Front Cover – Suicide: The Political and Legal Implications of Creating Endless Mass Death by Roger Hallam with Robin Boardman (UK, 2025) Photo Credit: Roger Hallam Website
Modernity’s machine – the merging of industrial, bureaucratic, and cultural systems – was hailed as humanity’s savior. Instead, it has become the architect of humanity’s demise. The hyperobject of the climate crisis is the machine’s ultimate creation: vast, uncontrollable, and devastating. It grows from a past riddled with injustice and destruction, erupting into a present where we imprison those who resist it. And this points to a future where our survival hangs by a thread.
[…]
The machine – the complex system that governs us – is where the horror lies. It takes time for us to fully recognize this, especially because it feels so abstract. But deep down, we know. There’s reluctance to confront it, yet the truth is undeniable. If you’re reading this, step away for a moment, take a walk, then come back. It’s time to confront this head-on.
One billion displaced people. That’s the primary scenario we face. It could be more, maybe less. The number is not the point. The point is the scale of catastrophe. This is the reality we’re heading towards.
Excerpts from Suicide: The Political and Legal Implications of Creating Endless Mass Death byRoger Hallam with Robin Boardman, published by Hard Rain Books, United Kingdom, 2025, pp. 113 & 131-132.
Front Cover: Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire by Adam Greenfield Photo Credit: Verso Books (UK/USA, 2024)
The fundamental idea of the Lifehouse [in a disaster zone] is that there should be a place in every three- or four-city block radius where you can charge your phone when the power’s down everywhere else, draw drinking water when the supply from the mains is for whatever reason untrustworthy, gather with your neighbors to discuss matters of common concern, organize reliable childcare, borrow tools it doesn’t make sense for any one household to own individually and so on—and that these can and should be one and the same place. As a foundation for collective resourcefulness, the Lifehouse is a practical implementation of the values we’ve spent this book exploring.
Excerpt from Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire by Adam Greenfield, Verso Books, UK/USA, 2024 (p. 167).
Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire is an urgent and practical guide to community resilience in the face of climate catastrophe and the collapse of late-stage capitalism. Greenfield recovers lessons from the Black Panther survival programs (USA), the astonishingly effective Occupy Sandy disaster-relief effort (NYC/USA), the solidarity networks of crisis-era Greece, as well as municipalist Spain and autonomous Rojava (Syria), to show how practices of mutual care and local power can help shelter us from a future that often feels like it has no place for us or the values we cherish.
Adam Greenfieldis an American best-selling author, urbanist, and critical futurist, based in London since 2013. He has spent the past quarter-century thinking and working at the intersection of technology, design and politics with everyday life. Selected in 2013 as Senior Urban Fellow at the LSE Cities center of the London School of Economics, he previously taught in New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and the Urban Design program at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. His books include Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Urban Computing and Its Discontents, and the bestsellers Against the Smart City and Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life.
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1968, he graduated with a degree in cultural studies at New York University in 1989. Between 1995 and 2000, he served as a Psychological Operations Specialist in the U.S. Army Special Operations Command.
Puerto Rican Poet Loretta Collins Klobah / Oil Painting on Front Cover: Ángel Plenero by Samuel Lind Photo Credit: Peepal Tree Press (UK, 2018)
My Poetry Corner April 2025 features the title poem from the poetry collection Ricantations (Peepal Tree Press, 2018) by Puerto Rican poet Loretta Collins Klobah. Born in Merced, California, she earned an M.F.A. in poetry writing from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she also completed a doctoral degree in English, with an emphasis on Caribbean literary and cultural studies. She spent four of the nine years of her doctoral study in Jamaica (Caribbean) and West Indian neighborhoods of Toronto (Canada) and London (UK). Since the late 1990s, she lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she is a professor of Caribbean literature and creative writing at the University of Puerto Rico.
Growing up in an English and Spanish working-class household has influenced Klobah’s style of blending Spanish and English in her work. Her mother had Spanish and Scottish heritage, her father Cherokee and Irish. Her Mexican American godparents taught her Spanish, widely spoken in Merced where she grew up. The title of her collection Ricantations appears to be a blend of these two languages.
Klobah began writing poetry in primary school as a way of processing life and engaging with the world. At eighteen years, on becoming part of the active poetry community in Fresno, California, she began receiving serious mentoring from former US Poet Laureate Philip Levine and other award-winning poets.
“I don’t write love poetry, and I don’t rhyme,” Klobah told Trinidadian poet Andre Bagoo during a 2012 interview for the Caribbean Beat magazine, following the release of her award-winning debut poetry collection. “I write because I want to communicate with readers in a way that matters, makes an impact, or makes some kind of beneficial difference in the reader’s thoughts and in the society.”
During 2024, thousands of our American brothers and sisters lost loved ones, property, and jobs to various weather/climate-related disasters that struck their state. Many of them are still recovering from their losses. Without resources, others will never recover. Tragedy does not impact us all in the same way.
On January 10, 2025, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released the data and analysis quantifying the economic costs of the disasters that reached or exceeded US$1 billion. They confirmed 27 weather/climate disaster events, amounting to a total ofUS$182.7 billion. This places 2024 as the fourth costliest on record, trailing behind 2017 (US$395.9 billion), 2025 (US$268.5 billion), and 2022 (US$183.6 billion).
