Natural Selection
Description:
What is the relationship between the way we treat the environment around us and the way we treat each other? Natural Selection makes the case that the excesses of globalization and consumerism teach us to treat each other as disposable, much as they treat the trees, water, sky, and soil as expendable. If the processes of human evolution, through natural selection, taught us to consume increasingly more as a survival strategy, that strategy is now an evolutionary hangover effect that is doing us in. Using two representative characters who stand for the American consumer, the book looks at the lives of those who, in their constant pursuit of the new, can't seem to get their relationships right. The poems show the costs of treating each other and our environment as consumable, and point toward a moral gravity the characters struggle to learn in order to do otherwise.