Category: ecocide

deer hunting season | regular firearm, November 15 – 30, 2023, Michigan, U.S.

On By ©️K.T. 2026In Animals, Ceasefire, deer, deer hunting, Earth hospice, Earthling, earthlings, ecocide, fauna, Gaza, Genocide, holocaust, hunters, hunting, hunting season, ki, kill lists, kin, kinship, Life and Death, November, Palestine, Philosophy, planetary hospice, Poem, Tradition As Violence, Tradition Is Violence, wildlife, ZionismLeave a comment

the gunshot
crisp, startling
a radiating crackle
floating on the unusually warm autumn air

my dog bolts for the house, and once inside, takes cover under the desk – this is a natural response to explosives

fear, confusion, rage, sorrow course through my marrow — we are made of the same stuff

then i remember that deer-stalking-luring-and-killing with a gun season started today

i’d seen the dignified six-point buck head south earlier,
the same direction of the blast / i realize that he may be dead, now

then i remember that i haven’t seen the
doe and her playful and curious fawns
in over a month’s time

on my way to the highway entrance ramp,
i avoid the main roads
where the bodies of two deer lay dead
a half mile apart
/ i pretend they can’t be, that they aren’t my familiars /

the deer always seem to be lying just barely off the road

do they collapse and die there identically — or does someone drag them there by their legs or antlers; are there protocols for this?
what does the weight of a dead deer body or dead human body feel like in the hands? are the dead heavier? would i be able to drag a deer or human body? maybe — in my heyday
i have only ever held dead rabbits, squirrels, birds, fish in my own two hands

then i remember that our first dog was euthanized at home, in the back yard, in the June Sun, but it was not me who lifted and carried his body away / why didn’t i carry him? back then, i was in my strength heyday.

Continue reading “deer hunting season | regular firearm, November 15 – 30, 2023, Michigan, U.S.” →

“The crew compartment’s breaking up”

On By ©️K.T. 2026In Climate Acceptance, Climate Chaos, Climate Collapse, Crone Consciousness, Earth hospice, Earthling, earthlings, ecocide, exposition, Funerary, Hospice, Lament, Lamentations, Life and Death, music, planetary hospice, Song, Songs, Space Shuttle ColumbiaLeave a comment

John Roderick wrote the above line and repeats it seven times(!) in his song, “The Commander Thinks Aloud”— about the Space Shuttle Columbia Disaster that happened February 1, 2003

and, if I’m not careful, I will start to cry during the first verse


The Commander Thinks Aloud

Boys and girls in cars
Dogs and birds on lawns
From here I can touch the sun


Put your jackets on
I feel we're being born
The Tropic of Capricorn is below


We stall above the pole
Still your face is young
As we feel our weight return


A trail of shooting stars
The horses call the storm
Because the air contains the Charge


The radio is on
And Houston knows the score
Can you feel it, we're almost home

The crew compartment's breaking up
The crew compartment's breaking up
The crew compartment's breaking up
The crew compartment's breaking up
(This is all I wanted to bring home)

The crew compartment's breaking up
(This is all I wanted to bring home)

The crew compartment's breaking up
(This is all I wanted to bring home)

The crew compartment's breaking up
This is all I wanted to bring home to you

Songwriter: John Roderick, The Long Winters


The Commander Thinks Aloud lyrics © Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd., Rough Trade Publishing

this song — since the very first time i (belatedly) heard and learned about it on the Song Exploder podcast in 2016 — became an instant melancholic metaphor-lamentation for me, even while retaining it’s very visceral and intended meaning —

at first, for the climate chaos we face on our communal spaceship — Spaceship Earth,

as in, “hey, do you realize we’re floating in space?” — then, why are we [deliberately] destroying the crew compartment?

