Ecopoetics
Quick answer: Ecopoetics is poetry that engages ecological relationships and environmental crisis, going beyond scenic nature writing. Definition, key poets and practice.
Ecopoetics is the practice of writing poetry that engages ecological relationships, environmental crisis and the more-than-human world, treating nature not as scenery for human feeling but as a web the poet writes from within. The term gained currency after 2001, when Jonathan Skinner founded a journal called ecopoetics, though the impulse is older. Where traditional nature poetry often admires a landscape, ecopoetics asks harder questions: who lives here, what is being lost, what does the poem's own language owe to the systems it describes?
You will meet the word in journals, prize citations and course syllabi, increasingly attached to poems about climate change. For writers, it names a shift many have already felt: it has become difficult to write honestly about a spring morning without the weather itself carrying a warning.
From Nature Poetry to Ecopoetics
The lineage runs through poets who treated the natural world as a subject of knowledge, not just beauty. Gary Snyder brought ecology, fieldwork and Buddhist attention into American verse decades before the label existed; W. S. Merwin mourned extinction and planted a palm forest; A. R. Ammons wrote whole poems as systems of flow and exchange. Later work widened the frame: Alice Oswald's book-length poem Dart assembles a river from the voices of the people who work and swim it, Juliana Spahr connects lyric intimacy to oil economies, and Forrest Gander and Ed Roberson braid science and grief. Pacific poet Craig Santos Perez writes rising seas from the islands that feel them first.
What Makes a Poem Ecopoetic
No single style rules, but recurring habits include naming species precisely rather than gesturing at greenery; letting nonhuman lives occupy the poem's centre; using form to enact ecological ideas, fragmentation for habitat loss, recursion for cycles; and admitting the writer's own entanglement, the petrol in the tank that drove you to the trailhead. Guilt alone makes dull poems; curiosity, accuracy and love make durable ones.
Writing It Yourself
Start local and specific: one street tree, one drain, one invasive vine. Learn its actual names and habits, then write with that knowledge under the surface. Themed contests increasingly invite environmental work, and judges reward poems where the ecological detail is exact rather than borrowed; a monthly deadline, like Writory's, is a good engine for building a body of such poems season by season.
What poets can take from this
- Learn the real names of five species you see weekly; precision is the first ecopoetic instrument.
- Write the nonhuman without ventriloquism: observe behaviour instead of assigning human motives.
- Let form mirror subject, tidal repetitions, eroding line lengths, a poem that loses a word per stanza.
- Include your own footprint honestly; the poet is inside the ecosystem, not above it.
- Balance elegy with attention: document what thrives as carefully as what disappears.
Try it yourself
Choose one square metre of ground you can revisit, describe it in three visits across a week, and write a poem in three sections where something changes that no human caused.
Questions
What is the difference between nature poetry and ecopoetics?
Nature poetry traditionally uses landscape as a setting or mirror for human emotion. Ecopoetics treats ecological systems and nonhuman lives as subjects in their own right, and often engages environmental crisis directly.
Does ecopoetry have to be about climate change?
No. Climate is a major current, but ecopoetics covers any writing attentive to ecological relationships, soil, rivers, cities, extinction, agriculture, including celebratory and scientific modes.
Where did the term ecopoetics come from?
It circulated in criticism during the 1990s and was anchored by Jonathan Skinner's journal ecopoetics, founded in 2001. The word itself joins the Greek 'oikos', house or habitat, with poetics, the study of making.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.