Facebook posted only the words “Go outside.”

Thoughts at the End of Empire

• It’s possible future generations will destroy
• our art, literature, music, film,
• and corporations, in bitterness
• for allowing ecosystem collapse,

• and mistrust for how many leaders
• were distracted, apathetic, selfish,
• ignorant, or insane with money and power.

• It’s possible future generations will redefine
• family, community, work, value, happiness,
• life, dirt, success.

• It’s possible education will change
• from locking children in boxes
• to getting them outside in tide pools,
• rivers, creeks, deserts, mountains

• and their community of remaining
• mammals, birds, fish, amphibians,
• invertebrates, reptiles, plants, trees.

• It’s also possible, based on our collective
• behavior, there won’t be future generations.

How We Stopped Corporate Psychopaths from Cooking Planet Earth

For Mary DeMocker 

• We planted trees everywhere at once.
• Facebook posted only the words “Go outside.”

• “Destroy Your Television Day” grew more popular 
• than Xmas and the 4th of July.

• Children of execs saw themselves as global citizens
• and despite every temptation and distraction

• disowned their wayward parents.
• ExxonMobil became BlueOrbSolar.

• Each country committed to saving 
• one thing from extinction — them.

• People wondered why it took so long.

2007 Logos

• When I complain to the old man 
• about rising gas prices,
• he says “I want $10 a gallon.”

• “Why?” is the obvious question.
• “Because I love birds,” he says. 

• At the time, I thought him insane
• but now I think most everyone else is.

Scott T. Starbuck is a poet/activist. His books are Industrial Oz: Ecopoems, noted by Bill McKibben as “rousing, needling, haunting,” Hawk on Wire: Ecopoems, available at Fomite Press (preferred) and Amazon.

Starbuck is a co-creative writing coordinator at San Diego Mesa College, was a Friends of William Stafford Scholar at the “Speak Truth to Power” Fellowship of Reconciliation Seabeck Conference, an Artsmith Fellow on Orcas Island, writer-in-residence at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and 2016 PLAYA climate-change resident in poetry. His ecoblog, Trees, Fish, and Dreams, with audio poems, is at riverseek.blogspot.com.