and

for our lives — for the simplicity that is both stolen and lost

in the daily struggle — of and against exploitation, repression and oppression; in the daily drama of our dis/mis/mal contentment; in the daily, unnecessary grasping, striving, amassing and hoarding — whether for – or of, wealth, land, power, influence, reputation, career, fame, control or privilege —

or, in orbiting the Earth in a shuttle or space station or landing on the Moon in a spacecraft — when we could’ve just been human beings caretaking of this Eden and of each other.

and personally,

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Earthling in Planetary Hospice: climate acceptance versus climate doomerism

On By ©️K.T. 2026In climate, Climate Acceptance, Climate Chaos, Climate Collapse, Crone, Crone Consciousness, Earth hospice, Earthling, earthlings, ecocide, Hospice, planetary hospiceLeave a comment

Rebecca Solnit of The Guardian in late July penned a piece which misrepresents climate acceptance, realism and planetary hospice solely as a harmful defeatism and doomerism.

Renaee Churches wrote an important and thoughtful response that will not reach an audience as large as Solnit’s, and is excerpted below:

We have already lost the climate battle and it is stories or opinions like the one above, that are preventing others from grasping this, and stopping us from taking the kinds of collective adaptive responses appropriate on a local and global scale.

The not-too-late framing is a dangerous one. It means people are prepared to wait for global elites to roll out the energy transition, to deploy such ‘solutions’ as carbon capture technologies, or other flawed techno fixes, aimed at making those elites wealthy, while not stopping the baked in warming that is already here and accelerating. It is only when we finally break through the not-too-late taboo that we will begin the work in earnest of adaptation to reduce suffering as much as we can.

We need to normalise talk about collapse and have a broad, society-wide, honest discussion about how we can respond. These discussions are already happening behind closed doors by the Militaries of the world, by Insurance Agencies, and the Financial Sector elites. So we don’t need more writers like Solnit advising the masses to effectively keep calm and carry on. Rather we need a clear-eyed look at the reality of our situation — as a failing global industrial civilisation.

Then together, as ordinary people, we can adjust, grieve and determine how best to navigate the great unravelling as it continues to play out in our lives.

Renaee Churches, Medium

this is my response to Solnit’s piece, which will reach even fewer people:

Climate acceptance and Planetary Hospice involve the refusal to endorse,
and the honesty to resist, further extraction from and destruction of the Earth and injuries to indigenous and marginalized communities of People across the World and to the remaining, marginally or tenuously stable or life-supportive swaths or pockets of wildlife, forests, tundra, deserts, wetlands, lakes, rivers
and ocean.

Continue reading “Earthling in Planetary Hospice: climate acceptance versus climate doomerism” →

Earthling in Planetary Hospice: late July 2023

On By ©️K.T. 2026In Crone, Cronehood, Earth hospice, Earthling, earthlings, ecocide, Existence, Hospice, planetary hospiceLeave a comment

I have been in existential hospice for a while now — not because I am personally terminally ill, but because I am experiencing and witnessing our planet die – the planet that we and all our fellow Earthlings from the salmon to the sycamores, from the gulls to the goldenrods, from the frogs to the funguses require for habitat — biologically, habitat is synonymous with life, with sustainable, continuing existence.

Earthling in Planetary Hospice
a new section of the Limineen
where I share climate and environmental metrics and information about climate chaos and collapse and write about my own experience of existential hospice and Planetary Hospice.

The Western World and the white-European capitalist and middle classes — that have driven industrialization; fossil fuel extraction; natural, animal and human resources exploitation, commodification and exhaustion; consumer greed and waste; and atmospheric, environmental and ecological devastation and destruction — will not ride this one out like some cyclical economic corrective shockwave or isolated ‘natural’ disaster — this is not like a stock market crash, an engineered mortgage crisis or a flash flood or rogue tornado that temporarily inconveniences the well-insured:

no, they, their children and grandchildren will suffer and die as well.

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.

