Bad Tenants

It’s no secret that every living system on Planet Earth is in decline.

Key points from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report| ITV News, October 8, 2018: “There is no documented historic precedent” for the sweeping change to energy, transportation and other systems required to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) wrote in a report requested as part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement…. The transformation described in the document is breathtaking, and the speed of change required raises inevitable questions about its feasibility. Most strikingly, the document says the world’s annual carbon dioxide emissions, which amount to more than 40 billion tons per year, would have to be on an extremely steep downward path by 2030 to either hold the world entirely below 1.5 degrees Celsius, or allow only a brief “overshoot” in temperatures. As of 2018, emissions appeared to be still rising, not yet showing the clear peak that would need to occur before any decline…. Overall reductions in emissions in the next decade would probably need to be more than 1 billion tons per year, larger than the current emissions of all but a few of the very largest emitting countries. By 2050, the report calls for a total or near-total phaseout of the burning of coal…. The bottom line, Sunday’s report found, is that the world is woefully off target.” (Mooney and Dennis, 2018)

It’s official: human beings are the most dangerous species in the history of Planet Earth. Carruthers was inspired to propose this theme for Sacred Machines, based on his sadness upon reading about (1) plastic littering the beaches of one of the world’s most remote islands, Midway Atoll, and learning about (2) the massive “trash vortex,” twice the size of Texas, swirling about in the magnificent, once-pristine Pacific Ocean.

RE-VO added the Black spiritual motif of directing the listener in his/her motions, eg. “Now, put your hand on your head,” etc., and his resignation that, as a teacher, if he was unable to convey this all-important ecological message to his students, nothing else will matter ultimately.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9hetZuPzS4

The title of Sacred Machines’ second album, Zero Footprint, is a reference to the late “Green CEO” Ray Anderson‘s usage of the term in Bakan’s The Corporation (2003). It was Anderson’s quest to make his corporation, Interface, the world’s largest carpet manufacturer, carbon-neutral, yielding “zero footprint” upon the sacred Earth.

BAD TENANTS
(Carruthers/RE-VO) (2018)

Plastic washing up on Midway,
passing by the trash vortex.
Who really cares? Just trash the place,
and bring on the bling and sex.

Now, put your hand on your head and cry.
Raise your hand to the wounded sky.
Now, put your hand on your head and cry.
Raise your hands in the air and die.

We are the bad tenants on this ocean pearl of blue.
First and last has long been lost,
and the damage deposit is due.
We are the bad tenants on this cosmic sphere of blue.
Who really cares, just trash the place
and move on to somewhere new.

Whale with eighty bags in her stomach,
washed up on a distant beach.
The planet gonna swat us like flies,
and I got nothing left to teach.

Now, put your hand on your head and cry.
Raise your hand to the wounded sky.
Now, put your hand on your head and cry.
Raise your hands in the air and die.

We are the bad tenants on this ocean pearl of blue.
First and last has long been lost,
and the damage deposit is due.
We are the bad tenants on this cosmic sphere of blue.
Who really cares, just trash the place
and move on to somewhere new.