Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years From Now

“Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now” first appeared on the daily digital poetry series Poem-a-Day in 2017. The Academy of American Poets hosts the series on its poets.org website. By the time of the poem’s publication, concerns about climate change, environmental degradation, and the possibility of world-wide destruction of the planet were widespread. According to The Guardian, 2016 was the hottest year on record to date. Some scientists speculated that within 10 years the earth would no longer be habitable for humans, due to the devastation wrought by climate change, pollution, and toxins released into the environment. Yet many feared that human beings were not doing enough to stop or reverse the damage. In 2016, the electoral college elected Donald Trump, who later denied the reality of climate change and pulled out of the historic Paris Climate Agreement shortly after the publication of this poem. Environmental activists saw this as a mistake with potentially dire consequences.

Climate change, pollution, and industrial interests have had a negative impact on the climate. In the USA, timber companies have harvested forests for commercial use. Toxins released into the environment have devastated rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water. The speaker of Olzmann’s poem assures the future interlocuter that this destruction hadn’t yet wiped out everything: “Absolutely, there were some forests left! / Absolutely there were still some lakes!” (Lines 13-14).