All the World Was Broken: An Ecopoem On weightless air, the cocksure ravens flew. Wild sheep chewed grass; deer And bison chewed too. On a slanted hillside white mountain goats Enjoyed a lofty view. In forests, eucalypti, fresh-minted, grew. And fire-green firs with purple cones, Did too. For the silver-studded starfish there were oceans Wet with green and blue – And oceans for the whale and dolphin too. On blackest soil, the man called Adam grew His

The Cosmic Covenant And it came to me all in a feeling how everything fitted together, this place and ourselves and the animals and the tools, and how the sky held us. – Wendell Berry, A World Lost The cosmic covenant — what Isaiah calls the covenant of peace — is, in Robert Murray’s terms, “the belief in a divinely willed order harmoniously linking heaven and earth.” Murray casts this covenant as a kind of marriage: a union binding heaven and earth, God and Israel, into a si

The Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline Project And again: the thud of executions echoes in the green ear of Maboula, Cameroon. The tremendous squeak of the assassin's blow and the axe cleaves the trunk: the first bite travels down the core like electricity through bone. The wood rings out dull music, a drowsy monotone. A loud creak and the sky topples; a tearing tumult of raindrops, leaves and twigs. Upper kingdoms are disturbed: birds disperse and disappear with the passing clou