Biophilia Hypothesis

People near the Brooklyn Bridge look on as wildfire smoke from Canada causes hazy conditions in New York City, on July 16, 2026. Out-of-control wildfires in Ontario, Canada, prompted evacuations and sent dangerous smoke billowing into the U.S. where millions of people were exposed to the unhealthy air.ANGELA WEISS / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Excerpt from this story from Truthout:

As wildfires raged across Canada on Thursday, sending dangerous smoke across the border into major US cities, climate advocates called for accountability for the fossil fuel industry, which knew for decades that its products were largely responsible for the climate crisis, yet chose to push climate denial instead.

While fire is a natural part of the lifecycle of Canada’s boreal forests, the heating of the atmosphere due to the burning of oil, gas, and coal has made fires more frequent and extreme.

“We need Nuremberg trials for Big Oil,” the youth-led Sunrise Movement wrote on social media in response to the fires.

Climate Defiance agreed, posting, “Nuremberg-style trials are in order for the fossil fuel executives who knew what they were doing to our children’s futures and did anyway.”

There were 884 fires burning in Canada on Thursday, with 124 out of control, according to the country’s national wildland fire summary. Over 100 fires were raging in Ontario alone, where they have forced the evacuation of at least 15 rural communities; destroyed homes in the Indigenous community of Collins First Nation, or Namaygoosisagagun; and polluted the skies over parts of the upper Midwest and Northeastern US.

As of Thursday evening Eastern time, the four cities with the worst air quality in the world were Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Toronto, according to IQAir.

People have shared dramatic footage of the fires on social media. One video shows a train moving through a blaze near Armstrong, Ontario. Thankfully, all crew members were evacuated safely, The Guardian reported.

Laura Chasmer, a professor of geography and the environment at the University of Western Ontario, noted that fires in Canada like the ones raging across Ontario have increased since 2015.

“This is associated with some of the extreme climate warming that we’ve been seeing, and the atmospheric drying of the surface,” she told BBC News.

Brandi Morin, a Cree-Iroquois-French journalist from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta, noted in her Substack that Canada was warming at twice the global average. Despite this, the Canadian government has made progress on three major fossil fuel pipelines this July.

“Every barrel these new pipelines are built to move adds to the exact warming that’s turning our boreal forests into tinder,” Morin wrote.

Essay written by Emily Atkin published in the Heated Substack:

What’s that viral quote again? “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.” The original author apparently wrote that sentence while sitting on the toilet during an unprecedented2022 wildfire, a fitting nod to our current diarrhea parasite-ridden reality. (Also a climate story, by the way).

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I am so tired of this cycle. The idea of writing another article about “why this is climate change” or “how the Trump administration is making this worse” or “what you can do to make a difference” makes me nauseous with boredom and resentment. I’ve done it. I’ve done it repeatedly. I’ve poured everything I have into it every single time.  The torture of climate obstruction is that it exists to trap us in the cycle of explanation and debate forever. Polluters and their cronies are not trying to win the climate argument, merely to prolong it in perpetuity so there’s never enough public consensus for action. Obstructionists always say they’re just “asking questions.” But year after year, the questions and the answers are the same. And god forbid you get too tired or frustrated to keep explaining the nuances, or at least to do it with a smile. Then you’re a shithead who doesn’t want to engage.

One of the most excruciating versions of this cycles is the climate-change-versus-forest-management trap. The number of Republican lawmakers screaming “aCtuaLLy, iT’s FoReSt mAnAgEmeNt, NoT cLiMatE ChaNgE,” is enough to make me pop a blood vessel. Yes, it’s true! Forest management plays a role! It is not enough to manage away the hotter, drier conditions that have turned fires into continent-spanning hellscape smoke events. We have talked to an endless number of ecologists, fire management experts, and climate scientists about this. Maybe stop getting all your information from fossil fuel bootlickers and you will begin to understand. 

Excerpt from this LA Times story:

In a case that has become a local flashpoint, environmental groups seeking to halt a lithium operation in Imperial County until it gets further review argued before a state appeals court in San Diego on Thursday.

