Lucille Clifton’s poetry is generally described by scholars and fellow poets as concise, lean, spare, direct, unadorned, economical, deceptively simple, deceptively slight, and deceptively evanescent.  Her deceit is in her brevity.  Like Emily Dickinson, to whom she is often compared in style, though not subject, she astonishes with very few—and often very short—lines.  Clifton refuses capital letters and often refuses punctuation.  Her words sit quietly on the page even while the meanings of the words pounce on the unsuspecting reader.

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Those who know me well, know I care more about being people-friendly and quite a bit less about being eco-friendly.

I've often participated in debates around why industrialized societies devote so much time and energy to "greening" the world, rather than exhausting the same amount of energy to "peopling" the world.

My overarching question is always, "With so many acts of war, genocide, femicide, rape and other atrocities that occur daily against humankind, why are environmentalist so concerned with whether I drink out of a glass or plastic bottle?"

Or, to bring the question closer to home, "How do we counter the immediate needs that are a result of high unemployment rates, substandard public education, senseless violence and unaffordable housing in communities of color by reducing our waste?"

As Jimi Izrael put it in a recent post on The Root, "Poor people live in the now...I'm too busy trying to survive to spend any time worrying about the environment."

Unfortunately, I have found that eco-fanatics are rarely humanity-fanatics.  Although quick to reassure that "going green" is for the betterment of future societies, environmentalist rarely explain how we can integrate Earth-friendly initiatives with those that address basic human rights violations today.

"When you're broke, it's not about sustaining the environment. It's about staying alive in the moment," continues Izreal. "That's the way I was raised. I've always looked at environmentalism as middle-class folly, but I understand why it's important. We want our kids to have a better world, or whatever, and I get it."

Yes, we get it.  We get how environmental efforts create a better world for us all -- kumbaya.

But like Izrael, I have to ask, "How do you make Earth Day and 'green living' relevant and important to poor people as well as folks in the 'hood?"

How do we address the humanitarian issues plaguing populations now while planning for the longevity of the planet?

Related links

National Geographic’s New Environmental Rankings
Don’t Buy Green

Photo by James Brandon King.