Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years From Now

In “Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now,” Olzmann uses the epistolary verse form to query why his generation destroys the environment. By using the epistolary form to address a person living in the future, Olzmann also creates a more personal and believable vision of how climate destruction affects others. Though the poem offers speculative fiction and contains facts that have not yet occurred, it draws on current predictions of what might happen. At the time of the poem’s creation, the bees are not extinct, but many bee species are presently on the endangered species list. By writing this letter as though the worst has already happened, Olzmann dramatizes the current environmental threat; he therefore asks the reader to consider the threat and inevitable destruction not as a hypothetical situation but as a reality. This discussion between the current generation and an unnamed member of a future generation allows the speaker to inadvertently answer the poem’s initial query about causation.

The poem’s tone reveals that the destruction is inevitable; the speaker speculates on what future generations will think about the current generation and how the current generation would answer that question. This allows the speaker to disclose their own feelings on the current situation. A logical person who saw how the current generation treats whales and elephants, how they “harpooned [them] into extinction” (Line 3), would conclude that people must hate whales. The speaker hypothesizes that the reader, 50 years in the future, will assume that the environmental destruction occurring was intentional and that the past generation was “[in]capable of joy” (Line 7). By depicting this dystopian future world and getting into the mind of the would-be future generation, the poem condemns or at least calls into question what the current generation is doing. This intentional line of questioning serves to inculcate readers by asking them if they hate the environment, or if they want the next generation to think the previous generation was incapable of joy and therefore intentional in killing off the planet.

Despite evidence suggesting the current generation’s lack of joy, the speaker pushes back against the assumption that their generation wants to intentionally harm the planet, stating, “we admired” the night sky (Line 10). Though written to the hypothetical person living in the future, the poem also speaks to contemporary readers. While explaining to the interlocuter that the speaker’s contemporaries value nature, the speaker simultaneously reminds contemporary readers to appreciate the night sky, flowers, lakes, and forests because they may soon disappear.

In the penultimate stanza, the speaker focuses on the pleasure people take in the environment:

I’m saying, it wasn’t all lead paint and sulfur dioxide.

There were bees back then, and they pollinated

a euphoria of flowers so we might

contemplate the great mysteries and finally ask,

‘Hey guys, what’s transcendence?’ (Lines 15-19).

Olzmann depicts the present generation as interested in “transcendence” but not knowing what it is. This widespread lack of knowledge gives the reader a clue into the reason humans destroyed the environment: They were ignorant of the importance of nature and its fragility. The irony is that they only ask the question, “hey guys, what’s transcendence?” at the end of the poem. The word “finally” (Line 18) indicates it has taken a long time to ask this question, and that it may be a “final” question coming too late, especially as the next and last line is: “And then all the bees were dead” (Line 20). The final line comes suddenly.

The bees don’t die off slowly, but by the time the speaker mentions them, they are already dead. It is final. It has the effect of showing the suddenness of the extinction and the consequences of having asked the right questions too late. The poem raises an alarm for the current generation, reminding people how much they gain from nature, and implying they have an obligation to future generations to protect it. At the same time, the sudden end depicts the short-sightedness and obliviousness of this generation, and it predicts that they will let all the bees die off due to lack of attention. This leaves the speaker with the responsibility of explaining what happened to the person living 50 years from now.