Black Cockatoos are Starving

Over the last couple of weeks we've been noticing a dramatic shift in the usual flight patterns of white-tailed black cockatoos over the valley. These magnificent, endangered birds are known as Ngolyenok in Noongar, and as Carnaby's in settler-speak. Sometimes we see 'Baudin's' as well, but usually on the other side of the river to the south-west. I say flight patterns 'over' the valley because, with rare exceptions, this has been the case for all the Sept/Oct periods (from the end of Djilba to the beginning of Kambarang) we've been here across fifteen years. 

Usually it's a migratory flight from north of here, with occasional pauses/perching before moving on to nesting hollows in wandoos at various points around the region (frequently bulldozed or cut down... it's an ongoing struggle to preserve nesting trees), or onward to the coastal plain to feed on banksia seeds. But this year is dramatically different — the 'wee-oo/wee-oo' calls have become a string of presence rather than snippets of audio. They have flown over, arced back, and hung around. Wing to wing, shadow by shadow, they are low overhead in cycles. 

We wondered if they were making use of flooded gum hollows down at the base of the valley for nesting — these flooded gums were largely destroyed years ago by a devastating 'controlled burn' that got out of hand and ignited dead leaves in forks and took out hundreds-of-years-old trees. But some remain basically intact, and others have grown back from the base of what remains of trunks (essentially chimneys). 

We are hearing the cockatoos constantly, and they are looping overhead throughout the day as they search for food. They are using York gums here as roosts (unusual), and astonishingly have started feeding on wild oats from the ground! I've also noticed on neighbouring 'properties' (what a word!) that they are foraging on animal fodder/feed in paddocks. 

I was quite literally writing a poem about this earlier today, when Tracy sent me an article by Emma Young and quoting botanist Kingsley Dixon about the paucity of food on the coastal plain for cockatoos visiting Boorloo/Perth due to the heat-stressed banksias not seeding as usual (late rains were another complicating factor) — further consequences of human-induced climate change. Everything suffers. To think that Chalice mining would wipe out cockatoo habitat to mine 'green metals' at Julimar (nearby)!— the contradictions are legion. 

As cockatoos starve, they search for alternative food sources, but this is an act of desperation. Unless we stop the war on nature (and on human life itself) in all its forms, we consign species after species to death. We simply don't have that right, and need to act on what we observe. A life of recording change brought about by human rapacity (and indifference) in poem after poem is confronting even for me. And the poem here speaks about the work necessary for all of us, myself included.

Ngolyenok —White-tailed Black Cockatoos — Have Become Part of My Quotidian

 

The feeding honk of cockatoos

that could be ‘contentment’ or pragmatism

is reworking my brain’s storage facilities,

 

multiplying in memory beyond the  2.5 petabytes

the Scientific American claims as capacity,

opening new pathways into non-neural tissue.

 

My hands and feet as repositories, to do the work.

Where for fifteen years they have passed over

at this time of year, cockatoos are demi-resident

 

and claiming something deeper, or opening

new possibilities given the impacts on their

habitat. Now I hear (more memory

 

will be required) that banksia woodlands

down on the coastal plain have failed to seed,

and these honking grazing cockatoos

 

are desperately feeding on wild oats

that grow outside the spray zones. I will

delay grass cutting a little longer

 

so they can augment their memories

with new possibilities, new scenes.

Then maybe the banksia will rise again,

restore memory to its optimal setting.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Eclogues 3

           John Kinsella

A third and final post (for the time being) on eclogues. This is an intertextual eclogue I wrote around May last year making use of an Emily Brontë poem. There's a conversation going on with the text and contexts of the original Brontë poem, but there's also a commentary on eco-collapse. It should be noted that by the time Emily died in 1848, the Industrial Revolution had so accelerated Anthropocene climate change that she was embedded in the damage in ways that might have induced a sublimated form of anxiety about 'human progress' if not a material resistance because of awareness. 

Mind you, it was only eight years later that Eunice Newton Foote made observations about climate and carbon dioxide, and towards the end of the century (1896) when Svante Arrhenius noted the effect carbon dioxide could have on temperatures on earth. So even though there's an absurdity implicit in culture jamming across very different eras, it's maybe not so absurd when we consider the import of 'progress'. Juxtaposing Brontë's (anomalous in many ways) 'conservative' politics in conversation with an (Audenesque) 'age of anxiety' resistance voice is belied by the far-sightedness of her insights into the self with regard to 'nature', and the deep passion for the interconnectedness of life. 

