Marc

you’re gone

to that other after place

where we all go

you made it man

the rest of us wait

and try to do okay

you my dear friend

did better than okay

painting, writing

tremendous poetry

i have you on tape

reading that amazing new york poe

that night in the basement

i have you on video

from the film that was never made

you dealing coins

with an insulin needle

in your stomach

i knew you way back in johnson

when you still played the bass fiddle

up in our apartment

when the world was young

you stopped smoking

and stopped carrying

the big bottle of diet coke

when i saw you in recycle north

you seemed so happy

or let’s say glad to be alive

maybe it was because

we were glad to see each other

we would joke about death

good clever one liners

while looking at stuff

we didn’t want,

death not being one of the

but a good, caring, mutual

true eye connection

sometimes through your

broken glasses

i read one of your

poems aloud tonight

a form of kaddish and respect

marc, you are a dear one

inspire artists to

be true themselves

you will be missed

you have left us so much

thank you for your struggle

and kindness in the turbulence

you will be missed

by us who love you

Steve Goldberg

Burlington

Editor’s Note: This poem is a tribute to former Seven Days art critic Marc Awodey, who died last week at the age of 51 [“R.I.P., Marc Awodey,” October 15]. There’s a 5 p.m. memorial service for him on Friday, November 2, at Burlington’s Unitarian Universalist Church.

Hot Air

I am stunned that Judith Levine used the term “mountaintop-removal” to describe the Lowell Mountain wind project [Poli Psy, October 10]. Mountaintop removal wipes entire mountains off the map, fills the valleys below with toxic waste, and clogs rivers, streams and other water bodies with a muddy chemical ooze — permanently. It pollutes for hundreds of miles around the site and creates a barren, infertile wasteland over hundreds of thousands of flattened acres. The entire long-distance view she admired from the windmill site would be a blackened moonscape if she’d taken the same hike to an actual mountaintop removal site. Her valid points about opportunism and other legitimate issues are obscured by the wildly inaccurate description of the site. There is absolutely no comparison.

There is a reason Bill McKibben is protesting mountaintop removal sites, rather than Lowell’s wind project.

Liane Allen

Newbury

Population is the Problem

Judith Levine talks about stopping global warming at the source [Poli Psy, October 10]. What she fails to mention, as do most people, is that the population of the Earth has doubled since I was born in 1954. At that time, the world population was slightly less than 3 billion. Now we have over 7 billion. That means we have more than doubled our need for energy, food and commodities of all kinds. Yet few environmentalists include the huge, unsustainable growth in human population in their scenarios.

Meanwhile, all of us Homo sapiens are being encouraged to buy more and more stuff — to get this new gadget and that new device. We have more and more devices and gadgets needing more and more energy.

That energy must come from somewhere. Isn’t it time that we all think about having only one child and unplugging a lot of our devices? Every time there is a jobs report about the economy, we hear that the number of jobs doesn’t keep up with the added population. What? Is anybody listening? There are too many Homo sapiens on this planet.

Lisa Sammet

Craftsbury

Sweet “Clover”

Our favorite place to eat is Leunig’s, but we went to Clover House with friends from Pennsylvania last week. The food couldn’t have been better. My parents used to go there, but the cook they have now is awesome. I have traveled throughout the U.S., Europe, New Zealand and Korea. We know good food. Our guests were so impressed. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t have waiting lines.

Nancy Holowitz

Longmeadow, Massachusetts

A Professor’s View

Judith Levine’s “Gone With the Wind” [Poli Psy, October 10] presents a beautifully rendered and evocative insider’s view of the grassroots opposition to wind development. (“Industrial wind,” “wind farms” — call them what you will, knowing that food farms stopped being Old McDonald long ago, too.) I applaud Levine’s artistry and the cogency of her case. She mentions the bigger picture that makes wind power such a tricky issue for environmentalists: global warming’s advance “faster than any model predicted.” I’d like to add a few brushstrokes to that picture.

First, addressing that advance will take more than energy efficiency, and more than wind, solar and other alternatives. It may take nuclear, though I hope it doesn’t. Preventing that will certainly take all of the others.

Second, making wind power feasible on a large scale requires making industrial wind power feasible. We have a president who’s created policies that would do that, but he may not be around in another three weeks.

Third, Vermonters love their forested mountains, but only those who don’t need the jobs or the money will fight against the use of a mountain for jobs and money. That makes it a class issue. Class issues have a way of scrambling environmentalists’ hopes, which makes it all the more important to develop cross-class solutions. I, for one, hope that Gov. Shumlin’s new commission on siting and permitting energy projects is a step in that direction.

Adrian Ivakhiv

Burlington

Ivakhiv is an associate professor at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment & Natural Resources.