Rosaliene’s Succulent Garden – Summer 2024 – Los Angeles – Southern California
This summer, June through August 2024, the average temperature for the contiguous American states was 73.8° F (23.2°C) – 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit above average – ranking as our nation’s fourth-hottest summer on record. So says NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. California – together with Arizona, Florida, Maine, and New Hampshire – “sizzled through their warmest summer on record.” Heatwaves are growing more frequent, more extreme, and longer lasting in the U.S. West and across the world as the climate crisis drives increasingly severe and dangerous weather conditions.
To end this summer with a bang, an excessive heatwave arrived on Thursday, September 5th, bringing a record-breaking temperature of 112°F (44.4°C) in downtown Los Angeles on Friday, September 6th, says the National Weather Service. With temperatures in the nineties in our neighborhood in West Los Angeles for five days straight, I was forced to stay indoors – no weekend gardening – until relief came on Tuesday, September 10th.
Front Cover: Eye of the Storm: Facing Climate and Social Chaos with Calm and Courage by Terry Lepage Photo Credit: Open Door Communication (USA, 2023)
[D]ue to the baked-in heating of the planet, we are experiencing ever-increasing regional catastrophes across the globe from storms, fires, floods, droughts, crop failures, and heat waves. A barrage of local, regional, and specific collapses on an uncertain time frame against a background of more general decline seems to be in store, rather than one grand collapse…. This is the storm we face.
Fear is contagious, calm is contagious, and courage is contagious. Those of us who have some idea of what is unfolding can prepare ourselves mentally, emotionally, and spiritually to be (as we are able) centers of calm, compassion, and courage. We can be ready to coach others to hold onto their values in hard times. Because we will have pre-processed some of the loss that others will deny for a while longer, we will be able to support them when they finally face what comes.
Excerpt from Eye of the Storm: Facing Climate and Social Chaos with Calm and Courage by Terry Lepage, Open Door Communication, California, USA, 2023 (pp. 11 & 12).
Terry LePage creates spaces for connection, healing, insight, and inspiration. With a PhD in chemistry and a Master of Divinity, she combines heart and head with her clear and insightful writing, speaking, and facilitation. She has worked as a research chemist, transitional minister, and hospice chaplain. She currently lives in Southern California and facilitates Nonviolent Communication practice groups, grief circles, and social justice groups both locally and for the international Deep Adaptation Forum.
Fragrant Red Rosebush – Spring 2024 – Los Angeles – Southern California
With an ongoing global climate crisis, due to humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels, our weather swings from one extreme to the next. Heat domes. Prolonged drought. Rain bombs. Epic floods. We’re not the only ones impacted. So are the trees and plants. Unlike those of us who can find shelter, they must face the elements head-on. Some are resilient and adaptive. Others are not so fortunate.
I’ve observed that the rosebushes in our communal garden are more sensitive to these extremes than my succulent plants. Over the years, we have lost 50 percent of our rosebushes, leaving only eight survivors. The two most recent losses, of the white Hedgerow variety, occurred after the Winter 2022-2023 heavy rains. Grown in an area fully exposed to the elements, their roots sat for three months underwater.
The photo on the left below shows one of them. I haven’t asked the gardener to uproot it in the hope that there may still be some lingering life. The photo on the right is also a white Hedgerow rosebush that stands at the other end of the same exposed plot. After standing for three months in the Winter 2023-2024 floodwater, it’s not doing well. In spring, it’s usually filled with lots of sprawling leaf-laden branches and roses. During our “gray May,” it produced only one tiny rose. I fear that it will not survive another wet winter.
Dead White Rosebush – Winter 2022-2023White Rosebush – Spring 2024
About seven years ago, I undertook to clean up the garden plot of a former neighbor and friend, a food stylist, who had moved back to her home state when her husband Benny took ill with lung cancer. He died months later in January 2016. In March the following year, my best friend and poet also died of lung cancer. Taking care of this plot became part of my grieving process.
After clearing the dense overgrowth of cactus plants, I uncovered the stunted dead trunk and branches of what appeared to be a rosebush. The six-inch tall (15 cm) plant had been smothered by more aggressive plants. For two years I watered it without any sign of life. Then, wonders of wonders, a new branch appeared with tender baby leaves. My care and attention had paid off. The first and single stunning pink rose appeared a year later. Then in 2022, it thanked me with five roses (see photo on the left below). My Miracle Rosebush, as I call it, continued to produce up to six flowers each spring, but I’ve noticed a change in the color and shape, as shown in the photo on the right below. Resilience has its limits as we age.
Stunted Miracle Rosebush – Spring 2022Stunted Miracle Rosebush – Spring 2024
My former food stylist neighbor planted the captioned fragrant red rosebush. Then just a small potted plant used in one of her photo shoots, it has grown into the hardiest and most luxurious of our rosebushes that keeps on giving. It reminds me of our neighbor Benny who is no longer with us. Healing after loss can come in unexpected ways.
