Call me Gaia Terra Mother any name will do
Three billion years I’ve busted my maternal ass for you
Believe me it’s no picnic trying to fine tune
A climate for creatures as picky as you —
You can’t stand it too cold
You can’t stand it too hot —
Why’d you name this planet Earth?
You should have called it Goldilocks

I spent a billion years nursing marine micro-organisms
To make a living breathing carbon-cycling thermostatic dynamism
To pump air you could breathe into the atmospheric system —
Without all that photosynthesizing phyto-plankton I strewed
Over every inch of ocean
You’d be totally screwed —
And you dissolve their shells with your CO2

For billions of years I’ve done nothing but toil
To balance biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, soil
So your breath won’t freeze and your brains won’t boil —
And you get it in your heads to go drilling for oil

I sequestered excess carbon in the bottom of my seas
To scrunch the heat down into those few degrees
Of your tiny window of viability
And threw in long-term temperature stability
To shape this planet as the one and only place
In all of space
Just right for your pampered human race —
And for you it’s just a dump for petrochemical waste

Three billion years of patient symbiotic evolution
And you blow it all to shit with your Industrial Revolution
Three billion years I laboured to get it just right
And you destroy my hard-won balance fucking overnite?
Well excuse my language but I am pissed
In my whole long life I’ve never been so dissed

Three billion years I’ve nurtured a dynamic equilibrium
A world-wide web of teeming interwoven ecosystems
And you rip it to shreds with capitalism
Fouling my water
Exhausting my soil
Devouring my minerals timber and ores
With your drilling blasting fracking
Where’s your sense of limitation

I’m too old I can’t keep up with your disruptive innovations
Or clean up the latest mess left from your reckless exploitation
Of every last nook and cranny of my once-green creation —
All in your worship of commodification

You’ve stuck me in a no-win situation
I’m depleted fatigued Seething with frustration
The only cure I can see is complete abdication

You got it
That’s right
I’m splitting this scene
You want to run it
Be my guest

Happy Anthropocene