This is not a song competition à la Virgil's Third Eclogue (which drew on Theocritus, of course), but rather a 'song fusing': a discussion that becomes the figurative annealing of a problem that goes back to the mass destruction of forests, the rise of metals, and the entrenching of the military state in all its forms. There's no third speaker in this poem acting as judge, but maybe the reader is playing that role: as much over their own role in climate change and eco-destruction as over the validity of the two voices. 

Over the years I have used intertext a great deal, but as I always note, there are problems attached to doing so. Brontë isn't given a choice, of course, but I think the need of the planet outweighs such proprieties. As one who opposes AI usage of writers' work but am also opposed to anyone owning words or even combination of words, it might seem straightforward that I believe such jamming is an automatic 'right'. Further, as I use what I call 'templating' to intertext with 'canonical' works in order to contest the control mechanisms that deliver them to us as 'authoritative' (in whatever way), it might seem that I am entrenched in this 'freedom'. 

But it's more complex than this: there are many texts I'd never touch (especially if I felt it culturally appropriative), and when I do it can be either out of massive respect or massive disgust. It's not an easy picture. Suffice it to say in this instance that Emily Brontë's poetry accompanies me everywhere I go (I literally carry her collected poems with me everywhere). Oh, and competition has been a big part of the destruction of the biosphere. There is no competitiveness in this!

Eclogue With Emily Brontë’s ‘Shall earth no more inspire thee’

 

 

EB: Shall earth no more inspire thee,

Thou lonely dreamer now?

Since passion may not fire thee

Shall Nature cease to bow?

 

JK: I speak plainly: I’ve been keeping

records of failure, of diminishing rainfall

            and defoliation, of contaminated rivers

and erosion. Anti-inspiration.

 

EB: Thy mind is ever moving

In regions dark to thee;

Recall its useless roving—

Come back and dwell with me.

 

JK: I’m working on it. Where

I come from and don’t belong,

            I am trying to save a forest

from a ‘green metals’ miner.

 

EB: I know my mountain breezes

Enchant and soothe thee still—

I know my sunshine pleases

Despite thy wayward will.

 

JK: They do, maybe now

more than ever, but facts mess

            with the imagery. There

are mountains being converted to ore.

 

EB: When day with evening blending

Sinks from the summer sky,

I’ve seen thy spirit bending

In fond idolatry.

 

JK: I idolise the earth,

not the idols of capital —

            a ‘summer’s sky’

is a broken thesaurus.

 

EB: I’ve watched thee every hour;

I know my mighty sway,

I know my magic power

To drive thy griefs away.

 

JK: True, I rely on you.

But there’s less room for rhyme

            outside of advertising:

gadgets, oil particulate, fate.

 

EB: Few hearts to mortals given

On earth so wildly pine;

Yet none would ask a heaven

More like this earth than thine.

 

JK: Yes, that’s it  — ask no more

of heaven than we have around us,

            or had... going going but not gone.

A tree lost it seems too easy to forget.

 

EB: Then let my winds caress thee;

Thy comrade let me be—

Since nought beside can bless thee,

Return and dwell with me.

 

JK: Seems like we’re arguing

when we’re not — the flight

            of a pigeon is as glorious

as that of a goshawk. I love both.

 

 

            John Kinsella with Emily Brontë

Anyone interested in my eclogue work might look at poetry collections such as The Hunt, Visitants, Peripheral Light, The New Arcadia, Supervivid Depastoralism and The Pastoraclasm (essentially a book of eco-eclogues).

Short Play for the Protection of Native Forests Under Assault by 'Green Metals' Miners in Western Australia

 

After Deductions: an interventionist play for Julimar Forest

            by John Kinsella for open and free use

 

Three figures: two protesters and a reporter who lifts a mask (one side Tragedy and one side Comedy) to his/her/their face as he/she/they speak/s.

 

Reporter: Only two of you? Where are the rest of you?

 

Protester 1: Out of sight out of mind.

 

Protester 2: The town has been bought with water slides and the promise of jobs.

 

Protester 1: Not all of the town... not all of the district.

