Deep Green: Culture, Rebellion, Poetry

do you Mr. Jones?" --- b. dylan

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If you're looking for a scientific essay with footnotes, or a practical political platform or even an agenda, this won't be the place...though you're more than welcome to stick around. Everything from here on is based on observations, impressions, subtle influences, emotional predispositions...in a word: feelings...which can be as good a place as any for a starting point...leaving the road map-making to others.

First, let's acknowledge that there's a growing mainstream green consciousness sweeping across the world, including in the United States. Inherent in this mass green acceptance are the more radical seeds of deep green consciousness which basically rejects (or rebels against) social and cultural foundations, assumptions and social conditioning that rationalizes "human domination" over all other living things on the planet. Maybe within this deep green phenomena there lives the fundamental antidote to the slash-burn-extinction dogma we've all been spoon-fed as "normal."

When we look at the innate interconnection and interdependence of all living things, the ideas of deep ecology, living co-existence and co-evolution are relevant, but this goes beyond what I want to say here.

So for now, let's just recognize deep green as a growing and developing body of alternative cultural images and logic that needs no conventional wisdom or schedule.

Rebellion in the form of an alternative holistic life style might be one of many natural deep green oppositional responses to a dominant culture based on money-making, violence, and exploitation. Other forms of rebellion are found in music, art, and poetry...countercultural expression if you want to use the handy phrase.

But it's in poetry that I want to dwell, not as a critic or reviewer, but as a participating poet. Let me use this opening as an open reading to emphasize the theme herein.