Laura Harrison-Snyder "Tomorrow's Song"

As a soon to graduate political science major, I loved the first few lines of this poem:

"The USA slowly lost its mandate
in the middle and later twentieth century
it never gave the mountains and rivers,
trees and animals,
a vote.
all the people turned away from it
myths die; even continents are impermanent (77).

With all of America's natural beauty, it has no way of speaking for or defending itself. The trees and animals can't register and show up at the polls on Election Day, therefore it is up to us the voters to speak for them and send signals to our elected officials that the natural environment has its rights too.

Later in the poem Snyder writes the following:

We look to the future with pleasure
we need no fossil fuel
get power within
grow strong on less (77).

This is what the current push for clean, environmentally friendly energy is trying to do, "grow strong on less." I hope we can manage to do just that, because if we continue on our current path we are only digging a grave for ourselves as well as the planet we live on.