Submission - poetry? prose?
Emma McDonell. College 8 and an ENVS and anthro major.
Dear Animals
It's 75°, there's not a single cloud in the bright blue sky and it should be the dead of winter. I wonder what the birds on their winter travels, the blooming roses and the hibernating bears are thinking. They must be confused. No one sent them the IPCC memo that global temperatures are set to rise a whopping 7°, that they should plan around the 4x increase in hurricanes or that the pH levels of the sea would drop below 6, and it's all our fault. No, we didn't round up the animals on an ark and make the big announcement, that the world as they know it will soon no longer exist. That the seasons that govern their lives will not longer function according to plan. We didn't tell them that many of their homes will soon cease to exist, and they will become refugees without a habitat to call their own. No, we forgot to notify them that their friends and neighbors, those that they depend upon for food, shelter and life in general may die off for good. We forgot to mention that their babies will grow up in a drastically different world, perhaps an inferno or a habitat without sufficient food sources. No, we saved our breath and saved ourselves the guilt trip. And now we will just watch them fly, swim, crawl and run in confusion until they figure it out theirselves. Yet, in our cunning we forgot the obvious truth that we too are animals. And when we make them suffer, we too will suffer. Because the webs that we break we are equally entangled in as any spider or dandelion. And so in our egomaniacal actions in which we think we are harming them, we are too, killing ourselves.