Ecopoetry: Writing the Planet in an Age of Crisis
Quick answer: Ecopoetry explained: how poets from John Clare to Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner write the living planet, and the craft of nature poetry in an age of climate crisis.
Nature poetry admires the world; ecopoetry knows the world is in trouble and that the poet is implicated in the trouble. The distinction is recent as a label, the journal ecopoetics, founded by Jonathan Skinner in 2001, helped fix the term, but the impulse is old. John Clare wrote in protest as enclosure fenced and drained the English commons he loved, even giving a voice to a piece of abused land in The Lament of Swordy Well. Gerard Manley Hopkins grieved a row of felled aspens in Binsey Poplars with the shock of a man watching something unrepeatable destroyed.
Ecopoetry today spans every continent and register: elegy for the lost, documentary of the damaged, celebration of what survives, and argument about what happens next. Its languages are as varied as its ecosystems, from English and Spanish to Chamorro and Marshallese.
The landmarks: from inhumanism to the rising sea
Robinson Jeffers, writing from the California coast, proposed what he called inhumanism, a deliberate shift of value from humanity to the wider world, and his granite and hawk imagery still defines one pole of the tradition. Gary Snyder fused Zen practice, fieldwork and ecology; his collection Turtle Island won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. Wendell Berry has spent decades writing the ethics of farming and staying put, while Mary Oliver made attention to herons and grasshoppers a discipline practised by millions of readers. W. S. Merwin, who planted a palm forest on former wasteland in Hawaii, wrote unpunctuated elegies for vanishing species and languages.
The contemporary field is wider still. A. R. Ammons won the National Book Award for Garbage, a long poem built on a landfill. Alice Oswald's Dart braids the voices of everyone who lives and works along one Devon river. Jorie Graham's Sea Change wrestles with climate breakdown at the level of syntax. Camille Dungy's anthology Black Nature reframed African American poetry's long engagement with land, and Craig Santos Perez writes the Pacific from Guam. When Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner of the Marshall Islands performed a poem addressed to her infant daughter at the 2014 United Nations climate summit, world delegates got a rare thing: policy briefed by poetry.
The craft: precision, scale and the honest we
Ecopoetry's first discipline is naming. Field guide precision, knowing a sedge from a rush, an alder from an ash, is a form of respect, and vague nature is dead on the page. Its second is scale: the strongest poems move between deep time and this afternoon, a trilobite and a car park, so the reader feels geological stakes in a domestic moment. Its third is honesty about the speaker. The easy move is blaming a vague humanity; the braver poem admits the poet drove to the nature reserve. Form can enact ecology too, as in Oswald's polyphony or Merwin's sentences that refuse to close, where the shape of the poem behaves like the system it describes.
The tradition today
The energy around ecopoetry keeps growing. The Ginkgo Prize rewards ecopoems written in English, and magazines and anthologies dedicated to the field multiply yearly. Robert Macfarlane and the artist Jackie Morris made The Lost Words, a book of spells restoring nature vocabulary dropped from a children's dictionary, into a bestseller and a schools movement. Climate marches carry lines of verse on cardboard, and poets in the Pacific, the Arctic and the Sahel write from the sharp end of changes the rest of the world still debates. The subject is not going away; neither is the poetry.
What poets can take from this
- Learn the real names of five plants and five birds where you live, and use them.
- Put one geological or evolutionary timescale inside an otherwise domestic poem and watch the stakes change.
- Write the damaged place, the retail park, the drained marsh, not only the beautiful one.
- Include yourself honestly: your flight, your phone, your appetite belong in the poem.
- Resist the consoling ending unless the poem has earned it.
- Read Mary Oliver for attention and Jorie Graham for alarm, then find your own register between them.
Try it yourself
Choose a species or place within a mile of your home that has changed in your own lifetime. Write a poem that names it precisely, shows the change without editorialising, and ends on an image rather than a moral.
Questions
What is the difference between nature poetry and ecopoetry?
Nature poetry observes and celebrates the natural world, often treating it as a backdrop for human feeling. Ecopoetry starts from ecological awareness: interdependence, damage and the poet's own implication in it. Much ecopoetry is nature poetry with the innocence removed.
Who are the leading ecopoets?
Foundational figures include Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver and W. S. Merwin. Contemporary names to read are Alice Oswald, Jorie Graham, Camille Dungy, Craig Santos Perez, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and Juliana Spahr.
Does ecopoetry have to be about climate change?
No. Climate is its most urgent subject, but ecopoetry covers extinction, land use, farming, rivers, cities and the simple discipline of paying attention. A precise poem about one hedgerow can be as ecological as a sequence about melting ice.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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