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I'm Going To Miss Tigers |
I'm going to miss tigers.
Those regal creatures are fading away,
Into the past,
Into photographs in books,
Into documentaries,
Into web sites,
Into stored DNA.
I'm going to miss tigers.
It was a bright blue skied day,
Not the usual L.A. day.
You know, the kind that you can see the air you
breathe.
Sometimes I think I'm more comfortable
Seeing what I breathe.
I'm sort of used to that,
Not this oxygen rich air
That blows in so rarely
On a bright blue skied day.
In the last second four people were born.
In the last minute 247 more people were born.
In the next hour 14,820 people will be born.
Tomorrow 355,680 people will be added to planet earth.
Next week another 2,489,760 people will join the human
race.
A month from now there will be 9,956,000 new mouths to
feed.
By this time next year the earth will groan
Under the weight of 119,472,000 more people.
In the last two seconds eight people were born
And three died.
The air is getting hotter.
The storms are getting wilder.
Spaceship earth is changing.
The first three months of this year
Were the hottest in recorded history.
The oceans are rising
And the polar ice caps are shrinking.
And time is running out.
The air is getting hotter.
I'm going to miss tigers.
Those cunning creatures pacing across the plains,
Are dwindling to a precious few,
In the wild,
In zoos,
In memory,
In photographs,
In the past,
Gone soon and gone for good.
I'm going to miss tigers.
On this glorious planet,
Our only home,
We know of almost two million species
Of living things.
But there may be twice that
Or maybe as many as 100 million.
Species come and species go.
It's been that way here for billions of years.
Survival of the fittest
On this glorious planet.
On the beautiful, good earth
The average life span of a species
Is about one million years
And new species evolve about every million years.
Nice sense of balance
On mother nature's home.
Today the extinction rate is higher,
By a hundred times, maybe,
By a thousand times perhaps
And new species are taking longer to be born
On the beautiful, good earth.
The future of our children
And of theirs
is being played out today
As we grope to cope with global change.
Too many people,
Too many cars,
Too many things to want,
Too many tons of garbage,
Too many plumes of fossil burnt fuel,
Too many mouths to feed,
Too many pesticides,
Too many polluted waterways.
The future of our children.
I'm going to miss tigers.
They move with such ease
In a world made uneasy.
Soon they will move with ease
In my memory,
In tourist taken videotapes,
On CD photo albums,
In the past.
I'm going to miss tigers.
When Christ was born
There were 500 million people on this planet,
Sharing our home,
Sharing its glory,
Sharing His glory.
Today there are six billion
With a "B"
Not so many if you say it fast.
But even saying it fast
That’s four times where we were a hundred years ago,
Half of where we will be fifty years from now,
And over five and a half billion more than when Christ
was born.
We still share this home,
Mother nature's home, our home, His home
But time is running out.
The earth will survive.
The oceans will survive.
Plants, animals and insects will survive,
But not most of them
And in all likelihood, not us.
The planet went on without dinosaurs,
Survived comets crashing,
And it will survive us.
We will take so much
Before we leave
This home we share.
No more Chinese river dolphins,
No more Hawaiian crows,
No more manatees,
No more strange insects,
No more exotic plants
No more cures for disease from those exotic plants,
No more albatross,
No more tigers.
I'm going to miss tigers.
They have a royal grace when they move.
In my memory,
In old fading photographs
Turning yellow
On abandoned ground,
Blowing in the wind
In my memory,
In the distant past.
I'm going to miss tigers.
But who is going to miss me?
And who is going to miss us?
copyright 2004
Pete
Justus |
