Mountain Sky (2008)
How could you not have known?
What more evidence did you need that your lives, your comfortable lives, would do so much damage to ours?
Did you think you could wage war against nations without waging war against people and against he earth?
Didn't you wonder what we would drink, once you had poisoned the aquifers?
Didn't you wonder what we would breathe, once you poisoned the air?
Did you stop to ask how we would be safe, in a world poisoned by war?
Did you think it all belonged to you---this beautiful earth?
You who loved your children, did you think we could live without birdsong and swaying trees?
And if you knew, how could you not care? What could matter more to you than your children, and their babies?
How could a parent destroy what is life-giving and astonishing in her child's world?
And if you knew, and if you cared, how could you not act?
What excuses did you make?
And now, what would you have us do?
-- Excerpt from Kathleen Dean Moore's "The Pine Island Paradox," p. 118
(Copyright 2004).