Artist Michael Gresalfi shares new artworks using leaves, seeds and other natural materials to produce zoomorphic or anthropomorphic masks and sculptures that echo our early ancestors and an approach to the world that recognises, “We are all related.”
1,560 words: estimated reading time = 6 minutes
I am excited by an artistic theme I have been pursuing these past months. I have named the series ‘Flora-Persona.’
Using only natural materials, including plants, trees and associated leaves and seeds, and avoiding the use of any manmade materials during the creative process (such as paints, adhesives, and dyes), I purposefully manipulate plants and other flora in a zoomorphic or anthropomorphic manner.
Relying solely on Nature’s bounty is an artistic departure for me in some ways, yet a continuum of my focus on addressing the rising environmental damage, including climate-related disruptions, which our industrialized world has wrought.
Inspired by my research in support of my painting entitled ‘Wood-Wide Web’ (which I previously presented on ClimateCultures in my post with Eva Strautmann), I became acutely aware of the ability of various tree and plant species, along with fungi, to communicate and share resources with one another in a symbiotic manner.
‘Wood-Wide Web’ portrays a forest, field, or meadow not merely as a collection of competing individuals in a shared location, but rather as an interconnected community where resource sharing and communication play a significant role in the health and resilience of the entire ecosystem.
Mitakuye Oyasin: we are all related
My research led me to read about the Mother Tree Project. This large-scale, decade-long research effort led by Dr. Suzanne Simard at the University of British Columbia, revealed that neighboring trees and plants are in communication with one another via an underground network of fungi that resembles the neural networks in our brains.
I was astonished to learn that in one study, Simard documented that a Douglas fir tree that was injured by insects appeared to send chemical warning signals to a Ponderosa pine tree growing nearby. The pine tree then produced enzymes to protect itself against the nearby insect invasion.
To me, a form of collective consciousness was in play within the web of life, across at least two Kingdoms. In biological taxonomy, life forms are organized into hierarchical groups: Kingdoms are at the top, with phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species being progressively lower tiers.Fungi are in a separate Kingdom from trees and plants, yet they support one another in a mutually beneficial way.
Not so with respect to humanity, the alpha species in the Kingdom of Animalia. I began to see more clearly that we don’t support the interconnected web of life, and in fact we continue to disrupt the very symbiotic fabric that the wood-wide web illustrates.
During my daily walk in the woods behind my home, I began to consider more thoughtfully how alienated we all are from the natural world, and I began to ponder how a conscious wood-wide web of interconnected life that surrounds me might view humankind. Yes, not a comforting thought.
The artistic concept of ‘Flora Persona’ formed slowly. My evolving viewpoint was also informed by a Lakota phrase, “Mitakuye Oyasin” (“We are all related”). The phrase expresses the idea that every living entity shares the same divine origin and life force, and that humanity is part of a complex reciprocal web of existence, rather than separate from, or superior to, nature.
My artistic interest was thus stimulated by both non-Western and ancient beliefs concerning the shared web of life and by my newfound understanding that plants and trees have some form of elementary consciousness, as demonstrated by their ability to communicate across species, genus, families, and all the way up the hierarchical groups, to include across the two noted Kingdoms.
Reaching back to our roots in art
Both climate and human culture, including artistic expression, have intersected in many ways throughout our species’ course of time. In this evolving series, I delve deeply into our ancient past for artistic inspiration. I suggest that we have been creating art across the various climate epochs we have inhabited, since times immemorial. I believe that both the flora and fauna available in long-ago times provided source materials used to create art, back into earlier hominin eras.
It is reasonable to assume that humans have been making art from biodegradable materials, including masks, figurines, and sculptures, for more than one hundred thousand years.
Masks and sculptures have been my primary focus to date. My artistic goal is to present man-manipulated natural elements in a manner that harkens back to our early ancestors.
With respect to cave paintings, the earliest known artistic expressions for both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, consisting of non-figurative symbolic markings, are more than 70,000 years old. They are still in existence today, due to their isolation and protection from the weathering elements. Other art, made from natural materials and not contained within caves, clearly has not been preserved.
One of my flora-persona series interests is using burdock (Arctium lappa) seed heads to create extinct local animals that were plentiful in my region of Maryland, USA during the Woodland and Archaic Periods — such as the wooly mammoth and the cave bear. It is my contention that such natural materials were used to create art by these ancient native ancestors, and indeed perhaps as far back as our early hominin ancestors.
Burdock plant and collected seed heads, as well as a few examples of my ‘Burr Art ‘, are presented below:
Plant masks: viewing how our relatives might see us
With respect to making human-like faces from plant leaves, I was inspired to begin this Flora-Persona series when pondering the wood-wide web and, particularly, the nascent consciousness documented via chemical communication networks formed between fungi, plants, and trees.
These leaf masks are not necessarily made to be worn. Rather, they are meant to present these wonders of nature as a member of our distant family, aligned with the Lakota phrase “Mitakuye Oyasin”: we are all related.
