Every five years, the Australian government publishes a comprehensive assessment of the health of the environment. It is called the State of the Environment Report, and the latest iteration was released this week. Not only does the report confirm that the environment is sick, but it made Don Defenderfer feel sick. This is the Launceston poet’s response.

The heartbreaking death by a thousand cuts continues.

Drumbeating.

Cut, cut, cut.

In a few seconds the trees are beheaded

And tombstones are left behind.

The decapitation is justified as progress,

Progress for what? For whom? And where?

Now there are no birds flying above the headstones –

There is nowhere to make nests,

There are no sugar gliders gliding from branch to branch,

There are no breezes sighing in the slippery gum leaves,

There is only profit and loss on balance sheets in air-conditioned offices.

It is happening all around Australia –

Death by a thousand cuts to our trees,

To our water, our wildlife, our soils,

To our very souls.

It is all adding up now and we see what we have done

And our hearts ache.

It is a time of reckoning and redirection

Before it is too late.

Don Defenderfer is a native of San Francisco who once went on a holiday to Alaska where he met an Australian who told him to visit Tasmania. So he did, and while here he met a woman. That was 40 years ago. He was state coordinator for Landcare for many years, a job that allowed him to be inspired by not only the beauty of the Tasmanian landscape but by the many people that are trying to repair and renew it. He has a Masters Degree in Social Ecology and a Bachelor of Environmental Studies with a minor in writing. He has published three volumes of poetry, and his work has appeared in newspapers and periodicals, including The New York Times and The Australian. Two volumes of collected essays and poems, "Tasmania: An island dream" Parts 1 and 2, can be bought through the Forty South Bookshop.