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.