Three other rosebushes also brighten my days with their unique beauty and vibrancy, as pictured below. The two remaining rosebushes are not yet in bloom. Hopefully, with the “gray May” and early “June gloom” now behind us, they will awaken to the summer heat.
The photos below were taken by a neighbor and dear friend who, sad to say, has recently moved out-of-state. In the early spring, I also lost my young gardening enthusiast and companion who moved to another neighborhood, trading her garden space for a dog park and ocean-view. Our lives, like the weather and climate, are continually in motion. I adapt as best as I can and, like the rosebushes, bloom in due season.
Brazilian Poet Angélica Freitas Photo Credit: Dirk Skiba / Companhia das Letras, Brazil
In my Poetry Corner June 2024, featuring a Brazilian poet, I would like to call attention to a climate change disaster that struck the people of Porto Alegre, capital of Brazil’s southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul.
The contemporary poet and translator Angélica Freitas is no newcomer to my Poetry Corner. In May 2019, I featured her poem “the woman is a construction” from her poetry collection a uterus is the size of a fist / um útero é do tamanho de um punho (2012). This month’s featured poem “porto alegre, 2016” is from her third collection Songs of Torment /Canções de Atormentar (2020). In this collection, she takes a wider view of injustice, machismo, and her disillusion with the Brazilian dream that’s still out of reach for the majority.
Born in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, in 1973, Angélica Freitas began writing poetry at the age of nine, but her journey to finding herself as a poet took a long and circuitous route. Her discovery, at fifteen years, that she was gay made it difficult to fit in with her peers. Bullies found her and easy target. Then, her father’s sudden death when she was eighteen upended her dream to study in Glasgow, where she spent six months with a Scottish girlfriend.
With her mother’s insistence that she earn a university degree, she opted to pursue a career in journalism at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre. She remained in the capital after graduation, where she could be invisible. In 2000, an unexpected acceptance as a trainee with O Estado de São Paulo, one of Brazil’s largest newspapers, led her to the metropolis of São Paulo.
Freitas confessed that she wasn’t a good reporter, but that the experience exposed her to the other realities of life. During a period of depression in 2005, she attended a poetry workshop conducted by Carlito Azevedo, a poet from Rio de Janeiro, that changed the course of her life. At 31 years old, she realized she was on the wrong path. During an interview for the Public Library of Paraná, she said:
“Okay, I want to write, but it’s not journalism, it’s poetry. You see, that was in my face the whole time. It was what I had been doing since I was little. So that’s it. Best to quit my job and dedicate myself to literature. I called my mother and said I was thinking about spending time in Pelotas. She supported me. Six months later, I resigned, handed over my apartment. Then I returned to Pelotas to organize and finish writing what became my first book, which was called Rilke shake.”
My Poetry Corner April 2024 features the poem “Earth Crisis” from the poetry collection We Are Poetry: Lessons I Didn’t Learn in a Textbook (USA, 2022) by Kym Gordon Moore, an African American poet and marketing communications professional. The following excerpts of poems are all sourced from this collection.
Moore earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Criminal Justice and a Master of Business Administration degree with a concentration in Marketing. Born and raised in South Carolina, she now lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.
With over four decades as a writer and public speaker in marketing communications, Moore has become an advocate of using poetry in the fight against illiteracy and aliteracy among children and adults. She also mentors young and aspiring poets by identifying commonalities in their personal stories while exposing them to diverse opportunities that transform their experiences into creative development.
Moore’s latest book is not your regular collection of poetry. As noted on the back cover: “This book contains several components that serve as an academic complement giving creative insight into the poetry revolutionary movement. It functions as a dialogue engineer, designed to build and employ the application of poetry in the fight against illiteracy, functional illiteracy, aliteracy, and disparity.”
Storm Damage from mudslide – Studio City – City of Los Angeles – Southern California – February 5, 2024 Photo Credit: David Crane / Associated Press
The sun is out again. Alleluia! Beginning last Sunday and throughout Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the Pineapple Express atmospheric river unloaded its burden across California. Don’t get me wrong: We need the rain to replenish our state’s depleted reservoirs after years of drought. Is it asking too much not to have the rain all at once? Consider downtown Los Angeles. Within just four days, the area was drenched with more than 8 inches (20 cm) of rain. That’s more than half of the area’s normal annual rainfall of 14.25 inches (36 cm).
We were well warned ahead of the onslaught. To ensure our city had the required resources to respond to the storm’s impacts, on Monday, February 5th, our Mayor Karen Bass signed a Declaration of Local Emergency throughout the City of Los Angeles. Flooding, fallen trees, and hundreds of mudslides were merciless to everything and everyone in their path. I give thanks that our neighborhood was spared from such devastating blows. At our apartment complex, the lawn and garden plots are fully saturated. Some plants thrive in such weather. Others, like some of my succulents, not so much.
Extreme climate change events have become more frequent and severe. How the gods must laugh at human ineptitude in connecting the dots between our behavior and our environment! We can no longer have it all. Yet, we persist in our self-destructive ways of being and doing. Drill, Baby, Drill!
Three Worlds One Vision 