Marching orders are handed down,
Each troop is given a uniform--
Standard issue with an ID number--
Every name is replaced with a barcode.

Each is a soldier of an unusual sort,
They're no mean army of men,
They fight in a war without skirmishes,
Their weapons are not meant to kill.

It is nature this army fights of late,
Nature which must be caged and tamed--
They'll tear her down, strip and reshape her--
All which is wild or free will be remade.

Man especially is the quarry to enslave,
For he is the highest of nature's specimens,
The most noble, the most regal, the most free;
Yet also fickle, savage, and easily captured.

Man stands at the edge of a great rift;
Or rather, he bridges the chasm
Stretching between nature and something else,
Something too high for the technocrat to touch.

Despairingly, the technocrat sends orders to his army:
Instructions for the battle, for the war!
Drawing diabolical strategies for a last conquest,
For the eradication of nature and nature's Lord.

He draws upon his manufactured facts,
Small pieces of esoteric and uncertain information,
Which he has draw diligently from his large tomes--
This is the lifeblood of the technocrat's war effort.

Despite many facts and an abundance of data--
Those trillions upon trillions of bits at his disposal--
His knowledge is scarcely any greater,
For he rejects both wisdom and true understanding.

Thus the technocrat conducts his war,
Not from a command post as of old,
Astride a jeep or charger at his army's head:
Rather, from inside a fluorescent-lit cell.

His aide-de-camp has been replaced
By computer chips and signal wires,
His flesh-and-blood followers' loyalty,
Long-since obsoleted by machine programming.

He attacks nature with unmatched ferocity,
Though for all of hi efficiency and ruthlessness
He never scratches deep below the surface,
Nor does his gaze pierce beyond superficial appearances.

His eyes cannot see nor his ears hear,
And his mind with all its vast analytic prowess
Cannot penetrate or conceive that concealed presence,
For Whom nature is but a perceivable sign half-revealed.