Natural Tar Springs at La Brea – Juristac Tribal Cultural Landscape – California/USA – January 2026 Photo Credit: Protect Juristac Website
This is the second article in my series about our changing Earth from interviews with Native Americans shared in We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth, edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth (USA 2022). My presentation does not follow the order of the interviews.
Camellia Trees – Overlooking Footpath to Parking Lot – Los Angeles – California – January 25, 2026
Our Peace Maker has launched war on Iran: Operation Epic Fury. While insanity continues to be the order of the day under political leadership lacking in moral courage, I do what is in my power to avoid contagion. I draw on lessons learned in my youth during the turbulent years in the pre- and post-independent years of my native land, when the grown-ups had found ways to keep joy alive in our lives. As in those days, I brighten my workday by playing the radio in the background. KOST 103.5 is my preferred local radio channel for bringing me my favorite songs of yesteryear as well as today’s top hits.
“Is war,” says Jamaican reggae singer Bob Marley (1945-1981).
Back in the day, weekend get-togethers with our extended family members and close friends relieved distress from the violence seeping into our day-to-day lives. I remember the bottom-house parties with music and dance: birthdays, weddings, wedding anniversaries, arrival of a new baby. Every achievement, school or job-related, was cause for a celebration, adding more joy to our lives. We also went all out with Christmas and year-end festivities. What a joyful time of the year! My happiest memories of growing up in Guyana.
Front Cover Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse by Luke Demp (USA, 2025) Photo Credit: Penguin Random House
Looking at both the long-run trajectory of Goliath and current trends, our Global Goliath appears destined to hurtle down one of three paths. The first, and most likely, is self-termination. The second is a world in chains. The third is a world in which we somehow manage to shackle and control it. Reversing inequality and establishing deep democracy in a lasting fashion has unfortunately been a rarity throughout history. It is a highly unlikely outcome, which makes it worth fighting for even more desperately. While throughout history the collapse of a Goliath was usually temporary and a liberation, in the future it threatens to be permanent and take us and much of the planet with it. We are passengers on a journey that looks likely to end in chains or evolutionary suicide. Our Global Goliath will die explosively unless we kill it first.
Excerpt from Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse byLuke Kemp, published by Penguin Random House, New York, USA, 2025, p. 406.
Saint Lucian Poet John Robert Lee Photo Credit: The Voice St. Lucia News / Photo by Tara Lucien
MyPoetry Corner February 2026 features the poem “Uprising” from the poetry collection Belmont Portfolio by poet, preacher, and retired teacher and librarian John Robert Lee, published by Peepal Tree Press (UK, 2023). Born in 1948 in the Caribbean Island nation of Saint Lucia, he majored in English and French Literature, including Caribbean Literature, at the University of the West Indies in Barbados (Cave Hill Campus) and Jamaica (Mona Campus) in the early 1980s.
Ordained in 1997 as an Elder of Calvary Baptist Church, Lee continues to be active in his local Baptist Church where he preaches occasionally. While he remains connected to the pulse of Caribbean literature and the arts, he is no longer actively involved in theatre and broadcasting as he once was. Father of three children, he lives with his wife in Saint Lucia.
“I explore my world and what is happening in it, Caribbean and international; my culture and its history, its music, both traditional and contemporary, its life in all that complexity; my own personal experiences of maturing, aging, and my ever-deepening faith.”
Belmont in the title is a historical and cultural neighborhood in northeast Port of Spain, capital of the Caribbean Republic of Trinidad & Tobago. During his stay in Belmont, while attending the Caribbean Festival of Arts (CARIFESTA) in 2019, Lee took photos of the area that later inspired a series of ekphrastic poems.
This is the first article in my series about our changing Earth from interviews with Native Americans shared in We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth, edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth (USA 2022). My presentation does not follow the order of the interviews.
Born on that memorable day of September 11, 2001, Raquel Ramirez is the youngest participant interviewed via Skype during the pandemic lockdown in midsummer 2020. She defines herself as an urban Native American, Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe, and other strong Native family roots. Growing up in California, she’s greatly influenced by the state’s indigenous cultures.
In addressing the crises we face on our changing Earth, Raquel considers awareness as a challenge to confront and overcome. Breaking free of ignorance in society and our own ignorance is, she acknowledges, an emotional and difficult process.
Awareness doesn’t just mean listening or hearing or recognizing. It is very much being present and being conscious of people beyond you!
Alex Pretti & Renee Good – Killed in Cold Blood – Minneapolis – Minnesota – USA – January 2026
Mother, the situation has gotten out of control among the members of our fractured collective American family. Father is not well. Without you around to rein in his worst instincts, he acts like a vengeful god, punishing those who don’t obey his commandments or kneel before him. He cannot tolerate independent thinking. Even a simple “no” enrages him. Nowadays, if you defy him, he doesn’t hesitate to leave you out in the cold to be trampled upon by his goons. If you die at their hands, he blames you for putting yourself in harm’s way.
