Don Ogden
I have been a poet and writer all my life. When I moved to the hills of North Leverett with my family in 1980 to build a homestead and get away from the crush of megalopolis I was in the process of editing an anthology of creative works that sprang from the anti-nuclear/pro-safe energy movement. The Reagan era, with its threat of possible nuclear war, caused that movement to evolve and change course. The anthology wound up on the shelf, but the creativity continued on within movements and campaigns founded on the notion that western civilization was floundering, out of balance.
My concerns about the state of the planet, about humanity's estrangement from the natural world and its suicidal trajectory toward oblivion (taking future generations and so many other life forms and elements with it), has kept me searching for words that might help people to either awaken or be reinforced in their efforts to change the world as we knew it.
My poetry, sometimes published by others, sometimes self-published, was a vehicle for such words, but so was my reporting and commentary. Sometimes the writing paid, more often not, but payment was not the objective. Outreach was the objective. Keeping me from losing my mind in a world gone mad was the objective. It remains so.
In the mid-'90s I was fortunate to land a job doing commentary for Pacifica Radio Network News and later, Great Lakes Radio Consortium, most often on environmental issues. That experience taught me the value of radio as a medium for mass outreach. Later, when Valley Free Radio (WXOJ-LP, 103.3fm) was launched in Florence, MA I co-founded The Enviro Show as another outlet for the ongoing work, the creative work, I feel it is helpful in disseminating the message. That message is now far more urgent than it was thirty or forty years ago. I noticed as a child in the 1950s people used to say sarcastically, "What do you want to do, save the world?" when someone seemed to go overboard with good deeds. Today, in this age of Climate Crisis, we actually are trying to save the world. Who knew! Now I'm putting the best of my work on this most basic and critical of all issues into a book titled "A Climate of Change".
Links to work:
http://concertobi.blogspot.com
http://enviroshow.wordpress.com
Bad Atmosphere
this is not what it was supposed to behow many fields ago, clear blue and clouds
billowing and soft breeze, dancing leaves
us wondering if our own children, grand
children will be left with broken days
loss of ways what was such a gift to us:
birdsong moments and fragile wings so bright,
colors and scents molding memory then
something, a shadow, a careless movement
beyond the yard, in the distance, in the house
unnamed unease and a growing world of
bad ideas, bad atmosphere for all the best
reasons, for the children playing outside.
all the human population has more than doubled
since then, the others have dwindled and
the children's time to play, scheduled, gone
the way of no one does that any more, and
they get in the car and drive off the edge
of the chart where everything is made away
where science meets the unknown and
the air is seemingly conditioned for your
comfort until the lights go out and the gas
runs out there on that hot asphalt hell and
the angry yells and the wars, the wars, and
the empty silence. try texting that. try liking
that. the links are numbered now. there are
only so many "resources" and that
away is right here today and the
atmosphere? the atmosphere is bad.