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?

How Real Conservatives Sacrifice

‘Let us sacrifice our today so that our children can have a better tomorrow.’  A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

To feed divinely-mandated population growth, we seek more intensive farming on increased acreage

We must abandon this foolish carbon tax idea that threatens an ever-fragile economic recovery

Sadly, we will not even be able to debate funding the cleanup of our surface waters right now

The savings of the thrifty must be sacrificed to no-strings-attached bailouts for the moneychangers

The Pygmies and the Inuit must help pay our dues, right along with the Orangs and the Bonobos

We ask that desert species permanently accept this new hotter, drier and windier order

Microscopic ocean life forms will simply have to adapt to consuming our rain of plastic particulates

Migrating elephants must stop feeding upon the crops we now must grow on their ancient pathways

We propose massive cuts to biodiversity to be offset by large increases in human numbers

Many un-cataloged rain forest species must be replaced by new bioengineered monocrops

To meet our taste for fish we must foster their extinction by driving up their prices

Corporate farms will be forced to degrade the soils to meet the nutritional needs of good families

Consumers must accept ecologically devastating imports which don’t work, then simply break

Trees need to begin migrating to survive this absolutely unpreventable, unproven change in climate

The frogs had best be making some kind of peace with their inevitable and imminent extinction

We are drafting a plan to pack ever more of our people into sprawling unmanaged ghettos

Healthcare spending must be slashed as it threatens such truly important items as defense

We must enforce the tacit global agreement to collectively bury our heads in the sand

Please grant your old jobs to foreigners and believe that the better ones come to you tomorrow

We ask that polar bears and musk oxen take Personal Responsibility for their adaptation

Nearly all of us must accept a uniformly low living standard in the name of globalization

It is not without some regret that we unveil our new energy independence through coal initiative

During these times of real crisis, noise and light pollution are simply not on our agenda

We must secretly violate your privacy to prevent more awful attacks we cannot mention

We ask mothers to carry PCBs, metals and hormones in their milk for the sake of our progress

Our people must bravely sacrifice their children’s futures to fulfill their own implanted desires

The songbirds shall be called upon to disappear from their shredded habitats everywhere

Our rivers will have to carry the burden of our billion points of unconscious toxic runoff

The last old growth forests will be asked to provide us with a few bad, but temporary logging jobs

Sales reps of all one true gods must demand blinder faith for empty promises of eternal salvation

Bankers will be asked to endure symbolic wrist-slappings as they grasp at more unaudited handouts

Oil companies must accept record profits on a declining supply yet subvert all energy alternatives

For the sake of leaving not one child behind, we seek a general dumbing down of all of society

We petition coal extractors to patriotically hold down costs thru non-remediated strip-mining

Regrettably, as His chosen people we must pursue a cowboy exceptionist foreign policy, in His name

In this time of shared sacrifice we ask for a continued suspension of our collective common sense