Three Degree Ecosutra
May/June 1989

I've heard that they used a Cray,
world's hugest supercomputer, in its bath
of liquid helium, shunting effortless electrons
at almost the speed of light. A vast calculation
recombining all that's known about the air
and sea and sun, physics, chemistry, the equations
of the planet. Thirty years. What if..

the forests keep burning, if the world keeps
burning, if everything that was alive,
tree, grass, coal, oil, dung, is eaten by capital;
reduced to smoke, growth, profit and
doom shit in the sky, holding the sun's heat?

What if there's three degrees of warming overall?
Just following the graph, just watching how
its been climbing for twenty years or so.

That's twenty-nineteen, not so long from here:
you'll be as old your mom and dad are now,
if you're still around. Your kids'll be
(work it out,) more or less your age.
Quite a few things will have changed,
one of them the North West Wind.

Think of those photographs of our blue world:
each year the curling fingerprint of cloud
of the North West Wind
moves towards the equator in winter,
following low pressure.
Now twist the temperature
only three degrees up,
and
the massive cyclone system shifts a little south
slips past Africa, and the Cape dries up.
The great western desert
strolls south from Namibia,
down through Namaqualand,
the West coast running dry,
species collapse,
storm and crop-failure,
hunger, communities disrupted,
dams without water, guns...

Down south to the Western Cape,
and the rains don't come:
towns down, jobs lost, no water!
The wheat stops growing.
The fynbos utterly destroyed,
cactus and succulent left
in the sandy soil.
No cattle.
Cape Town dies of thirst,
slowly,
with burning and blood.

The whole east coast gets much more hot and wet,
with choking humid air, sweat and fatigue, a swamp
with floods every year, and farmers learning to grow rice
and all of Africa's parasites in the water's warmth.
More people and fewer jobs,
storms and new weather!

I've heard it said that we'll drown in human shit
choking at the entrance to our own long night.
Profit. Profit and industrial policy....
Poor small women and men, limbs lopped
by the machine of history.

May all beings have freedom and the causes of freedom.
May all beings free themselves from oppression
and the causes of oppression,
working now and deep for liberation.

Now I invoke the blessing of Tara the green mother:
OM TARE TUTARE TURE SWAHA.
OM TARE TUTARE TURE SWAHA.
OM TARE TUTARE TURE SWAHA.