State of the Planet

In his poem, State of the Planet, Robert Hass frequently referenced Lucretius, a Roman poet and philospher who wrote a poem called On the Nature of the Universe. In this poem Lucretius attempted
to debunk what he called "supersition"; that is, the belief that the gods created the world and the universe
and interfered with it in anyway. Lucretius argued against such an idea by presenting evidence that the
existence of the universe and its operations could be completely explained by natural phonomena-"the regular but purposeless motions and interactions of tiny atoms in empty space"-and not by the will of the gods.
Hass seems to believe the things Lucretius presented in his poem. "The book will try to give the child the
wonder of how, in our time, we understand life came to be: Stuff flung off from the sun, the molten core
still pouring sometimes rivers of black basalt across the earth from the old fountains of its origin. A hundred
million years of clouds, sulfurous rain. The long cooling. There is no silence in the world like the silence of rock before life was." The above quote and other things Hass said clearly showed that he was an evolutionist.

This poem was written on the fifieth anniversary of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a research unit
at Colombia University. One of the things the observatory does is study the natural world in order to discover how to best steward the planet and effeciently use our natural resources. State of the Planet describes several scenes in which the world is being affected by man's often careless use of the earth's
resources. "[The book] will also tell her that the air-it's likely to say "the troposphere-" has trapped emissions
from millions of cars..and is making a greenhouse of the atmosphere..Topsoil: going fast. Rivers: dammed
and fouled...Pacific salmon nosing against dams from Yokoham to Kamchatka to Seattle and Portland, flailing up fish ladders, against turbines..Most of the ancient groves are gone." Hass wrote this poem out
of concern for Earth's well-being, hoping people would take notice and make efforts to change how they
use the resources that are available to us.