The Seven Steps to Solving the Climate Crisis as a Grizzly Bear

By Ben “BK” Kornman

Grizzly bears have been hypothesized to appreciate the beauty of nature. Polar bears don’t have that luxury. They’re too busy trying to evenly distribute their weight on adrift icebergs.

Step 1: Open your eyes.

You sit stoically on a comfy plateau. The landscape’s stunning balance of symmetry and its cooler cousin, asymmetry, strikes your deepest chord. You’ve been so busy searching for salmon you never thought to simply take your head out of the water and see the sea flow.

Your eyes now wide, you know that you find this world inherently beautiful. But is beauty in nature’s nature, or does the beauty merely lie in your perception?

Many people ask if you shit in the woods. What fewer people ask is why said shit smells like shit. This is because your body doesn’t want you to be at all tempted to eat shit, for fear of spreading diseases and shit.

Now, a logical grizzly like yourself might ask, if my body has convinced me what smells are awful, is it possible for it to also convince me what sights are beautiful? If so, why would it tell me that the view of the valley below this peak is worthy of my appreciation. Perhaps, this is natural selection’s way of signifying nature’s protection of me and all of my bear friends, giving me a reason to want to preserve it.

What an honor it is to be alive! to experience the great gift of beauty!

Step 2: Close your eyes.

Listen.

A sad, scared man once said, “close your eyes and let the word paint a thousand pictures.”

Let your thoughts wash over you as you remember all the ways in which you’ve beared witness to Earth’s bountiful transfer of energy. Now put it to words.

I turned with the seasons and talked with the sparrows. I grew with the seeds and glittered with the stars. I rested with the sand and ran with the sea. I am the Earth, as are my children, and theirs. Beyond this paradigm exists nothing of relevance. This planet is all I have.

Step 3: Recognize reality.

You are not a grizzly bear. If only it were that simple.

Step 4: Face the music.

We are past the point of no return. Who cares when the climate clock clangs, we’ve been dead in the water for decades, it’s now just about how fast and how high our limp bodies will rise.

The only silver lining is the fact that nature will persist. Like Fiona Apple, you know a sound is still a sound around no one. We view natural disaster as just that, but in reality, our mother’s fury is an intrinsic feature of her cyclical multitudes. Furthermore, she can recognize that a man-child is a parasite and, despite her undying love, must be cut off. In the end, Earth will be better off without us.

Nevertheless, with that being said, despite it all, you fight.

It is not your fault that we’re here. Our billionaire god-kings are to blame, but the worst thing you can be is complicit. For the sake of the youth, no matter how doomed they are, you have no other choice.

Step 5: Search within.

Who are you? Are you the scientist who’s come to save us all with your eco-friendly,
carbon-neutral, flax-fueled Earth-healer? No? You’d fail a tenth grade math test if you had to take it right now? That’s what I thought.

Inside of you there is a voice, and that voice has a perspective, and that perspective is valuable, because that perspective is unique.

We exist in a moment of history and there is no one else to take notes for you, so start writing. Describe the fragrance of that flower using flowery frills of phonetics so your great grandchild can read it and experience what it’s like to smell something long gone. Write a seething sonnet so soothingly sincere it makes your grandmother tear up with generational guilt. Write a pithy pantoum so poignant it inspires the assassination of a gas CEO.

Write everything. Write until your hand aches–actually, fuck that–write until your hand falls off. Let your word paint a thousand pictures because without it you are not only helpless, but silently so. Write until you’ve reached the point where you have nothing else to write, write down the fact that you have nothing else to write, and then keep writing.

Whether humanity dies with a shout or a whimper, the poets will all be singing. Just as the band played on as the Titanic sank, so must the poets write on as we all sink.

Step 6: Open your eyes (again).

It got dark.

Step 7: Share with the class.

This final step is both the most important and the most daunting. Sharing your voice is akin to cutting yourself open and handing someone your spleen. However, unlike Fiona Apple, you know a sound around no one is no sound at all.

Your vote has never mattered less, you must use your voice. Your voice has never mattered more, use it to remind others of the same.

Grizzly bears admiring a nice view have no clue that their snow white cousins are overlooking a cliff just the same, but they’re losing their balance. The grizzlies have even less of a clue that they and the rest of us will follow soon behind the arctic bears. So tell them. Tell everyone you know. Be informed. Ignorance is no bliss at the scene of a crime.

Poems are merely words with intent, and in this time of criminal crisis you either speak with intentionality or get ignored. In the meantime, the poets have notes to take and songs to sing.

Ben Kornman, or BK, is a poetry and prose writer from New Orleans. Now a college student in Portland, he explores the ultra-contemporary.