Several commentators noted that one of the topics avoided in the presidential debate this past Monday was climate change. Both candidates must have been relieved when moderator Bob Schieffer didn’t bring the subject up. Obama, after all, needs industrial Ohio if he is to be reelected (that’s why he hasn’t been mentioning his support for cap and trade policies) and Romney has reversed previous concern for the environment so as to win over wingnuts who believe that global warming is a hoax. The omission upset those of us appalled by what is happening to our planet, however.
I share a revenge fantasy by my father that those who love the earth can use to vent their frustrations. I suspect it owes something to Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, where a group of environmentalist anarchists go around sabotaging the bulldozers of developers and blowing up dams.
The socially responsible side of me feels it necessary to caution readers not to example of Environmental Zorro. The blowback against actual sabotage would offset anything achieved by the initial act. But maybe venting through literature clears aways defeatism and spurs us on to keep fighting the good fight.
Z Is the Zap of the Zorro
By Scott Bates
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZap
on the rusty lock of the dirty cage of the sad circus bear
ZZZZZZZap
in red paint on the baby seal about to be slaughtered for fur
ZZZZZZZap
into the hull of the pirate whaler
through the gas tank of the wolf-hunters’ helicopter
into the tires of the elephant poachers
through the cruel steel traps
into the nuclear plant
under the constipated dam
into the stripminers’ gas tanks
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZap
Z
strkes again
and again ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZap
Z
stands
for ZORRO
which stands for THE FOX
who stands like a wary Cobra
flies like a bat
dances like a dragonfly flashes like a lightning bolt tracks like a path in the April woods wanders like a water spider leaps like a fox in a crazy June meadow
Z stands
for ANIMAL RIGHTS FROM AARDVARK TO ZEBRA
(and from Aniston Alabama to Zama Mizzizzippi)
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZap
Published in Scott Bates, The ABC of Radical Ecology (New Market, Tennessee: Highlander Research and Education Center, 1982, 1992).
