Are scientists amid peat and gas samplers, who cry
‘Methane will evolve from flooding by and by!’
This is the pasture the bugs may tell of,
These the gases the bog may smell of,
When we have pulled at nature’s lever -
Not fearing to walk with global warming,
Since knowledge of earth’s the great repriever,
A potent force in opinion-forming.
Farting in a greenhouse, the Earth Mother reacts
To our diet of richness - we give her syrup of facts!
What our pragmatism requires her principles permit;
What our destructiveness seeks they do not forbid:
‘Man is the measure of all things,’ says Love,
‘But he who measures not himself is measured!’
Now Erda watches our every move,
Dogs the poisoner, wastes the untreasured:
We are not cosmic specks and we are not alone,
For we can feel ourselves and Earth as one.
‘Yet it moves!’ Defiant after the assize, massively
Did certainty weigh upon Galileo, and passively
Upon Darwin (given benefit of the doubt). Expertness
Takes centre-stage¹ now. It lays on a slide:
Bog microbes mounted, cultural inertness,
A lawless society adrift, orange-dyed -
Ironic points of light, that at eleven o’clock
Become Von Neumann, Wheeler, Carter, Lovelock!