Michael DePung
4 min readApr 30, 2019
My picture I took the evening after my tour of the waters around Pensacola

Earth Month and Awakened Souls: Rachel Carson and our Environment

I didn’t want to let the last day of April slide by without reposting, with revisions, an article I wrote three years ago and a poem I composed years before that — it will be self-explanatory. If this nation and world had made better progress and if they had not repudiated the spirit of Earth Month, then, I would not even need to post this article. This current administration has only set us back by giant steps. The bottom line is not the bottom line.

Here is my three-year old post:

In Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, she brought to light the problems of environmental destruction. She methodically laid out the processes of pollution that were occurring, and her book essentially changed the way most Americans thought about using chemicals in a wholesale manner to deal with inconveniences. Enough attention accrued that the Endangered Species Act of 1973 was passed by Congress, almost unanimously, virtually the direct result of Carson’s work.

Yet, today many people refute the spirit of Carson’s work. Fracking dumps dozens of chemicals into the earth, chemicals that destroy life beyond renewability. Some are harmful and even fatal to us. The administration has auctioned off over 100,000 acres of public land at the end of 2018 for fracking. No lies can cover up the destructive nature of this process. If nature goes, we go.

The imagination and knowledge to use alternative energies exist; the problem is not enough profit and control for oligarchs. If the motivation is the bottom line at the expense of life, that is insanity, stupidity. Oh, I know the arguments, and my counter will always be the same: if Nature is destroyed beyond renewability, then we should not benefit by any products, processes, or methods that destroy her.

Large corporations and their scientists are engaged in the same sort of practices today that Carson’s work exposed as deadly to the environment and humans over 50 years ago. How can this be? Convenience? Profit? They make pseudo-humanitarian claims, but these are shallow lies.

Carson said in Silent Spring, “How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?” The same logic applies to any practices destructive of the environment.

Like fracking, which is the very sort of situation that Carson examined: dumping immense quantities of poisons into the environment, especially polluting underground waters, that cause currently unmeasured consequences.

We have options. We need to use them. Capitalism unchecked by Nature and the Heart is worthless, destructive shit. Nature shows us the reality of our actions; our Heart reveals our motives. Harmony is possible.

The Moon at Half-Mast

I offer a long poem today, written immediately after viewing the devastation of the deep well Horizon oil spill.

(June 22, 2010, Pensacola, Florida)

Nearly full moon viewed in azure blue sky

Before sun had set — all Moon’s features

Clearly visible, clearly weeping.

The flag, our flag, flown at half staff

(half mast on a ship — which is the position

From which I viewed the moon

As I looked up past a sailboat mast)

A symbol of sorrow, mourning,

Community recognition of someone passing

Someone of significance, importance —

More so than the common man,

For those who have served their country, our country.

The moon, our moon — not just America’s — grieved

This day as she stared in horror, mouth agape,

At her waters she so faithfully controls,

Waters of the Gulf of Mexico,

Waters of Southern coastal United States, our states,

Appropriately salty waters, now being raped,

The vicious, belching, bellowing, black gush of

Appropriately named crude oil

Spewing, violently forcing its destructive blobs and blankets

Of life-destroying gunk on this majestic milieu

Of marine flora and fauna.

She, Moon, could not respond with frenetic action,

Like that which she viewed with her silvery face

Of the buzzing clean-up engaged in by tiny man.

She could only do three things —

Two of which she performs rather flawlessly

And the third she awkwardly and silently conveys;

Faithfully, she uses her mass and orbit

To keep this globe, our globe,

On its crucial twenty-three-and-a-half degree axis,

And she then uses those same attributes, her attributes,

To steadily, faithfully, and effortlessly urge the sea tides

To ebb and flow.

Neither natural nor effortless, though,

Are the silent sobs with which she now convulses,

Expressing the destruction and loss which people, we people,

Have caused her to witness;

She now wails and laments:

Wails over the brown unsightly blobs

Bobbing over the face of the surging blue sea;

Laments the answering, oily sheen

To the flawless silver radiation she casts in beauty;

Wails for the tiny shelled creatures and wavy, curly sea grasses

Now gasping poisoned breaths;

Laments the powdery white shores

Now pock-marked brown and gummy;

Wails over the majestic pelicans, gulls, osprey, heron

And every sea bird that gently communes with her —

All those, threatened now with a greasy, flightless end

Or a perplexing, gnawing hunger;

Laments the little fish, the dolphins, the turtles,

The rays, the crustaceans — so many creatures —

Puzzled at the noxious, smothering net

Now enclosing and settling upon them, around them —

The cycle of life disrupted by this unnatural death.

And through the salty and now oily tears

Of her devastated domain she cries with the undulating sea surface,

“Not I, Not I, Not I, Not I

Did this, Did this, Did this, Did this!”

And the waves answer,

“Who did, Who did, Who did, Who did?”

And what do we, we humans, say?

Moon glows at half mast over the sea.

Michael DePung
Michael DePung

Written by Michael DePung

Explore. Discover. Collect. Connect. Create. Love. I write these things to experience and express Spirit here. How do you do Life? Contact: mdepung@gmail.com

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