My granddaughter, Lael, gave me Red Earth, a poetry book by Esther Vincent Xueming, for Christmas (last year?), and I finally finished it by jumping past 20 or 30 books still waiting to be read.
I’ll have to admit I was a little put off by the promotional blurb on the back cover: “Red Earth is an ecofeminist poetry collection offering meditations on place and the making of home amid the ever-increasing racket of society…etc .”
Though I consider myself an environmentalist, I avoid using words that begin with “eco” unless it’s the prefix for “economist” or “ecologist.” I’m not even sure what an “ecofeminist” is, though I assume Lael might.
Luckily, the poetry itself wasn’t limited to eco- or feminist. Several poems stood out for me. “Crossing” is an interesting take on Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark.” My favorite poem is probably “My Father’s Hands” because it reminds me of my dad and how I would always compare his huge hands to my tiny hands, always hoping to grow up as big as he was (I never did).
“Albatross” stands out as an ecofeminist poem.
Albatross
On illegal sand mining in Cambodia
A country is hungry to expand her borders.
so she sucks on the fat of another’s land.
Machines like ravenous knives carve out tonne
after incessant tonne of sand, dredging the body
to the marrow. Stripped bare, the mangrove’s prop
and pencil roots become useless bleeding stumps.
How can she breathe air that is iron and rust?
How strange to fill the sea with sand, to reclaim
water into unsinkable land. A country builds
another tower, a floating garden of imported
flora, a casino with a capsized boat.
To carry this albatross of guilt, my shame
of standing on another's land, the weight
of a body that was never mine to own.
Until I read this poem, I had never heard of dredging sand to build new beaches. I was aware that in the past, shrimp farming contributed to the destruction of Mangroves — in total, about 40 percent of them have been lost, particularly from the 1980s to the early 2000s, as forests were cut down to build more shrimp ponds.
Most Americans probably know as little as I do about Mangrove forests, but a search on ChatGPT reveals what is lost when a Mangrove Forest is killed to build a Casino:
Mangrove forests are among the most productive ecosystems on Earth, supporting a diverse range of life. Here’s what thrives there:
? Plants
• Mangrove trees (red, black, white, and buttonwood species) dominate, adapted to saltwater, tides, and low oxygen soils.
• Algae and seagrasses grow in tidal waters, supporting food webs.
? Aquatic Life
• Crustaceans: shrimp, crabs (like fiddler crabs, mud crabs, and mangrove tree crabs).
• Mollusks: oysters, clams, mussels, and snails attach to roots.
• Fish: snappers, groupers, barramundi, mullet, mudskippers, and juvenile reef fish use mangroves as nurseries.
? Reptiles & Amphibians
• Saltwater crocodiles, water monitors, and various snakes thrive.
• Frogs and toads live in the brackish wetlands.
? Birds
• Wading birds: herons, egrets, ibises, spoonbills.
• Fish-eating birds: ospreys, kingfishers.
• Migratory shorebirds stop to rest and feed.
? Mammals
• Monkeys (like proboscis monkeys in Southeast Asia).
• Bats roost in mangroves.
• Small mammals such as otters and rodents.
? Microorganisms
• Specialized bacteria and fungi help recycle nutrients and decompose organic matter.
? Overall, mangroves are vital nurseries for marine species, protect coastlines, and store large amounts of carbon.
No wonder Xueming sees this destruction as an “albatross of guilt,” a phrase that seems to come from Xueming’s view of the destruction as a burden of guilt, akin to the “albatross of guilt” in Coleridge’s poem.
Of course, it would be easy to dismiss the destruction of Mangroves in Cambodia as “not our problem.” Still, the problem is very similar to the destruction of wetlands in America.
Wetlands provide many of the same benefits that Mangrove Forests provide, and ChatGPT tells us that over the past half-century, the U.S. has lost approximately 10–15 million acres of wetlands, including significant reductions in critical vegetated wetlands. Although the annual rate of loss has slowed compared to mid-20th-century peaks, tens of thousands of acres continue to disappear each year.
It’s easy to look the other way while our environment is being destroyed because it doesn’t seem like we can do much to solve it personally (though my friends tell me it is evil to use ChatGPT). I suspect it would be a better world if we all felt more responsibility for the destruction of our environment. Xueming lives in Singapore, so it’s reassuring to know that environmentalism has become worldwide