So, great men and women are meeting in Glasgow, with the fate of the world in their hands.

Meanwhile, other forces are pushing back. Using the same spoil tactics developed by the tobacco industry, the paid-for ‘think tanks’, stacked with sypathetic pseudo-science aimed to cast doubt and confuse; the politicians in the back pocket, the media outlets primed and ready to push an agenda suited to those whose power and wealth is threatened by a change to the status quo. (If you want to know more about exactly how this works, I would suggest watching this BBC film.)

Here is another poem. My retelling of the Gaia myth.

The woman beneath the hill of the world

.

They say the earth is a woman

Wrapped in a gossamer layer of

Brown-green skin

Runnelled and pooled by

Salt tears

.

They say the woman is barren, for her sterile

Soils are not fed from the falling leaves

Now the trees are gone, and

Long tresses of her deep green hair

Have been stored as silage

.

They say the woman mourns her children

Whose bones now brine the ocean, and

Whose dawn song is no longer sung

Whose savannahs have all

Been stolen

.

They say the woman speaks to mountains

But they no longer listen; that she

Looks for signs in distant stars but their blink

Is blurred by all the smoke from her

Burning forests

.

They say the woman would write her story

Except that the black ink in her wells

Have all been pumped dry, and the

Tail-feather-quills from her favourite flightless birds

Have all been plucked away

.

The woman has not gone yet, they say

For she has nowhere else to go. There are

No lands beyond these fields for her

No other ground she could lay down

So beneath her hill she stays