Poetry & Conservation
THE WILD is retreat and the climate is in crises and we, ourselves, inhabit an epidemic of loneliness, and it seems to me all this is so because poetry has taken flight from our daily lives—from the account we make of what counts in our selves and the world. “Life is a spell so exquisite,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “that everything conspires to break it.” The wild, too, is a exquisite spell. Poetry, reclaiming in the language our belonging in beauty and in a meaningful world, and in the wild order of things, can recast the spell.
At an event for the conference of the Australian Environmental Law Association, Brian Walters SC and I will talk about all this, sharing some of our own poems and some of the poems that have so convinced us that without poetry we cannot save the world, let alone ourselves. The event, a poetic conversation about conservation, is on Thursday 1 October, and it’s all happening by zoom. Please join us.