Dr. Albert Bartlett, 1923-2013
Ph.D. Nuclear Physics, Harvard University/Professor Emeritus University of Colorado

I can understand how ignorance, whether willful or innocent, is preferable. But now is the time for the truthful acknowledgement and acceptance of the catalyzation of unstoppable and irreversible feedback loops coupled with an accelerating rate of change projected to their reasonable scientific conclusion.

It’s also time for individual personal ecological recognition and reconciliation.We are pure consumers, we are not producers. We are human animals reliant on habitat and other species for our lives — there is no other Earthling species naturally reliant on human beings. It is essential that each one of us understands the gravity of this — and undertakes palliative, hospice and grief work for ourselves, for other beings, for other Earthlings, right now.

Being present as witness and participant, perpetrator and victim, and caregiver and care-receiver during the death of the World as we have always known it, is an undeniably crushing experience and responsibility — but simultaneously, it is also an incredible, incredulous, and humbling honor.

What a time to be alive, truly.

I don’t think anyone of us will garner a reservation on some exclusive, off-planet ‘Elysium’ – and I, myself wouldn’t want one.

Immense grief is the close companion to the immense joy and wonder that I still feel and experience.

the May plow

On By ©️K.T. 2026In Earth hospice, Earthling, earthlings, ecocide, Hospice, Poem, poetry, spring, telepathy, wildlifeLeave a comment
the beautiful spring day that the fields are first plowed for the season is heartrending
the privacy, peace and space that non-human animals had on the barren 80 acres for the last six months is gone within minutes and hours

on the day they plow
the fields clear of last year’s stover
i stay quiet and invisible, indoors

there is a seen and unseen frantic attempt at evacuation, an exodus of

snakes, turtles, frogs, toads, rabbits, moles, voles, possums, weasels, marmots, skunks, raccoons, squirrels, mice, rats,

evicted without notice, again

geese and sandhill crane nests destroyed

over-wintered graves defiled

and newly-born deer crushed, plowed over and under

/this destruction, all,

for corn to fatten-up confined and tortured

pigs, cows, chickens, turkeys, salmon, catfish, tilapia

for human appetite, gluttony/

death eaters!

if i just stay quiet,
quieter than the snake and mole i saw yesterday,
if i just stay inside, unseen, all day ‘til Sun’s set, like the possum i saw last night,
then kin may seek refuge, find sanctuary here

to catch their breath

some of us have forgotten that they too breathe

and feel fear,

and scream, wail, and mourn

run!!! come, run here!!!
stay right here, please, the roads to west and south also bring death!

i put all my faith into telepathy today

the gulls arrive
chasing and taunting the tractor driver,

he’s no farmer
his hands literally never touch soil or seed

a machine operating a machine guided by satellite

if only the gulls or crows would pluck out his eyes when he dismounts

if only, i would.

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Earth

On By ©️K.T. 2026In Crone Consciousness, Earth Day, Earth hospice, Earthling, earthlings, ecocide, Garden of Eden, ki, kin, Mother, planetary hospiceLeave a comment

“Do you realize – we’re floating in space?”

Our ancestors were born on a spaceship that never needed refueling, repair, redesign or course correction.

Earthlings have all uniquely adapted to their respective natural, geographical habitats and migration routes — except for the warring and dominant human regimes and cultures — that decided for all Earthlings that they should geo-engineer artificial environments and extract the blood and bodies of the ancient ones — for one species’ sole benefit — until Earth no longer feels or looks like Earth – and has become unrecognizable, unsafe or uninhabitable to most other species.

photo credit : European Space Agency

There are PCBs in the Atacama Trench and microplastics in fetal tissue of mammals – of humans.

Despite all the wonderful river and beach clean-up and tree planting projects on Earth Day, for me, it’s always a contemplative and sobering day.

We all have a stake—equally. Because if we do not save the environment and save the Earth, then whatever we do in civil rights or in a war against poverty will be of no meaning, because then we will have the equality of extinction and the brotherhood of the grave.

James L. Farmer,
at the very first Earth Day,
April 22, 1970