 

Protester 2: No... and more will join us in time... it just needs a seed... a nucleus for the protest to form around.

 

Reporter: And you’re it... looks like you’re setting up and in for the long haul.

 

Protester 1: Yes. We stand with you, forest.

 

Reporter: Why do you address the forest as if it’s a person?

 

Protester 1: It is an entity, an organism. It lives and breathes and is full of the living and the breathing...

 

Protester 2: and the transpiring... The CEO suggests the forest’s death will be a ‘net positive’ for the environment.

 

Protester 1: All those rare earths down below the root systems...

 

Protester 2: ...to be unearthed.

 

Reporter: The paper will say that it’s good for jobs good for the state good for business and an act of...

 

Protester 2: ...decarbonisation.

 

Protester 1: As easy as that... forest gone and more machines more consumables all weighed up...

 

Reporter: ... you means the feather against the heart...

 

Protester 1: No, that’s a ritual from ancient Egypt and this is Noongar boodjar and if you don’t listen and learn, if you don’t understand the stories of this country you’ll never find the language of care...

 

Protester 2: ...or loss.

 

Protester 1: The language of country the languages of an ecosystem are not fiscal are not profit and loss are not the triumph of capital as the biosphere collapses...

 

Protester 2: ... it is of the life you would erase would excavate would convert into batteries so the consuming can be eked out a little longer.

 

Reporter: So, you are saying what? That we should give up phones and cars?

 

Protester 2: We could... at least give up some of them cut back make do with a local life more and more...

 

Protester 1: I am for changing how we live entirely... minimising impact on what’s left of the world’s ecosystems... reducing the hypocrisies of our lives.

 

Reporter: Seems easy to say out here, with the cockatoos calling across the treetops, and the wattlebirds making comments.

 

Protester 1: Which is the point, really, isn’t it?

 

Reporter: The police will remove you when the time comes.

 

Protester 1: They will come and they will do the state’s bidding which is in the company’s interest. It’s always the same.

 

Reporter: You’ve done this before?

 

Protester 2: We have to... some of us have to be witnesses... people will come when there’s media attention and get roused up and then drift back to their phone-screens, the pressures and pleasures of their own lives... only a few of us will stay and then no one will see the last patch of forest vanish other than the miners themselves.

 

Protester 1: Who witnesses Alcoa eating the jarrah forests at an horrendous rate...? The bauxite craving... it’s as if even the most committed of us give in, fatigued. And the company recruits zoologists and ‘environmentalists’ [the protester exaggerates scare quotes in the air...] to exonerate them, to make it all okay, to let governments and their departments pretend they care... while those apologists convince themselves they are making the best of things... that if it weren’t for them, it’d be worse...

 

Protester 2: Worse being such a flexible word....

 

Protester 1: ...and then no one is there to see us witnessing... we become vulnerable... we are disposable. We have been shot at by logger and miners. Fact.

 

Reporter: That would have made a story... something to latch on to. You should have recorded...

 

Protester 1: There were no mobile phones when that happened... and we wouldn’t have been carrying them anyway.

 

Reporter: Which goes to show how vital technology can be in bringing attention to environmental issues. But this story needs that kind of human interest... otherwise it just sounds like a rant.

 

Protester 1: And easy to dismiss because it’s ‘just a rant’. But it’s all chicken and the egg...

 

Reporter: What do you mean?

 

Protester 1: The tech is why the forests vanish, why the mines are made in the first place.

 

Reporter: But you’ve got to get your story out there.

 

Protester 2: We have to stop the mine. The forest is an organism made up of innumerable organisms. It is part of the lungs of the earth. It is the home of so many creatures... and it has its own spirit as well.

 

Protester 1: And we destroy ourselves by destroying it.

 

Reporter: The CEO of Chalice Mining would disagree.

 

Protester 1: Well, as someone once said, ‘He would, wouldn’t he.’

 

Reporter: You mean Mandy Rice-Davies regarding Lord Astor, that seems a bit inappropriate.

 

Protester 1: No, I mean Tree Climber, a protester from the Hawke Block protest decades ago who was referring to a logger who said that a felled old growth tree served people better through what it provided than a standing one. These trees are entire ecosystems within ecosystems... they support much more than the human... and people can’t quite accept that they’re also essential to the human wherever and however that human might be living.