I continue to experiment with different plants, seeds, leaves, and tree bark, all picked up along my daily walks in my neighboring Black Hill Park. I find myself drawn to creating leaf masks that present the viewer with an unsettled view of how we humans might be viewed by our distant plant relatives, such as displaying sorrow, shock, disappointment, and anger. These sentiments seem very proper to me, considering the continuing harm we cause to the interconnected web of life.
Below are three photos. The first shows how I applied juice to several of my leaf masks, a natural dye from ripe purple pokeweed berries that I had gathered.
The final photos show a large 36” x 36” canvas I painted and then displayed, with four of my leaf masks within its four quadrants, followed by close-ups of the masks.
From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say a sentence or two about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.
Michael — “I used Gemini AI as a background search tool — looking for other examples of both my ‘burr art’ and ‘leaf art.’ Frankly, not much out there — at least from my initial research.”
***
Michael adds: “A young friend from Scotland, after looking at my burr art, brought to my attention the annual ancient event called the ‘Burryman,’ which happened to occur mid-August. The Burryman is a centuries-old Scottish folk tradition where a local man is covered head-to-toe in thousands of sticky burdock burrs and paraded through the area.” Find more at Wikipedia.
You can see Michael’s work with fellow ClimateCultures member, artist Eva Strautmann, in their post The Wood Wide Web – Fruitful Collaboration, which features both artists’ paintings on the topic.
This piece for the Ecological Disciple by Lenore Three Stars, The Way Forward: Mitakuye Oyasi — A Worldview (11/6/26) explores the value of an approach to our shared world that starts from the position that “We are all related” (Mitakuye Oyasi can also mean “All my relations.”)
More on the Mother Tree Project, founded by Dr. Suzanne Simard, can be found at The Mother Tree Project & Program, a research and outreach initiative housed in UBC’s Faculty of Forestry & Environmental Stewardship, rooted in the idea that forests are deeply interconnected systems, not just collections of individual trees.
An artist who seeks to incorporate art with climate change data, and whose work in encaustic medium, glass paint, oils and acrylics includes 'Our Changing Planet'.
Writer Peter Reason explores the possibilities of learning to unhook ourselves from taken-for-granted perspectives, finding ways to invoke the living presence of a sentient world through co-operative inquiry with humans and waterways as participants in a kinship ecology.
1,890 words: estimated reading time = 7.5 minutes
How can those of us enculturated into a Western worldview engage with our world as sentient, as responsive, as kin? This is the question we address in Living Waters, our series of on-line co-operative inquiry workshops involving both human and River persons; the next workshops run online from 11th March to 29th April 2025 and usually attracts an international participation (see below for registration details).
In these inquiries we have been asking questions of the kind:
What would it be like to live in a world of sentient beings rather than inert objects? How would we relate to such a world? And if we invoke such a world of sentient presence, calling to other-than-human beings as persons, might we elicit a response?
These questions focus our attention on whether we experience our world as something ‘out there’, which however wondrous and valuable is nevertheless separate from humans; this is the taken-for-granted perspective in Western society. Or is the world an animate presence, experienced as kin, as “all our relations”?[1] as do my Indigenous and Settler colleagues in Western Australia, who write in ‘Seeing, feeling, and hearing the world’:
… the ways we see, feel, and hear the world is associated with how we relate to and respond to our places. If we see the ground we walk on and the places we live in as animate, responsive, and relational, we are highly likely to care for Country with love, gentleness of spirit and fullness of heart. We are all able to hear and participate in the music, the soundscape of our places – to honour and celebrate the lyrics of life’. [2]
This way of seeing allows Indigenous people in their traditional cultures to experience the places they live – places their people have inhabited for tens of thousands of years – as living and responsive, with the whole community of beings as participants in a kinship ecology. These Indigenous elders draw on words that don’t translate easily, if at all, into English – pirlirr in Walmatjarri, liyan in Nyikina, and wirrin in Noongar – words that refer to a visceral way of knowing shared by people, all beings, and land itself. Through this way of seeing, feeling, and hearing Country, people know that “when you care for Country, Country will care for you”. [3]
When we use the terms Country (capital C), Land (capital L) or River (capital R) we refer to a broader, stronger, Indigenous use of the English language concepts of country, land, and river. These terms refer to places as relational, animate socio-ecosystems that are living and responsive. Country, Land and River include people as participants in a kin-centred ecology of being.