Controlled Thermal Resources wants to extract lithium from hot brine that will be used to power a geothermal electricity plant it plans to build. This type of lithium removal is different from traditional hardrock mining or evaporation ponds. The project also would need 6,500 acre-feet of fresh water annually for washing the mineral and cooling.

Earthworks, a nonprofit focused on the impacts of mining, and Comité Cívico del Valle, an Imperial County environmental justice group, allege the county didn’t adequately examine the project’s effects on water supply, air quality and tribal cultural resources when it granted approvals.

The groups filed suit in March 2024 and Imperial County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Jones ruled against them in January 2025, saying the county met its legal requirements.

Before a panel of three judges for the California Court of Appeals 4th Appellate District, plaintiffs’ lawyer Doug Carstens argued that if water becomes scarcer, the project may rely on agricultural runoff that currently feeds the shrinking Salton Sea, exacerbating dust and air quality issues. He also said the environmental review did not account for future water-thirsty projects in the desert area.

“There will be a lot of straws dipping into the pool,” Carstens said.

The project, called Hell’s Kitchen, also failed to adequately involve local tribes in assessing the effect on cultural resources, he said.

Controlled Thermal Resources attorney Suzanne Varco said that the company reached out to 26 area tribes in 2021 and received no reply. She noted that one elder from Kwaaymii Laguna Band of Indians responded with concerns about mud pots and other resources in the area, but it was more than five months after the consultation period closed.

Justice Julia Kelety’s questions suggested the tribes provided names for resources in the area but failed to say how they would be affected.

Excerpt from this Chicago Tribune story:

Smoke from wildfires — which are burning more of the Northern Hemisphere as Earth warms — attacks nearly every system in the human body, killing tens of thousands of people a year, numerous medical studies show.

It attacks the body immediately, spiking asthma cases with increased ambulance runs within hours, swamps emergency rooms in a day or so with people suffering from heart attacks and other cardiovascular and lung issues, as well as mental health issues, doctors and scientists told The Associated Press.

Smoke also harms pregnant women, increasing the risk of premature births and low-weight babies who could have breathing problems the rest of their lives, doctors and studies say. And then there are long-term risks connecting prolonged smoke and other air pollution exposure to some cancers and dementia.

After huge global fires in 2018 and 2019, the medical and science communities started looking at the health effects from the smoke with “more and more studies coming out finding that there’s all types of impacts that may not have been so obvious before,” said Dr. Mary Johnson, a Harvard School of Public Health environmental health scientist.

Smoke causes inflammation by triggering the body’s immune system to go into overtime to fight the irritant. Scientists have found it can harm the brain, the skin and men’s sperm, with almost no system of the body spared, Johnson said. People over 60 become more prone to stroke in wildfire smoke, she said.

“Wildfire smoke is the toxic product of combustion of whatever burned,” which could include houses and cars, said Dr. Courtney Howard, an emergency room physician, chair of the Global Climate and Health Alliance and president-elect of the Canadian Medical Association.

“So really it’s a big giant toxic soup of particles and gases.”

Scientists have counted at least 1,000 toxins in wildfire smoke, according to Colorado State University environmental toxicologist Luke Montrose.

Excerpt from this story from World Wildlife Fund:

Laurie and Mark Gaugler’s family cattle ranch is a stunning prairie under Montana’s wide-open skies with abundant wildlife populations. Their connection to the land runs generations deep, and their mission has always been powerful and simple: to practice good stewardship of the land and livestock while enhancing it for the future.

In 2021, the Gauglers noticed a family of beavers had moved into a perennial stream that winds through their ranch.

“It was really just luck one day,” Mark said. The Gauglers were excited about the potential for the beavers to help them restore the creek. Like many prairie streams across the American West, the creek was heavily altered over time through widespread land-use changes and the over-trapping of beavers by settlers, which removed beavers from large parts of their historic range.

When streams are degraded and there are fewer healthy riparian plants and trees, faster-moving water will erode streambanks and soil, making the area less resilient to drought and wildfire and reducing its habitat value for wildlife. More than half of wetlands in the Great Plains have been lost or significantly altered, and in many areas, 50%–70% of remaining wetlands are degraded to some degree.

The presence of beavers can change that. Beavers are known as amazing engineers, enriching the areas where they are found.