 

Reporter: Seems like a bit of a long-term profession, this protesting... I mean, it’s just opinion, really... it’s not an exact science...

 

Protester 2: ...unlike, say, journalism, mining, making weapons, being a politician, running a business, playing footy? And when we do present the ‘facts and figures’, they’re dismissed or manipulated... money and power control the science, control the data and how it’s used. Many of the people we oppose weren’t so long ago denying there was even such a thing as human-induced climate change.

 

Protester 1: They are opportunists...

 

Reporter: Who? Name names?

 

Protester 1: Speaking in general... about the mining lobby... especially the coal miners, but not exclusively.... their arguments... their declarations adapt to fit market circumstances and the ‘sensitivities’ [again, those exaggerated scare quotes in the air] of investors. You’re not dragging us into that trap... you do the research... isn’t that your job?

 

Reporter: Really, what bring the attention of mums and dads and families is people speaking they can identify with...

 

Protester 2: ...I am not sure what that means... no mum or dad is the same as any other and whatever anyone’s identity or beliefs or ethnicity the well-being of the biosphere is their right and their concern... we are not trying to appeal to a particular demographic, we are trying to save the forest.

 

Protester 1: ...we’re only speaking for the forest because there’s no one else to speak for it... we do not possess it, we don’t want to recolonise it... we want it to have rights and we want the traditional owners to have a say over country they know how to live with and preserve and respect. We learn respect from their respect.

 

Reporter: Sounds like someone’s shooting in there.

 

Protesters [together]: We hear it all the time... we see the four-wheel drives with spotlights... the shooters threaten us, yell abuse.

 

Reporter: You’re both poets, I am told.

 

Protesters: We are.

 

Reporter: Maybe you could read a poem about chuditches? I am told this is the healthiest and most robust population — or repopulation programme — of these carnivorous marsupials?

 

Protesters: That’s true, and they are incredible animals... but the forest is full of so many incredible animals and plants.

 

Reporter: Well, will you read something for me to share with our listeners?

 

Protester 1: There are so many ironies and contradictions in doing this.

 

Protester 2: But we’ve got to speak, haven’t we?

 

Protester 1: Yes... this is the season Makuru... the wet and cold months... and we would like the seasons to stay as close to what they were as possible... for the damage done to the biosphere means a breakdown of the seasons... only the nights remain as they were... and days as long as they were.

 

Protester 2: And the argument that the destruction of this 28 000-hectare conservation park or any section of it will be for the benefit of the environment is specious. Every miner of rare earths makes this argument to suit their balance sheet and their hope of wealth.

 

Protester 1: They pat themselves on the back that they’re doing it for the good of humanity when they greatly benefit from it personally.

 

Protester 2: Accruing wealth...

 

Protester 1: ...and power.

 

Protester 2: After deductions, they will live their lives in a denuded world quite well. They will meet their goals.

 

Reporter: The wind is lifting... it’s quite biting...

 

Protester 2: But the days have been much warmer and there’s been little rain this ‘winter’. The forest is stressed and the miners have been diamond-drilling deep, working their colonial patches: Hartog...

 

Protester 1: Janz, Dampier...

 

Protester 2: Baudin... not that they give a toss for Baudin’s cockatoo... that little bit of colonial renaming isn’t going to stress them...

 

Reporter: Anyway, poem, and I will leave you to it... I have another assignment to get to down in the city... gee, it really sounds like the sea, doesn’t it... I mean the wind through the wandoo and marri trees...

 

Protesters: ...through the forest... it does, doesn’t it... an inland sea full of life... and right now they are drilling to ascertain the boundlessness of their claim... of their gift to the planet... their climate coup de grace...

 

Silently into the sea of the forest

‘soft’-tracked vehicles will creep,

no wheels to crush undergrowth

they hope in future to delete.

 

Silently into the sea of the forest,

gently gently off-track — no tyres

pressing their case, just metal expecting

what’s flattened to shoot back into place.

 

Silently into the sea of the forest

those drilling rigs are determined to go —

to reach down further than roots

and mirror the hollow of sky.

