Reese Halter

In the darkest icy abyss, the largest predators, Sperm whales, hunt the biggest prey, Colossal squids. The battles are legendary. The winners take all. Welcome to the Sperm’s Kingdom.

The Monarchs of The Deep, male Sperm whales, rule the oceans with brawn and brains, 6X larger than humans. Gigantic head cavities filled with 1900 litres of spermaceti, a pearly white buoyant wax, facilitate the world’s deepest divers. Does the spermaceti prevent the skulls of these 50-ton Highnesses from being crushed, 3km beneath the surface? Undivulged.

During the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, bloodthirsty whalers relentlessly massacred Sperms for spermaceti that became candles, light, energy, cosmetics, textiles and more. Hundreds of thousands of our brothers and sisters, Sperms, were brutally murdered.

VICTORIA—Despite agreeing to protect trees over 400 years old, British Columbia Timber Sales, a government agency, greenlit the destruction of rare thousand-year-old western red and yellow cedars adjacent to Cape Scott Park, northwestern Vancouver Island.

Let me tell you about British Columbia’s wild woody neighbourhoods and why they are so worthy of defending. It’s awe-inspiring to stand in the presence of big venerable trees with impossibly high canopies. An old-growth temperate rainforest is a salubrious mystical experience.

From Edmonton, Alberta, to Burnaby, British Columbia, 890,000 barrels of oil per day are now flowing through the Trans Mountain Pipeline and off-loading onto tanker vessels docked on the edge of the Salish Sea.

Beguiled Canadian taxpayers forked out C$39bn to buy and rebuild the Trans Mountain Pipeline that winds its way through a school yard, waterways and endangered animals’ habitat.

The 2016 Paris Agreement was a smoke screen for unprincipled heads of state. The business of combusting carbon fuels was always the order of the day. From the Great Barrier ‘Graveyard’ and the Gulf of Carpentaria’s expired mangrove woodlands to the drought-ravaged Amazon rainforest and beyond, life is damned by accelerating manmade heat.

In the Pacific Northwest, fossil fuel tanker traffic is predicted to increase by a whopping seven-fold, to 408 trips through the Salish Sea – home of the critically endangered Southern Resident Orcas. And there’s 168% chance of a major oil spill from this obscene madness.

SAN FRANCISCO, June 11 – Iceland’s government issued a licence to the North Atlantic nation’s last whaling company, Hvalur hf, to brutally slay 128 fin whales.

It’s long overdue for the notorious whaler, Kristján Loftsson, to cease and desist massacring Mother Earth’s great whales, the oxygen replenishers.

Did you know that the oceans provide planetary life with three out of every four breaths of oxygen? Combustion heat (fossil fuels, wood pellets, palm oil) is adding the equivalent of 15.95 Hiroshimas every second of the year (31,536,000 A-bomb detonations) into the oceans, and it’s accelerating. Consequently, 40% of the oxygen-producing phytoplankton and cyanobacteria (Prochlorococcus) are missing from heat-disrupted nutrient deficiencies.

Leaves roots trunk,
Barking humankind,
Our collective medicine chest,
Our lungs
Our regulatory system
Our climate
Our oceans.

Imagine that planet Earth is a corporation with many indispensable branches called Earth Inc. After completing a pro forma balance sheet for the Earth Inc, I mulled over what might be said to a group of investors who were contemplating acquiring that entity.

It was very clear that Earth Inc was in a downward spiral and that a substantial portion of the annual operating profit was now being derived by liquidating assets that were essential for its continued operations. To correct the existing problems, and make the entity viable, it would realistically take decades and require injecting hundreds of trillions of dollars.

Forestry’s highway to hell is simplifying self-organising networks of cooperative biological communities to extinction. Hideous monoculture palm oil plantations are plaguing the planet. It’s a $71bn per annum sickening industry that’s fraught with corruption and escalating destruction. Deadly palm oil plantations are ruining our best defence against climate Armageddon, tropical rainforests.

Palm oil makes up one-third of all the biofuels burned annually. It emits 4X more planet-searing gases per unit than diesel fuel.

DRAX United Kingdom,
Subsidised Mother Earth destroyer,
Complicit bedpartner
Golden State Natural Resources,
Marvellous Californian old-growth
Into one million wood pellet tonnes,
Annual billowing furnaces.

Buds breaking,
Unhurried unpacking,
Potent phytoncides,
Glorious grandness,
Joyous jubilation!

South America’s other species-rich tropical assemblage, the Atlantic Rainforest, is in dire shape.

This priceless hotbed of life has mostly been razed, four out of every five trees are gone.

Five hundred years ago, this coastal and inland masterpiece was almost two times the area of New South Wales. The brunt of this remaining biome exists in Brazil (92%) with two slivers shared by Paraguay (6%) and Argentina (2%).

Nesting season
Snooze specialists,
Chinstrap penguins
King George Island
Antarctica,
Mysterious micro-sleepers!

Majesties of abyss,
Cachalot confabs,
Clicking coda chains,
Pitch, a- i-vowels, diphthongs

Eight hundred
Cranium scans:
Rhythmic chains
Theta waves,
Relax’d alertness,
Daydreaming!

Hey Sleepwalkers
COP28 furnace goers!
Fossil fuel HEAT
Discombobulator,
Wreck’d Mother’s clock,
Seasonal untimedness,
Plants rousing
Four times faster,
Insect pollinators sleeping in.