A Man, a Former Environmental Activist Turned PR Consultant for Logging Companies, Defends His Choices

doi:10.3366/edinburgh/9780748696000.003.0015

Chapter

A Man, a Former Environmental Activist Turned PR Consultant for Logging Companies, Defends His Choices

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https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748696000.003.0015

Pages

100–102

Published:

January 2015

Extract

Voice:
The sky is blue. The fairybird is blue.
A great bird soars across the sky’s blue dome,
its upturned bowl of brightest, brilliant blue
above the treeline and the canopy.
The canopy is closed: dipterocarpus,
your timber-lumber, underneath whose crowns
smaller trees grow whose limbs form scaffolding
for creepers and climbers, herbs and smaller shrubs,
for the pitcher plant and the sun fern dipteris
whose print is found in pre-historic fossils.
Man:
The dog barks, the cow moos, the sheep goes baa.
Man sizes up the cow and sheep
and clucking hen – and then puts them to use.
Look, answer me this: if a tree falls in the forest
and no one’s there to see it, will it burn?
Can it be stripped and pulped, packed and exported?
Does it make props and tiles? Or does it rot?
Voice:
The sky is blue. The distant sea is blue.
The moon’s torque drags that salty wedge each day
up through the mangrove forests to the east,
where a little snail will climb its tree each morning
descending at evening – not to escape the tide
but through an evolved, coincidental rhythm.
The mangrove trees drop twigs and other litter
that crabs and fungi break to phosphorus-rich
mulch for the zooplankton; bottom-feeders
who feed, in turn, carnivorous fish and birds
Man:
… who feed the bigger fish who then feed man,
the food chain’s top banana, cream of the crop
who pens in shrimp ponds and rips out raw gas.
Glory be his brain and spinal column!
His vertebrate strength and pelvis-threatening skull!
… You know, I see your point, when I was young
I thought that I would live … reactively;
cultivate plots, grow only what I need
but ‘need’ as a concept proved prone to expand.
Voice:
The sky is blue. The flycatcher is blue.
The king quail’s breast is blue. The forest hosts
dark-handed gibbon, yellow-banded snake,
the snub-nosed monkey and the flying fox
which scents, at range, the lowland fruit and blossom
crash-landing into trees to feed on nectar.
The trees grow buttresses. Some hollow limbs
house porcupines and rats whose pungent waste
is milled by the little creatures in the soil
then tilled back to the red loam of the earth.
Man:
When I was young I thought the life I’d lead
would be passionate, nomadic, self-contained
with my nine bean rows and hives of buzzy bees …
I’d keep a few goats, use only what I need
– but oh how the boundaries of sufficiency
shift ever outwards. That’s a fact of life.
Nests must be feathered, little mouths be fed.
And from such seeds do corporations grow.
Voice:
Here every kind of crawling rustling species,
from stinkhorn fungus to the giant flower,
jostles in constant restless composition
but the tree and its mast is root and branch of all.
The tree in its cycle is gregarious
so isopod crustaceans crowd in root-tips
and convex leaves shield colonies of ants.
Man:
So the pitcher plant lures insects to its lip
and inside larvae browse over their corpses.
The nematode worm and mosquito feed like this.
The forest hosts the opportunist killer
as the fig-tree hosts fig-wasp and parasite.
When man clears the trees he makes his destiny
alongside the timber-yards and paper-mills,
and the scorch on the mountain is his signature.
Voice
The sky is blue. The endless sky is blue
Man:
The smoke hung above the chimney stacks is blue.
Voice:
The glinting fly and darting bird are blue.
Man:
The ink on my ledger’s bottom line is blue.
Leontia Flynn

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Contents

A Man, a Former Environmental Activist Turned PR Consultant for Logging Companies, Defends His Choices

Extract

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Contents

A Man, a Former Environmental Activist Turned PR Consultant for Logging Companies, Defends His Choices

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