“Corporations spend $2 billion each year targeted specifically on the young, intending to lure them into a life of unthinking consumption. [ . . . .] Young people on average can recognize over 1000 corporate logos but only a handful of plants and animals native to their places.”
-- David W. Orr
in Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations
in Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations
Our goal was not to save the forest
and animals we knew
but to give them more time
so we jacked up pickups
and stole the wheels,
turned a tractor upside down
in the creek,
moved survey markers
around already-built homes.
We were nine so we painted our faces
like warriors and, at the end,
when “developers” destroyed our valley
we were still whole enough
to sit on a hill and cry.
Scott T. Starbuck's newest poems are at poetryfish.com; his new chapbook, The Warrior Poems, was one of six finalists of over five hundred entries at the 2009 Pudding House Poetry Chapbook Competition, and will soon be published by Pudding House. His creative nonfiction essay, "Another Short Ode to Kurt Cobain in the Time of Decay of the American Empire," is forthcoming in issue 11: "Life in a Time of Contraction" at drunkenboat.com.
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