20 pages • 40 minutes read
Prince EaDear Future Generations: Sorry
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
“Dear Future Generations: Sorry” is a poem working within the literary context of the environmental movement. Rachel Carson’s renowned book Silent Spring (1962) is credited with launching the environmental movement. However, the book begins with an epigraph from a poem by John Keats, a prominent English poet who wrote in the period of the Romantics (1800-1850). The Romantic poets often wrote about nature as an ideal; however, today, Prince Ea reflects that nature is no longer a beautiful, idyllic scene. While nature and the environment remain a muse and a source of poetic inspiration for the poet, the poem also shares an urgent warning and touches on the deep political quandary of 21st century Environmentalism. In “Dear Future Generations: Sorry,” Prince Ea invokes nature to sound an alarm for his readers that if humanity does not change, nature will cease to exist and so will all the organisms that depend on nature to live–including humans.
Many poets have come before Prince Ea and sounded similar alarms. For example, W. S. Merwin published “For a Coming Extinction” (1967) just a mere five years after Carson’s Silent Spring. The poem follows the subject of an extinct whale, but comments more largely on the changing earth (due to humans) and those effects. Told in a very different structure and tone from Prince Ea’s “Dear Future Generations: Sorry,” “For a Coming Extinction” shares a similar message. Joy Harjo’s “Once the Word Was Perfect” is a poem that follows a similar tone to Prince Ea’s and considers humanity’s general disregard for the environment. W. S. Merwin and Joy Harjo have, like Prince Ea, highlighted the destruction of the earth and called their readers to action. Prince Ea’s poem, and larger corpus, makes contemporary contributions to this ongoing conversation about conservation and activism.
Historical Context
To write “Dear Future Generations: Sorry,” Prince Ea spent several weeks in Africa where he witnessed the destruction of the rainforests firsthand. This inspired him to write a poem about climate change and environmentalism. In part, the poem is a challenge the systemic problems inherent in deforestation, questioning the motives of those seeking to profit from deforestation. “Dear Future Generations: Sorry” seeks to enlighten readers about climate change and the earth’s destruction, and to offer readers ideas on what they can do to stop it and subsequently change the future. This was a topic of urgent interest at the time of the poem’s composition, as the Paris Agreement was adopted in December, 2015 and entered into force in November 2016. Despite the political progress symbolized by this agreement, Prince Ea’s poem notes that the pursuit of profit will always undermine this progress unless rejected by the people more broadly.
Prince Ea’s views are in line with John Felstiner, the author of Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems (2009).Felstiner, like many environmentalists, believes that environmental urgency rises in importance above other social issues. Similarly, the speaker at the end of Prince Ea’s poem states, “Because whatever you’re fighting for: / Racism, Poverty, Feminism, Gay Rights / Or any type of Equality / It won’t matter in the least / Because if we don’t all work together to save the environment / We will be equally extinct” (Lines 84-89). The historical context of “Dear Future Generations: Sorry” is deeply rooted in an ongoing environmental movement and in conversations about environmentalism, how to save the planet, and how to work together to address an urgent, distressing future that looms before humanity.