 

 

Poets and Climate Change

Graphology Kaleidoscope 31: ‘poets’ & climate change 

Poets have mined the seasons through core-samples — their own cores,

            of course, and the seasons’ drills, performances

Poets from some places have imposed their models of seasons on other places

            they visit — dragging six seasons into four, four seasons into two

Poets so easily iron out the specificity of rainfall, temperature, duration, into

            metaphor, that great equaliser of creative manifest destiny

Poets monitor the weather because it is as reliable and unreliable as well, metaphor

Poets fixate on extreme weather events and also the predictability of the cyclical

            nature of seasons, though practice increasingly wavers with meltdown

Poets preserve the status quo using the machinery of communication

Poets take the poetry of community and make it their own, catching call & response

            in their nets of self-affirmation

Poets reduce the particularities of tree — the truth of its growth rings, the habitat

            it has sustained, it is — to ‘tree’, the symbolic extension of themselves

Poets watch the rain gauge, caught up in the effect of light through meniscus, and

            fail to note down the declining average — a dry rain-gauge is of limited appeal

Poets broadcast the word, which is their word even when smoke-screened behind

            collaborative gestures, spoken out of community, embedded in rituals,

            any way they can — they believe it is best to be heard

Poets believe they are heard by silence and time, a commodity

Poets blur their denials and are, taken en masse, not deniers (with stunning

            exceptions) but rely on prosody to scaffold their preference

            for playing with words rather than getting outside and protesting

Poets have LOVED the worldwide web and computers — in the end,

            even the deniers (of a certain ilk) come across to word processors

Poets make carbon dioxide, methane, and some glow with their exchanges

            fed by a grid underwritten by the nuclear industry and/or coal

Poets love writing about birds as extensions of the(ir) psyche while noting

            behaviours and habits — generic and in aberration — to say something

            about the human world to say something about birds to say something

            about aspiration to say something about language to say something

            about culture/s to say something about personal subjectivity

            and community to say something about history to say something

            about time to say something about space to say something

            about migratory patterns to say something about locality

            to say something about a vagrant blown off-course a rare

            sighting to say something about feathers to say something

            about hollow bones to say something about pollution (oil

            on the albatross’s wings) to say something about presence

            to say something about loss to say something about trees of life

            to say something about insects to say something about being

            on the hindquarters of mammals to say something about heat

            and shifts in frequency to say something to say something to say

Poets write about (being) human

Poets write about inducing

Poets write about climate

Poets write about change

Poets are wary of over-writing

Poets are wary about being filed into a category

Poets are cautious to keep a wide range of experience on tap

Poets are quick to avoid fads like the dissolution of the biosphere

Poets are there for one protest and not there for another, having filled their quotas

Poets selectively listen to the music of the spheres, especially the sphere that’s

            underwriting their imagery

Poets envision the landscape of their denials as the denial of others — being

            so attuned to the nuances of dirt, and stone, and air, and flesh, and cellulose

Poets are scientists in their own way though they privilege language over data which

            has advantages and disadvantages though they generally cope well with

            contradictions maybe gloating over this a little too much but even

            when writing in air-conditioned rooms know it’s bloody hot outside

            and hotter than the childhoods they reconstruct in lines rhythmic

            with heat waves and mirages and humidity and freak snow events

            making the weird out of the wonderful and cranking language

            into an event — scientists in their own way or maybe scientists per se

Poets are architects designing poems to be read under the new conditions

            accepted as default adjusting to suit their audience’s compliance

            to the changed conditions; architectural elegists celebrating   

            adaptability of and to the human condition — lament lament

Poets write relationships — between themselves and what’s outside

            their ideas of poets and poems and the word (written/spoken),

            so you’d think human-induced (they are often but not exclusively

            human, they are often though not exclusively ‘alive’ — haunting

            and haunted is the shadow of the poet) climate change would be

            the pivotal array of relationship/s they’d write out of, to, too

Poets acquire and reprocess and even neologise words, so here are a few

            for the condition we’ve made figuratively and literally and in thought

            and voice and all shades of a colouring grey — seeraturate, oilboil,

            dessicane — compounds, exploitation of suffixes and prefixes,

            locked into the colonial Latinate, conquest lexicons, culpabilities

Poets will also perish, illuminating their last breath, and ours, all of ours, too.

            Don’t hand it to them on a plate, stop feeding the loose change

            to the meter. Give language a cooling-off period. Unmake

            linguistic economics. Don’t sing a song of sixpence. See

            the bird without capturing it. Don’t play while determiners

            and pronouns burn together.

  

            John Kinsella