In reading The Dipper’s Acclaim and other essays again in the last fortnight, I am making distillate of a vision of John Feehan’s inspirational text and how it moderates mine. John has of course four major books Slieve Bloom, Laois, Bogs of Ireland and Farming in Ireland, in addition to his spiritual reflections on Laudato Si. This last book has been our recommended reading at the Corracloona Old School, Kiltyclougher, in County Leitrim, this week.
This latter book concern is the ecological conversion from the Augustinian to the Franciscan view of nature. The land use conflict and extinction turmoil that this change in philosophical guidance is attempting to moderate is devastating, as seen by soy and beef farming and the fires set in the Amazon on 10th August 2019, Dante’s endgame. The destruction of nature is the financial crime of the millennium.
The taxonomic tools we have for understanding the organization of nature is won by studying the morphology of species alive in the Amazon and nature everywhere in the global forest. We have had scholars of Brazil like Vainio in 1890 and Cacares 2011. Now she is organizing a lichen congress in Brazil in 2020 with the blessing of the International Association of Lichenologists’. These scholars have set a framework for the comprehension of the Amazon from the perspective of the genera and species of lichens on tree bark, intellectual insight showing that the Amazon is tractable and not to be feared. Lusophone literature on the Amazon shows the cultural abuses against nature have at least half a millenium’s lead in.
Taking the townland of Corracloona on the lakeshore of Upper Lough Mac Nean in North Letirim on the shore road between Glenfarne and Kiltyclougher where I am currently installed as a lichen studying hermit, I want to explore some insights on these topical concerns in my usual way.
Consider the lilies
It is not complexity rather the elegance
of plant parts, their veining and their form
That provides us with a congruence of consanguinity
Units of composition, order and harmony
That reveals our wonder in
The taxonomic aspiration for species
Consider the lilies
A bog myrtle and a sedge
Myrica gale and Carex panicea
The utricles in September
Transcending inference and analogy
A hopeful contemplation for the future
New to science once, but from nature first,
Predicted in another place
Open to another mind
Genetic readings of a plant part
A synapomorphic insight
in our vigil on life.
Ask not what you can do
The leap of recognition
A signal of joy
Of an encounter
With a specimen
Of a species
Known from literature before
New to us, admitted to our skeptical reality.
The extinction of micro-habitats of species
In the Amazon inferno
and across the masai warrior
plains of the pale of Ireland
Is the crisis and war of our time
Cast this injunction
In the extinction rebellion
To temper the flames
We apprehend you
Slow you with a sample
Of nature herself
The latin binomial
Of a novelty
only encountered in nature
Fathomable facets
Of a townland
A hopeful contemplation
for the future
Beyond the inferno
Forest bureaucratically dismissed
as farmland
the financial crime
of the millennium.
Howard Fox
5 September 2019
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