Language.
Silence is one part of speech, the war cry of wind.
Down a mountain pass, another.
A stranger's voice echoing through lonely valleys.
A lover's voice rising so close it's your own tongue.
These are keys to cipher, the way
the high hawk's key unlocks the throat of the sky
and the coyote's yip knocks it shut.
The way the aspen's bells conform to the breeze
while the rapid's drum defines resistance.
Sage speaks with one voice, pinyon with another.
Rock, wind her hand and water her brush,
spells and then scatters her demands.
Some notes tear and pebble our paths.
Some notes gather the bank we map our lives around.
That's the first poem of my very first book.
It is, as I hope you hear, a celebration of the landscape
that gave me language.
It is also, as you may hear, if you know the circumstances
in California, many of which we saw today
in Gregg's presentation, it's a landscape
that is imperiled by development, by sudden oak
death and other botanical diseases,
by acreage eradicating wild fires, and much more.
A quick tour of the web triggered by the search terms
climate change and chaparral got me
to the website of the California Chaparral Institute
and a page called Threats to Chaparral California Climate
Change HTML.
From that site, I either learned or was
reminded that the recent drought in California
is the worst in 1,200 years.
That according to Dr. Michael McGinnis, one consequence
of climate disturbance in California
will be a shift of biodiversity to the North, Oregon.
Scientists from the US Geological Survey
developed the coastal vulnerability index
to assess the physical vulnerability of the California
coast.
They found that, from San Luis Obispo to the Mexican border,
communities along the coastline have high or very high
vulnerability to climate change.
And I learned, or was reminded, that conservationist
organizations are asking land management and land development
organizations to please stop contributing to climate change
by grinding up chaparral, salvaged logging
public forests, and clearing habitat
in the name of fire protection.
Instead, use the best available science
to focus on what matters most, reducing the risk
within communities themselves.
In the slide that Greg put up, there
were all these, like, big wildfires that
have happened recently, and a bunch of them
were in California, and then one of them
that was also in that sort of exponentially massive scale
was the Horsetooth fire number two,
which is in my new backyard.
My imagination is surrounded, right?
It's kind of threatened at all times,
these places that I want to call home
and that I want to call safe.
There's a lot of information and very little of it
sounds like poetry.
And this is part of what I'm thinking
about these days, part of what I'm thinking about tonight.
Part of what I'm thinking about is the number
of creative writing students, five in the past five days,
who have told me that they find themselves needing
to completely reconsider their writing projects in light
of the election last Tuesday.
These students believe that their writing needs
to matter now more than ever, and that perhaps it
needs to matter in different ways
than it used to need to matter.
They believe that something is at stake
that they hadn't realized was quite such a problem.
They didn't realize how extensively they
might be in jeopardy, as it now appears their future might be.
And of course, they're correct.
And of course, in some ways they're
also not correct, right?
Our lives change, and they also don't.