Don’t worry about trying to fix it, he said,
we’ve destroyed this world past 
redemption, beyond habitability, it’s dead, 
murdered, our task now is to leave and colonize 
another planet. Wow. He really said that. 
Seriously. He imagines heroically saving 
humanity from extinction by escaping to some 
spacesuit utopia in the stars. That is the 
Puritan’s eye, escaping the corrupt Old World,
reinventing yourself in a new city on a hill in 
an imagined  tabula rasa, the eye of the imperialist, 
dreaming that there is always some new 
pristine place to start over again and plunder,
even now when people have pillaged the entire 
earth and there is no place left here to plunder. 

Then go, if you must, she said, to your own suicide, but
don’t expect me to buy you that spaceship.

Even if life really did come here 
long ago from the stars, she said, and 
even if that means we are star people too, 
even so, we have been here so long we 
are now and forever earth people, and
this earth does not belong to us; 
we belong to her. This planet is not
an object we can use, abuse, discard like 
so much garbage. Our task now is 
not to escape but to stay right here, to 
hold fast to earth, to learn to live here, 
to protect her. We are now and forever 
inseparable from her, our wild watery habitat, 
our precious green mother.