Stewarding the creek and the beaver family is important to Mark and Laurie’s management philosophy. When they noticed the beavers running out of food and building materials, they reached out to WWF to collaborate on a native planting project. The beavers mostly build their dams in this area out of grass and mud, and the occasional tree branch if they can get their paws on one, but with these fresh willow and cottonwood plantings, they hope to welcome the beavers for years to come. Over time, as the stream heals and the water table rises, native trees will propagate naturally in a virtuous cycle that will continue to spread along the creek.

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

The Inflation Reduction Act, which became law in 2022, was the first and largest climate bill in the history of the United States. It was also the cornerstone of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda. The bill offered billions of dollars in tax credits for companies that built solar and wind farms or electric vehicle battery factories, and to consumers who purchased electric cars and heat pumps. These incentives led developers to build enough solar and wind to power millions of homes and spurred the construction of hundreds of new factories, helping trigger a surge of new American manufacturing investment for the first time in decades.

The law lasted less than three years. Last July, President Donald Trump signed what he called the “Big Beautiful Bill,” a sweeping tax reform that repealed almost all the main subsidies of the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA. Even though around two dozen Republicans in Congress said they wanted to preserve clean energy incentives, almost all of them voted to pass the law. In signing the bill, Trump said it would end what he called the “Green New Scam.” 

A year after the repeal, the outlook for the climate is mixed. Most significantly, the IRA’s path toward sharply lowering emissions has been derailed. The IRA would have led the U.S. to cut its carbon emissions 50 percent from peak levels by 2035, but that goal is now out of reach. A series of studies have found that the repeal puts the U.S. back on track for the 30 percent reduction it was on track to achieve even before the IRA, and that emissions will likely remain more or less flat through the end of the decade. The repeal has also succeeded in slowing the clean energy buildout. Manufacturers and energy developers have scrapped dozens of solar farms and battery plants.

But the transition has not come to a complete halt. Most solar and wind projects that relied on Biden-era tax credits are still moving forward because they can make a profit even without subsidies. The electricity sector in particular is edging away from fossil fuels as renewables offer a cheap and fast alternative in many parts of the country. And some nixed projects may make a comeback despite Trump’s efforts to kill them.

Even now, a year after the repeal, its full effects are difficult to measure. It’s also hard to separate the effect of the IRA repeal from the Trump administration’s other policies. The president has canceled federal grants for clean energy projects, blocked the development of offshore wind, used executive authority to prevent the retirement of coal plants, and repealed dozens of agency rules that were meant to crack down on emissions. It’s unclear how many of these efforts will survive in court or how long they will last, which also makes it difficult to know how damaging the loss of tax credits for renewable energy and electric vehicles might be. That’s all without factoring in the AI boom, which has triggered more development of renewable energy and fossil fuels.

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

Michigan regulatory officials on Wednesday issued several key permits for the construction of a tunnel to replace an aging section of the Line 5 pipeline in the Straits of Mackinac, the waterways that straddle the state’s Upper and Lower peninsulas. Officials said that the necessity of the project in preventing an oil spill in the Great Lakes outweighed other public interests.

The controversial plan by Enbridge Energy would replace a dual segment of the crude oil and natural gas liquids pipeline that runs through the environmentally sensitive straits, with one buried beneath the lakebed between lakes Michigan and Huron. For more than 73 years, Line 5 has transported oil and natural gas liquids 645 miles from Superior, Wisconsin, to Sarnia, Ontario. 

The Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, or EGLE, approved a construction permit on lake bottomlands “following comprehensive review.” The agency said in a news release that the permit requires Enbridge to minimize damage to surrounding wetlands.

Despite acknowledging that construction would “adversely impact” rare plants and animals in the area, the state Department of Natural Resources still issued a permit to Enbridge. By state law, the permit also requires the company to “lessen impacts” with measures such as collecting seeds for later restoration or only clearing trees in the winter to protect bats.

Line 5 opponents slammed the decisions by state regulators. “The bigger picture is that there should be no destruction, no wetlands destruction, there should be no forest destruction for a project that is not needed,” said David Holtz, coalition coordinator for anti-Line 5 group Oil & Water Don’t Mix.

