Walking by Beaver Lake

By:  Norman J. Olson

 

walking along McKnight Road,

along Beaver Lake, I can

see trees, grass, weeds…

a world of green that feeds on

sunlight, minerals

and carbon dioxide…  of course,

the axis of this planet is tilted

toward

summer

now…  natural history

has me by the throat

and yellow gold finches

fly from twig to twig…

 

 

 

 

letter to the future

By:  Norman J. Olson

 

imagine this planet 2.4 billion

years ago, if time on that

scale has any meaning at all…  was

there a snowball Earth??  a planet covered

with ice and snow…

all the water turned solid

until volcanos finally put enough

carbon dioxide into the air

to warm things up

a bit…  for 3 or 4 hundred million years

snow and ice

covered the planet, according to

scientists, or, maybe not… they cannot agree,

but whatever happened, we have had both

glaciation

and ice free poles…  and through it all,

tiny bits of life survived (lucky for us, I guess)…

 

will we be around for the next glaciation?  will

our home again become snowball Earth…  will humans somehow

survive through the millennia?  well,

the odds are against us…  a meteor or

even a giant volcano could mean the end of us…

not to mention our own

self destructive militarism and idiocy…

drought, flood and famine are always

just around the corner… our tolerances

of heat and cold

are small…  for much of our brief tenure on this planet

starvation has been our companion, death and disease,

our daily lot…  will that change in the long term,

or are we in a brief golden age of medical miracles

 

even the scientists and fortune tellers do not know for sure…

 

so, my children’s children’s children x 2000…  I hope

you survive and if you do, good luck with the

ice…