Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I learned about the concept of “slow travel” after reading about the Italian climate researcher Gianluca Grimalda. Even though his boss ordered him back to work in Northern Germany by a certain date, he refused to take a transcontinental flight in time enough to return to his office. And for this — he was fired.

Grimalda rejects the cult of speed. He only boards an airplane if no other options exist. Earlier this year, he journeyed 14,000 miles on a research trip to Papua New Guinea. The trip took thirty-five days through multiple countries via trains, buses, ferries, taxis, and a shared car. By his estimate, he saved almost 4 tons of carbon emissions.

This summer we witnessed dire evidence of global warming — fires that scorched Canada and Hawaii, devastating floods in Libya, record-setting high temperatures across the globe. In light of this, I deeply admire Grimalda’s commitment to the planet, a commitment that envisions a world without airplanes.

I know: it sounds impossible. Our economies are dependent on the advances made in aviation. But what if we make our economies answer to the needs of the planet? Although the concept of slow travel is embedded in certain privileges, Grimalda’s example of conscientious travel feels like a possible intervention and, potentially, the start of a journey toward a healthier existence for our planet.

Today’s poem acknowledges the complex task of committing to the earth, which means committing to a sustainable future but also, identifying the entangled histories of colonization — of both people and of natural habitats.

What to Do with the Hedges
by Bernard Ferguson

it turns out all legacies are connected: Europe’s
charge through the West and the charge of
the phragmites alongside it; the precipitate 
of industrial profits trickling in threads,
beads of toxins saturating the river’s sediment;
and the rising seas salinating the marshes,
squeezing the swamps farther inland.

                                                                                  phragmites:
invader, living thing living irrepressibly amidst Hackensack,
from the Lenape ackingsah-sack, meaning stony ground, 
through more than muck and rock, the mercury
and wastewater made sludge, mirrors in the mulch,
poisoned the fish and killed what would have taken
much longer to kill. the capillaries of colonization have come
to make the silt, the still-rich swamp, the mud and lotuses
that surge in the streams between us — the rivers
that come to meet other rivers, rivers of time mixed 
with rivers of capital, the river gathered by the thaw 
of lost glaciers fusing with the rivers of glaciers faraway
and still thawing. the benefits of what was built continue to
collide with its costs. what do we do with that complexity?
what do we do with what we know?
                                                                                     they say the phragmites
should be eradicated for its growth. they say the phragmites
should be praised for the ingenuity of its roots. how do we
do both? how do we honor the habitat as it is
while mourning the way it was: the greens of the landscape
rich with their hues, the rivulets once bucolic 
with their strokes through these meadowlands,
these pastoral worlds that we’ve injured. do we
remove the phragmites? remove the carbon?
do we leave them both and remove us?

"What To Do With the Hedges" by Bernard Ferguson. Used by permission of the poet.