Featured image: Resistance. Acrylic on canvas. 2008. By Travis London. “With the successful devastation of the Washougal River watershed through intense logging and mineral extraction, there was only one thing left to do: install hydroelectric dams. In the early 1920s, construction of a third dam began down river from the outlet of Cougar Creek. The night the dam had been completed it was blown up. Dynamite reduced the structure to rubble and once again the salmon, eels, and crayfish passed unhindered.”
To this day, the Washougal River remains free flowing and supports populations of chum, coho, and chinook salmon, steehead, and cutthroat trout.
Truth
By John McGrath, 2004
Who will be the keepers of the flame, when shepherds shame their flock and mock the truth with every new transgression?
Should we be surprised to find a fork in every tongue of young and old, when those who lead us feed us daily, lies of such a size we barely blink at indiscretion any more from rank deceivers rotten to the core.
Yet some would call them heroes, after all they’ve said and done with word and deed, the very need to justify themselves long gone.
Who will be the guardians of the light?
When might is right and wrongs are sanctified, when innocence is maimed and sacrificed in Freedom’s name,
when none will take the blame, when every lie is truth and truth is lie, Who then will be the keepers of the flame,
save you and I?
No, we are not going to Mars
A poem about stupid ideas
By Monique Milne
Some philosophers say You define a thing by the context it’s in. So, what then … is a polar bear in a zoo? Or a human on Mars? Am I the sum of my parts? Something more? Something separate?
They say bacteria are us Or we have bacteria. A sterilised planet has no life Has no bacteria Bacteria are life.
What do you call a human on Mars, going to Mars, dreaming of Mars?
Is a machine alive? When every machine and computer rusts We’ll still be here! If the Earth turned to rust No more humans. Can’t make humans from machines.
LA hipsters know all about machines. Use them to ‘hack’ your body. Watch out for cell towers The illuminati hacking you Our bodies are meat-suits That our soul inhabits Our beautiful natural bodies Meat Suits!
What part of you is your soul? What of us is and always will be our body? Breathing, laughing, crying, blinking Breathe. Your feelings are the real you What does the feeling?
No, your real physical body is immaterial Better hack your meat suit Be better looking Live a lot longer Your true identity … Martian Such a spiritual experience.
What ever happened to seeing? Rejecting our bodies Rejecting our Earth Put your meat suit In a space suit And fly to Mars Where you belong.
But you are not an alien You belong here You deserve your body.
They
By Jeremiah Potter
They drug them by their necks away from the sacred Fire to the televisionThey murdered the buffalo, deer and bounty itself to feed them Wonder Bread and pork
They poisoned their rivers, streams, lakes and oceans to force them to drink swimming pool water and liquor
They beat them with Bibles and the cross in fear of the beauty of worshiping the earth
They stole all that sustained them to smudge out their freedom to tax them on the land that was loved and defended- their land that can never be owned or divided
Sitting here by this smokey fire under the winter dogwoods, maples, birch and hemlocks, in the vivid sun, I divide myself. As I always have.
Vowing to not be like they- colonist thieves, rapists and murderers
I vow not to bury and squash what has been, and still is, being done.
I vow, to like them, love the land and its Inhabitants.
To turn my shoulder to what they say is right and wrong- things so displaced from actual honesty.
I vow to stand against the utter insanity of they- in pure want of excess and unchecked desecration.
Salmon
By Max Wilbert
Seen on a sign at the Quileute reservation “the salmon helped us for thousands of years now it is time for us to help them”