Enbridge maintains that the tunnel project will protect the Great Lakes, and that Line 5 continues to operate “safely and reliably” under federal standards. 

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

If you wanted to save some money by learning how to check your home for air leaks, poor insulation, and power-hungry lightbulbs, the Department of Energy’s website was ready to help. And if you needed an expert, the site guided you to another page for help lining up a professional energy assessment, a well-established first step to cut utility bills and curb pollution at the same time. 

That is, until this summer, when both of those resources vanished from the agency’s site, each now redirecting to “Page not found.” They were taken down by July 3, around the same time that the Department of Energy deleted more than 1,600 pages from the Energy Saver section of its site, gutting a resource for people looking to conserve energy and lower bills.

“I can’t remember another time that, with DOE specifically, we’ve seen an entire domain go down the way that [it] has been reported on now,” said Izzy Pacenza, who monitors government websites for the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. Over a 30-day span this summer, as swaths of the country suffered under heat waves, more than 300 of the webpages had received 160,000 page views, according to an analysis from The Guardian.

The news coverage of the missing websites has focused on the disappearance of one recommendation in particular. Ahead of a heat wave that roasted New York City with 100-degree temperatures earlier this month, Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked businesses and residents to set their AC to 78 degrees to conserve energy, drawing the ire of Republicans who mocked the restrictions as “socialism.” Internet sleuths were quick to notice that similar guidance had vanished from the Department of Energy’s website, which used to direct people to keep their thermostat between 75 and 78 degrees. The timing suggested that the agency might have removed the pages as a rebuke to Mamdani’s advice.

The purge looked suspiciously timed for another reason:  On July 2, the Energy Department announced a proposed rule to make it harder for future administrations to approve energy efficiency standards for household appliances, saying it would “permanently end Green New Scam appliance mandates.” The move was part of the Trump administration’s broader attack on energy efficiency requirements.

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

With summer heat comes pool parties, beach days, backyard cookouts and, of course, swarms of bloodthirsty mosquitos.

But while insect bites have always been a side effect of time spent outdoors, the species doing the biting are changing in historically temperate regions like New England. As climate change makes these areas warmer and wetter, their ranges are expanding—and any diseases they carry come with them. 

In Connecticut, for example, a statewide mosquito monitoring program has detected 54 different species, including invasives like the Asian tiger mosquito, which can transmit potentially serious diseases including dengue and Zika. The mosquito’s historical territory is in hot and humid climates farther south, but it has been moving north. 

Programs like these are key for preventing mosquito-borne diseases, especially as climate change alters the risks. “You really do have to test the mosquitoes to know where the hot spots are for these viruses,” Armstrong said. “By the time we learn about human cases, it’s usually too late to do anything.”

There aren’t statewide monitoring programs in much of the country. Instead, a patchwork quilt of more than 1,000 mosquito control agencies tries to keep ahead of an evolving problem. Most are run at the local level, with a wide range of organizational structures and monitoring practices.

Excerpt from this story from The Guardian:

The plan to bury carbon under remote Indiana farmland is supposed to be a slam dunk for the climate, according to its supporters – all generously funded by US tax dollars.

But as far as Melissa Harrison and some other residents of Clymers, Indiana, are concerned, it just might be the end of their town. “This is our place,” she says. Generations of her family are buried in the cemetery, and she is raising her five grandchildren in one of several dozen white-clapboard homes among cornfields and industrial plants serving the farming industry.

Now a local ethanol plant has spearheaded a project to bury vast stores of carbon deep in the geologic formation that runs under the town and surrounding farms.

The government subsidies for the plan, which is supposed to help prevent global heating, are so generous that companies all over the country have been rushing to get permission for similar projects.

But residents around some of these carbon sequestration projects are organizing to stop them, making Clymers a center of emerging national tensions around these projects.

Image by Hans Toom from Pixabay.

Excerpt from this story from The Revelator, which is itself an excerpt from the book, The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore the Planet, written by Jason Dove Mark.

