dazzling icecaps, dusty brown deserts, wrinkled snowy mountain ranges and twinkling city lights

Smudged by the smoke from wood fires and factories, wrinkled by roads,

pock-marked by settlements, scratched by the hands of the creatures that evolved here

Full of life from its poles down to its deepest ocean trenches,

its surface animated by the heat stored within,

that amazingly thin atmosphere, rich in oxygen, too rich in our CO²

More than a miracle, though not all that it could be,

spot of life in the emptiness, isolated in a blackness so many light years across,

journeys with its sun ‘til the end of its days

Tilting its axis two times in each orbit, white snow filling the shadow,

as green effloresces under the sun,

whirling in tandem with a huge, silvery moon which brings the tides rippling

and rising in its orbital phases,

seemingly everywhere a beautifully complex set of natural reactions

And one there is of all the species that has cataloged and explained, hypothesized and sermonized, philosophized and capitalized, worshiped and desecrated,

whose work and whose effluvia can be seen from above.

So what would they think looking down from above?

is it a horrid little nest to be kicked hard and snuffed,

or a pleasant, shady grove to pause and relax in?

You be the judge in your home quite safe and warm,

or you make the call tending your fire, poverty-stricken and forlorn,

You show those strangers your wondrous technology, art and possessions,

or hold out your child to them, filthy and emaciated,

and look away as you mumble a confused and meaningless confession