About this piece

I’d recently read an incredible book called The Overstory, by Richard Powers, about how plants communicate and the devastating effects of deforestation. The following paraphrased passage puts the damage humans have done to this planet into poetic perspective and I was inspired to create a piece based on this concept which I've titled "The Eleventh Hour.”

“Say the planet is born at midnight and it runs for one day. First there is nothing. Life doesn't show up until three or four a.m. From dawn to late morning–a million million years of branching–nothing more exists than lean and simple cells. 

The day is two-thirds done when animals and plants part ways. And still life is only single cells. Every large living thing is a latecomer, showing up after dark. Nine p.pm brings jellyfish and worms. Later that hour comes the breakout–backbones, cartilage, an explosion of body forms.

Plants make it up on land just before ten. By eleven, dinosaurs have shot their bolt, leaving the mammals and birds in charge for an hour.

Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Anatomically modern man shows up FOUR SECONDS to midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in the thousandth click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself. 

By midnight, most of the globe is converted to row crops for the care and feeding of one species. And that's when the tree of life becomes something else again. That's when the giant trunk begins to teeter.”