“Smoke Over the Rainforest.”
In the tropical rainforest of Brazil, the Amazon, fire lights glow in the twilight, and smoke rolls over canopies of green that have stood for centuries. The fires are set by farmers, many of whom hunger for farmland ripped from the rainforest.
Political leaders, echoing their class masters in [inaudible], make light of climate change as little more than a hoax, but the deep green lungs of the planet are burning. Several fires set a day weeps of the rain forest which has now become a smoke forest soon to be grassland and then farmland.
The profit motive is killing mother earth, and as an individual becomes addicted to corporate tobacco, so too does modern man become addicted to money as both burn the lungs of life into bitter ash.
There will come a time when the lungs of the living will burn in search of sweet oxygen. But the scarred, battered, poisoned, barren earth will no longer answer. The earth, so vast, so capacious, will be as ill as humanity choking on poison. If this be civilization, bring me the wildest of the forest.
From imprisoned nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
