Tending Habitat and Other Poems

By Emily Cohen

Volume 23, number 2, A People’s Green New Deal

Organ Pipe • Conservation Corps
A Unionized Joshua Tree NPS Yields High Worker Morale
Breakdown • Tending Habitat • Mom • Nephews

Organ Pipe 

What you know,
you can’t un-know.
Used to be I could lay down and die
thinking of Organ Pipe

Maps of border patrol tracks,
Destruction of cultural sites
is a war crime (genocide).

I asked the I’itoi onions in my care
Who am I to dream?

Illegal roads disappearing
under vertical mulch

Hia C-ed O’odham and Tohono O’odham
moving freely across their land

The saguaro fruit harvest
that tastes
like a crown of strawberries

^{[Notes: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11]}

__________

Conservation Corps

The GND called for them & they came:
5-person, 10-person crews
Southwest Ancestral Lands
Eastern Sierra Women’s
California C1s with their backcountry trail dawgs
ACE & program alumni, too
all of ’em NNFE or AFGE
well-paid
union proud

brushing, pruning, clearing
agitating the soils
greeting grasses for the basket weavers
a thousand more years of cultural burns

^{[Notes: 12 13 14 15 16]}

__________

A Unionized Joshua Tree NPS Yields High Worker Morale

Restore your rights, wildcats.
Stop attending to the altar of tourism.
Visitation’ll roll on for a bit
unacceptable, unsafe, unnerving as the last two shutdowns were.

Your neighbors, we’ll put our bodies on the line for you
& the electric shuttle system.

Shut the park down, high-season.
No more low-wage customer service weekend burnout.
No more working outside in the baking heat breathing that nasty hazardous air.
No more getting less relative funding than Zion & Yosemite.

Shut the park down, high-season.
No more non-Ls managing for non-L wages.
No more working beyond job descriptions & having a detail not count.
No more term, perm, seasonal, contract, countdown to unemployment clock.

Shut the park down, high-season.
No more housing shortages.
No more airbnbs & vacation rentals pricing you out.

Shut the park down, high-season.
Let the cars, the sprinter vans, the RVs back up
& the visitors consider the wilderness myth.

^{[Notes: 17 18 19]}

__________

Breakdown

If not the last snow ever,
then April bulbs blooming in December.
A flood that goes over the doorstep,
or the Nexus pipeline rupturing in the wetlands. 

“How do you deal with the grief?” 

You know I have to believe the juncos and cedar waxwings and the rose-breasted grosbeak will come back. The herons will fly around.

Spring peeper
Potato bug
Daddy long-legs
Millimeter inch worm
Little red spot clover mite

^{[Notes: 20]}

__________

Tending Habitat

A Green New Deal Job

Mass extinction being the problem
You got to reimagine what a job is for

The landscape needed to be tended
Poets are low-carbon
& you knew what to do

You applied under the federal jobs guarantee
for the position of habitat tender
Outcomes measured over seasons, lifetimes
You already owned your tools

The government gave you a stipend
plenty so you could train
apprentices in the tending arts 

^{[Note: 21]}

__________

Mom

She used to catch butterflies in her net when she was little,
loved salamanders. I’ve never seen a salamander but that’s how species go.

__________

Nephews

These days I go from Joshua Tree, California, to Plain Township, Ohio, on the high-speed train. Morongo Basin Electric Van Cooperative picks me up. You meet me at the Market Ave Church Corner light-rail station — 2,300 miles in one easy day.

Grandpa’s waiting on the front porch. He shouts hello. You take off running. I wrap my arms far as I can round the big maple by the driveway. I knew you before you were born; this tree knew me. Your mom said you wanted to spend the weekend helping with grandma’s garden. Splitting bulbs gone spindly, replanting them.

^{[Note: 22]}

References

1. Ryan Devereaux, “Trump Is Blowing Up a National Monument in Arizona to Make Way for the Border Wall,” The Intercept, February 6, 2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/02/06/border-wall-construction-organ-pipe/.
2. Ryan Devereaux, “The Border Patrol Invited the Press to Watch It Blow Up a National Monument,” The Intercept, February 27, 2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/02/27/border-wall-construction-organ-pipe-explosion/.
3. Molly Hennessey-Fiske, “Arizona tribe refuses Trump’s wall, but agrees to let Border Patrol build virtual barrier,” Los Angeles Times, May 19, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-arizona-tribe-border-patrol-trump-wall-20190509-htmlstory.html.
4. Will Parrish, “The U.S. Border Patrol and an Israeli Military Contractor Are Putting a Native American Reservation Under ‘Persistent Surveillance’,” The Intercept, August 25, 2019, https://theintercept.com/2019/08/25/border-patrol-israel-elbit-surveillance/.
5. Todd Miller, “How Border Patrol Occupied the Tohono O’odham Nation,” In These Times, June 12, 2019, http://inthesetimes.com/article/21903/us-mexico-border-surveillance-tohono-oodham-nation-border-patrol.
6. “No Wall,” Tohono O’odham Nation, last modified February 2017, http://www.tonation-nsn.gov/nowall/.
7. Gary Paul Nabhan, The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in O’odham Country, (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982).
8. Native Seeds SEARCH, Tucson, Arizona
9. Various artists, Ajo Street Art Project, 2015, Ajo, Arizona.
10. Michael Chiago, Curley School mural, 2006, Ajo, Arizona.
11. International Sonoran Desert Alliance / Alianza Internacional del Desierto Sonorense, Ajo, Arizona. (isdanet.org).
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13. “The Green New Deal,” Friends of Bernie Sanders, accessed May 1, 2020, https://www.berniesanders.com/issues/green-new-deal/.
14. “A Green Stimulus to Rebuild Our Economy: An Open Letter and Call to Action to Members of Congress,” Green Stimulus Proposal, Medium, last modified March 22, 2020, https://medium.com/@green_stimulus_now/a-green-stimulus-to-rebuild-our-economy-1e7030a1d9ee.
15. M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
16. Hon. Ron W. Goode, “Cultural Burn,” last modified March 2014, https://water.ca.gov/LegacyFiles/waterplan/docs/tac/Cultural%20Burn%20(4).pdf.
17. “Battery-Electric Buses Coming To Zion National Park,” National Park Service, last modified May 9, 2019, https://www.nps.gov/articles/electric-bus-zion.htm.
18. “Joshua Tree National Park to Conclude Shuttle Service,” National Park Service, last modified September 23, 2019, https://www.nps.gov/jotr/learn/news/joshua-tree-national-park-to-conclude-shuttle-service.htm.
19. Isaac Kantor, “Ethnic Cleansing and America’s Creation of National Parks,” Public Land and Resources Law Review 28 (2007), https://scholarship.law.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1267&context=plrlr.
20. “National Wetlands Inventory (in Stark County),” Stark County Open Data, last modified May 30, 2019, https://opendata.starkcountyohio.gov/datasets/7d3416bafe814ccd986383c73386a2b7_0.
21. Celeste Headlee, Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving (New York: Harmony Books, 2020), 31-34.
22. Kate Aronoff et al. A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (New York: Verso, 2019), 131-32.