1st Edition
Poetry and the Global Climate Crisis Creative Educational Approaches to Complex Challenges
This book demonstrates how humans can become sensitized to, and intervene in, environmental degradation by writing, reading, analyzing, and teaching poetry. It offers both theoretical and practice-based essays, providing a diversity of approaches and voices that will be useful in the classroom and beyond.
The chapters in this edited collection explore how poetry can make readers climate-ready and climate-responsive through creativity, empathy, and empowerment. The book encompasses work from or about Oceania, Africa, Europe, North America, Asia, and Antarctica, integrating poetry into discussions of specific local and global issues, including the value of Indigenous responses to climate change; the dynamics of climate migration; the shifting boundaries between the human and more-than-human world; the ecopoetics of the prison-industrial complex; and the ongoing environmental effects of colonialism, racism, and sexism. With numerous examples of how poetry reading, teaching, and learning can enhance or modify mindsets, the book focuses on offering creative, practical approaches and tools that educators can implement into their teaching and equipping them with the theoretical knowledge to support these.
This volume will appeal to educational professionals engaged in teaching environmental, sustainability, and development topics, particularly from a humanities-led perspective.
Introduction
Part I: Perspectives on Indigenous Poetries
Chapter 1: Embodiment and Solace: The Entanglement of Culture with Nature in Contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand Ecopoetry
Janet Newman
Chapter 2: From Burning Beds to Rising Seas: Environmental Issues in the Song Lyrics of Midnight Oil
Knut Øystein Høvik
Chapter 3: From Standing Rock to Flint, Michigan: How Indigenous Poets Contextualise the Fight for Clean Water
Ronnie K. Stephens
Part II: Perspectives on the More-than-Human
Chapter 4: Last Migrations: The Poetry of Migratory Birds
Melanie Duckworth and Aidan Coleman
Chapter 5: Animal Politics and Ecological Haiku
Dean Anthony Brink
Chapter 6: Greeting a Ginkgo: How Anthropomorphism in Poetry Can Inspire Eco-Empathy
Christina Thatcher
Chapter 7: Of Jellyfish, Lichen, and Other More-Than-Human Matter: Ecopoethical Writing Research as Transformative Politics
Katharina Maria Kalinowski and Rosanne van der Voet.
Chapter 8: Using Poetry to Learn from the Animals We Brought to Antarctica
Caitlin Scarano
Part III: Critical and Theoretical Perspectives
Chapter 9: Imaging the Real in Times of Crisis: Empowerment and Ecosophy in Shaun Tan’s Tales from The Inner City
Heidi Silje Moen
Chapter 10: Vegetal Relationality: Three Australian [Eco]poets
Anne Buchanan Stuart
Chapter 11: Carceral Climates: Poetry, Ecology, and the U.S. Prison System
Angela Sorby
Chapter 12: Black Ecologies, the “Weather,” and “Renegade” Poetic Sensorium
Hanna Musiol
Chapter 13: “Everything depends on us:” The Ecofeminist Vision in Naomi Shihab Nye’s Honeybee
Sandra Lee Kleppe
Part IV: Global Juxtapositions
Chapter 14: Mitigating Ecological Threats: Amplifying Environmental Activism in Gabeba Baderoon’s Poetry
Niyi Akingbe
Chapter 15: Capitalism and Environmental Activism in Selected Nigerian Poetry
Mariam Salaudeen and Rasaq Malik Gbolahan
Chapter 16: Bugtong, or the Philippine Riddle as an Ecopoem
Christian Jil R. Benitez
Chapter 17: Poetry and Ecological Awareness: Inspiration from Pierluigi Cappello’s Poetry
Marzia Varutti
Conclusion: From Poetry to the World
Biography
Amatoritsero Ede is an international award-winning poet who was born in Nigeria, and he is a literary scholar and Assistant Professor of English at Mount Allison University, New Brunswick, Canada.
Sandra Lee Kleppe is a Professor of English-Language Literature at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences.
Angela Sorby is an award-winning poet and a Full Professor of English at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
