Two For Earth Week 2022

Earth & Space Science, STEM, Nature, Wildlife, Biodiversity

Ed Hessler

1) For Earth Day, 2020, Ze Frank of True Facts presented a short video (5m 38s) for PBS (!) entitled If The Earth Gave Earth Day awards. It has some saucy bits but this is ZeFrank. You are on your own.

Of course, scan the comments for some viewer reactions (1217 of 526,082 views).

I don't know whether Ze Frank and PBS have other events planned. I certainly keep hoping.

2) I recently discovered HERE: Poems for the Planet (Copper Canyon Press), edited by Elizabeth Coleman. This diverse collection is by poets from many nations and cultural traditions is divided into 5 sections.

--Where You'd Want to Come From: Poems for the Planet (about the beauty of earth)

--The Gentle Light That Vanishes: Our Endangered World (the first of two sections are about the "mutilated world," a phrase from the title of a poem by Adam Zagjewski)

--As If They'd Never Been: Poems for the Animals

-- The Ocean Within Them: Voices of Young People (written when the poets were between 6 and 18 years old)

--Like You Are New to the World: From Inspiration to Action (poems to energize)

At the end of the collection is an activist's guide written by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Here is a poem from the section The Ocean Within Them by Mary Anne Clarke. Composer Sarah Rimkus scored it and here her composition is presented by the Nazareth College Chamber Choir (the organization which commissioned it).  Cornell has ornithological information about the poem's subject, the Arctic Tern.