For hundreds of thousands of years, during those long centuries when the New World was still old, bald eagles lived nearly everywhere in North America, their one and only natural home. Eagles flew over the tidal estuaries of the Atlantic Coast and the rugged seashore of the Pacific. They built their nests in the folds of western basin and range, on the prairie, throughout the north woods. There were likely a half million of them, an eyrie perched every few miles along fish-rich rivers like the Schuylkill, the Hudson, the Columbia, the Colorado. Up to 14 pounds in weight and with a wingspan that can stretch eight feet from tip to tip, the bald eagle was sovereign of the American sky, the apex predator of the air.

The First Nations perceived a great power in the bird. Many Native cultures considered bald eagle feathers as sacred and used them in ceremonies or for ritual healing practices. For the Lenape people of the Delaware River region, it was considered a sign of courage and good luck to wear an eagle feather that had been plucked from a living bird. In the Southwest, the Pueblo and Zuni kept domesticated eagles in large aviaries. Across diverse cultures, Indigenous lore esteemed the eagle as a chief, the bird of heaven. “In an eagle there is all the wisdom in the world,” the twentieth-century Lakota spiritual leader Lame Deer (aka John Fire) once said. “Eagle” was very likely the most common animal clan name continent-wide.

When the newcomers arrived from across the sea and encountered this bird they had never known, they also apprehended its strength. Perhaps it was just anthropomorphic projection. Bald eagles mate for life and carefully tend their young, and maybe the settlers imagined some kind of puritanical family values. Bald eagles also have a passion for building — their nests can weigh up to a ton and last for decades — and maybe the restless settlers appreciated the bird’s industriousness. At the very least, the new Americans liked the bird’s military bearing, with its steely gaze, broad chest, and bone-white crown. In 1782, the bald eagle became the central symbol of the Great Seal of the United States, the unofficial national bird — George Washington in feathers.

But it was a conflicted relationship. The eagle had become a symbol of America, yet many Americans didn’t like the actual animal. “He is a Bird of bad moral Character,” Benjamin Franklin famously wrote. “He does not get his Living honestly.” Franklin was referring to the bald eagle’s habit of stealing fish from the smaller osprey, its penchant for poaching, and its taste for carrion. Settlers complained that eagles often snatched their lambs and chicks. Against all common sense, the myth spread that bald eagles could carry off human babies from the crib.

A campaign of ecocide began. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans murdered eagles mercilessly. Farmers and ranchers shot them on sight — “We kill all the eagles we can,” one sheep farmer said — while some state and local governments paid bounties for dead eagles. In Alaska alone, hunters killed some eighty thousand eagles to cash in on the territory’s bounty. By the turn of the last century, the birds were vanishingly rare in most of the country. “Twenty years ago, I used to see a dozen or more along the river in the spring” the nature writer John Burroughs noticed in the early 1900s, “where I now see only one or two, or none at all.”

Excerpt from this story from The Revelator:

In 2019 a nonprofit called The Ocean Cleanup conducted a major test of technology designed to remove plastic pollution from the water.

It appeared to work, and the nonprofit released photos proclaiming its success.

But some scientists noticed something else among the accumulated plastic in the Ocean Cleanup’s publicity photos.

“Earlier this year I warned that @TheOceanCleanup would catch and kill floating marine life,” marine ecologist Dr. Rebecca Helm wrote on the social media platform then known as Twitter. “This week they announced they’re collecting plastic, and their picture shows HUNDREDS of floating animals trapped with the plastic.”

The Ocean Cleanup team appeared to be oblivious to this consequence of their test before this public criticism.

It’s not surprising that any attempt to remove plastic from here would catch, and likely kill, many marine organisms, because the waters of this region aren’t a trash-filled biological desert. The area is full of neuston, marine life that lives right at the sea surface — species that may not be as charismatic as dolphins or sea turtles but are extremely ecologically important.

“This region in general has very high densities of several key species,” says Helm, now an affiliate faculty member at Georgetown University. “This ecosystem is ecologically important to species that we do care about. We can’t just go disrupting it in the name of conservation and imagine that everything is OK and that you’re doing a good thing.”

Other scientists agreed.

“Honestly, if that was me, I would have totally stopped,” Dr. Kim Martini, a physical oceanographer and founder of the oceanography equipment designer and supplier Tini Scientific, says of the incident. “Because the whole point is supposed to be about how you’re saving animals that live in the ocean.”