Our siblings who enable Father’s tyrannical rule are shameless, feckless, and spineless. Big Brother is the worst of them all—he’s truly creepy. Mother, you wouldn’t recognize the man he has become. He and the other enablers seek only to remain in Father’s favor and share in the spoils of his vast business empire. Father says that the only limit to his power is his own morality. I’m afraid to even consider what he means by that.
Front Cover Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis (UK/USA, 2024) Photo Credit: Melville House Publishing
The digital revolution may be turning waged workers into cloud proles, who live increasingly precarious, stressful lives under the invisible thumb of algorithmic bosses…. But that’s not the most significant fact about cloud capital…. The true revolution cloud capital has inflicted on humanity is the conversion of billions of us into willing cloud serfs volunteering to labour for nothing to reproduce cloud capital for the benefit of its owners.
[…]
Technofeudalism made things infinitely worse when it demolished the fence that used to provide the liberal individual with a refuge from the market. Cloud capital has shattered the individual into fragments of data, an identity comprised of choices as expressed by clicks, which its algorithms are able to manipulate. It has produced individuals who are not so much possessive as possessed, or rather persons incapable of being self-possessed.
Excerpts from Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis, published by Melville House Publishing, UK & USA, 2024, pp. 88 & 182.
Asian American Poet Laureate Arthur Sze 2025-2026 Photo Credit: U.S. Library of Congress (Photo by Shawn Miller)
My Poetry Corner January 2026 features the poem “Jaguar Song” from the twelfth poetry collection Into the Hush by Arthur Sze, Poet Laureate of the United States 2025-2026. He is the first Asian American to serve in this position. The following excerpts of poems are all sourced from this collection which explores humanity’s impact on Mother Nature together with glimpses of her untouched beauty.
Listen—in an Anchorage night, / a crunching resembling cars colliding, / and, as the incoming tide slaps, / you will never forget inlet ice breakup; black spruce branches are etched / against the sky; far from a city lined / with fast-food spots, bars, and pawnshops, […] you marvel at the green translucency / of leaves, the mystery of photosynthesis; / as grief and joy well up, you step / into the vernal sharpening of the day— / apricot trees are the first to bloom. (Poem “Spring View” p. 5).
Born in 1950 in New York City to Chinese immigrants, Sze is an award-winning poet with twelve books of poetry published, a translator of classical Chinese poetry, and editor. His journey to becoming a poet began in 1968 during his first semester at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he was pursuing a career in the sciences. As he tells it during an interview in 2025 with Jim Natal for Marsh Hawk Press:
“I sat in a large calculus class and felt increasingly bored by the lecture. I remember flipping to the back of a spiral notebook, and I started writing phrases to a poem. I was excited at what came to me, and, before the end of class, I had a rough draft…”
Front Cover: We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth – Edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth Published by The New Press, New York, USA, 2022
During the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, Dahr Jamail – an American award-winning journalist and environmental advocate – and Stan Rushworth – an elder and retired teacher of Cherokee descent living in Northern California – interviewed several people from different North American Indigenous cultures and communities, generations, and geographic. Their featured collection of interviews offers us a wide variety of perspectives on a much more integrated relationship to Earth and all human and non-human beings.
Turtle Island is a term used by some Indigenous peoples, primarily those in North America, to refer to the continent. This name stems from various Indigenous creation stories which describe the landmass as being formed on the back of a giant turtle. The concept of Turtle Island is deeply significant in many Native American cultures as it reflects their spiritual beliefs and relationship with Mother earth.
As inhabitants of these lands for thousands of generations before the arrival of European conquistadores and colonizers, Native Americans carry in their ancestral memories the rise and fall of great civilizations before ours. They have much to teach us about surviving collapse and healing our broken relationship with Mother Earth.
Earthrise – NASA Apollo 8 – December 24, 1968 – Photo by Astronaut William Anders Source Credit – Wikipedia
I’m still trying to process everything that has happened since the Earthrise on January 20, 2025. The punches were fast, violent, and relentless. They upended the global order established at the end of World War II. European allies have been left out in the cold to face what was once our mutual Cold War adversary. North American allies are treated with contempt. Venezuela’s coveted vast oil reserves have transformed the Caribbean Sea into a danger zone. How did we get here?
Sorry Greenland. The sovereignty of nations be damned. Your rare-earth metals are essential to our technological advancement. Our Big Tech giants are in a race to colonize Mars and the vast expanse of space beyond. They need these metals to build and power their AI machines. They also need lots of energy (and water) to operate their vast AI data centers.
Three Worlds One Vision 