Critical habitat throughout the U.S., including many coastlines and mountain areas. Note: Alaska is not to scale. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Excerpt from this story from The Revelator:

It wouldn’t make much sense to prohibit people from shooting a threatened woodpecker while allowing its forest to be cut down, or to bar killing endangered salmon while allowing a dam to dry out their habitat.

But that’s what the Trump administration is doing by changing how one word in the Endangered Species Act is interpreted: harm.

For 50 years, the U.S. government has interpreted the Endangered Species Act as protecting threatened and endangered species from actions that either directly kill them or eliminate their habitat. A new federal rule change, announced July 10, 2026, keeps the first part – protecting against the direct killing of the species – but removes habitat destruction.

That matters, because most species on the brink of extinction are on the Endangered Species list because there is almost no place left for them to live. Their habitats have been paved over, burned or transformed. Habitat protection is essential for their survival.

The Endangered Species Act, passed in 1973, bans the “take” of “any endangered species of fish or wildlife,” which includes harming protected species.

Since 1975, regulations have defined “harm” to include habitat destruction that kills or injures wildlife. Developers and logging interests challenged that definition in 1995 in a Supreme Court case, Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Great Oregon. However, the court ruled that the definition was reasonable and allowed federal agencies to continue using it.

In short, the law says “take” includes harm, and under the regulatory definition at the time, harm included indirect harm through habitat destruction.

Excerpt from this story from High Country News:

After more than half a century of federal protections, the Trump Administration on Tuesday announced a proposal to return management of grizzly bears in the Lower 48 to the states. 

Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, flanked by governors Greg Gianforte of Montana, Mark Gordon of Wyoming, and Brad Little of Idaho, heralded the new rule at a press conference in the heart of grizzly country north of Yellowstone National Park. 

“The grizzly bear recovery story is one of America’s greatest conservation successes,” Gianforte said from a makeshift stage just south of Big Sky, Montana. He cited a downside of the bears’ 50-year recovery and pointed to increasing bear-human conflicts in front yards, playgrounds and ranch pastures. “Montana is ready to have full authority to manage grizzly bears,” he said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1975 listed grizzlies as “threatened” in the Lower 48 states under the Endangered Species Act. At the time, fewer than 600 members of the species existed south of the Canadian border. Today, two major populations thrive in and around Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, each with approximately 1,000 bears — along with a smattering of smaller ecosystems that could support grizzlies with far fewer resident bruins.

The federal government has twice attempted to remove Endangered Species Act protections for grizzlies, specifically in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The move to delist bears would mean returning management to the states of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Both efforts, in 2007 and 2017, respectively, were overturned in court. Yet states kept petitioning to remove federal protections. In January 2025, during the final hours of the Biden administration, FWS denied those petitions and released a new rule perpetuating the bears’ protected status.

The rule announced today took a different approach, amending the Biden administration’s 2025 edict: Instead of delisting grizzlies, the bears will stay on the endangered species list. But under a new revision of section 4(d) of the Endangered Species Act, the federal government will concede grizzly management to the states. 

“I think of this as a dress rehearsal for delisting,” said Christy Clark, director of Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, after the meeting concluded.

For decades, concerns over delisting have centered around a grizzly hunt that could come with state management. However, Montana has a five-year moratorium on pursuing the animals post-delisting and Gianforte said the new rule would not permit a hunt in Montana.  

The text of the new 4(d) rule is yet to be published, but all three speakers and Secretary Burgum stressed that the new rule would grant states more flexibility to manage grizzlies on the ground as the states transition from an era of grizzly recovery to stewardship of the species.

Kind of weird to be putting part of a poem on Tumblr. I was reading The Rolling Stone article about Christopher Nolan's new movie, "The Odyssey." At the end of the article, the author included an extract, which is a poem, from the play "The Cure at Troy" by Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet and playwright. The extract speaks to our times in the US right now, in brutality yet with optimism:

Human beings suffer. They torture one another. They get hurt and get hard. No poem or play or song Can fully right a wrong Inflicted and endured.

History says, don’t hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change On the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore Is reachable from here. Believe in miracle And cures and healing wells.