Those of us socialized into a Western way of being have been taught to think of humans and nature as separate and mutually exclusive opposites. In Western culture, although some of the ‘higher’ mammals are credited with intelligence, by and large the other–than–human is experienced as brute matter, only of value in so far as it serves human purposes. This perspective is clearly in error, as it has proved to be astoundingly destructive of the quality and complexity of the planetary ecology. Can we Westerners find this quality of relationship, can we learn to see our world in the way of kinship? Writer Amitav Ghosh entreats us to listen once more to the voices of the more-than-human world:
Voices that have stubbornly continued to insist, in the face of unrelenting, apocalyptic violence, that nonhumans can, do, and must speak. It is essential now, as the prospect of planetary catastrophe comes ever closer, that those nonhuman voices be restored to our stories. The fate of humans, and all our relatives, depends on it. [4]
Living Waters inquiries are based not only on Indigenous perspectives but are rooted also in Western philosophy, specifically contemporary ‘living cosmos panpsychism’ which has its roots in the writings of Spinoza. We understand our world not as inanimate ‘stuff’ but as imbued from its origins with some kind of innerness – call it mind or sentience. Everything is integral to the fabric of the living cosmos, all of the same sentient cloth. And from this we see that all beings form a communion of subjects, reaching out to each other in mutual contact and communication, co-creating a ‘poetic ecology’: the fundamental erotics of being touched by the world and touching it in return. If we invoke a world of brute stuff, as is normal in Western society, then that is what we will experience. If we invoke the world as sentient presence, we may be graced with a response – as the living world configures itself on poetic, metaphorical response to our invocation, a process Freya Mathews refers to as ontopoetics.
The point of our inquiries is to learn to unhook ourselves from taken-for-granted perspectives and to explore ways of invoking the living presence of a sentient world. This is where Cooperative Inquiry comes in, a profoundly democratic approach to learning about and making sense of our world. This approach to living inquiry has three central characteristics that make it profoundly suitable for panpsychic inquiry because it treats all those involved – human and more-than-human – as subjective self-directing beings and therefore as equal participants in the inquiry process. It also emphasizes the experiential ground form of knowing, and it asserts the primacy of practice.
In orthodox scientific research the roles of subject and researcher are mutually exclusive, the researcher contributes the thinking that goes into the project, the subjects contribute the action to be studied. In co-operative inquiry these exclusive roles are replaced by mutual relationships. All involved work together both as co-researchers and co-subjects. Everyone is engaged in the design and management of the inquiry; everyone contributes to the questions to be asked and how to go about exploring them; everyone participates in the experience and action that’s being explored; everyone is involved in making sense and drawing conclusions; everyone draws on the learning from the inquiry in their future practice.
So how does this apply to the Living Waters workshops? We start with each participant identifying a River or waterway near where they live which they can engage with as a living, sentient being. They may sit with or walk by River, offering it quite simply attentive love. This can evolve into ceremony, gift-giving, song, prayer, always addressing River as a living being, always attentive to River’s response. We ask participants to compose accounts of their experiences and share these with an inquiry group of about six of their fellows; and periodically through the eight weeks of the workshops we work as a whole community of about twenty human persons to identify themes and shared questions. These cycles of inquiry are punctuated by seminar sessions at which the faculty offer perspectives on a view of the world as sentient – living cosmos panpsychism, biopoetics, place-based ecology, Gaia theory – which may inform the inquiry process.
Personal encounters – towards a sentient world
About one hundred human and River persons have participated in this inquiry process over the past four years. Our encounters with Rivers drew forth a wide range of responses, both inner and outer.
For many co-inquirers the initial challenge was to get over the internal voices that questioned the whole activity – this even though they joined the inquiry sympathetic to its aims. We all needed to quieten our minds and hush our expectations sufficiently to give fuller attention to River. Many found themselves at first distracted and self-absorbed.
Once inner voices were somewhat quietened, it was still easy to drop into a traditional subject-object relationship, to look at the river as still ‘out there’.
However, with persistence, practice, and support from the human inquiry community, most were able to sustain a feeling of sentient presence, and then move into what one group called ‘getting in the zone’. This is the experience of a sentient, embodied world, and of one’s own animal body as part of it; usually accompanied by intense feelings of pleasure and gratitude, maybe wonder and enchantment at the sheer beauty of it all.
Going deeper, there sometimes arose a curious juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary; and close to that a profound feeling that the ordinary is all extraordinary.
Some inquirers also developed a complex imaginative or psychic response, as if the world is somehow ‘speaking’ directly in words and images. In time, many participants found themselves ‘slipping under the psychic skin of the world’ or ‘lifting the veil’, with the illusion of separation slipping away.
Finally, there are on occasion active ontopoetic responses, ‘moments of grace’ when the world and its beings actively gesture back in response to invocation: animals and birds appear; there is a gust of wind or a shower of rain; leading to narratives of experience incontrovertibly linked to one’s invocation.
Offering to River Fowey. Photograph: David Peters
Many participants report experiences of a sentient and responsive world that are deeply felt, unassailably authentic. Such experiences have an authority of their own. They offer intimations of a world quite different from the materialist, brute world into which we moderns are socialized. As an outcome, our metaphysical assumptions are radically re-arranged. It is evident that experiences of a sentient, communicative world are available not just to Indigenous people living in traditional cultures, but to all human persons willing to put in the time, the attention, to risk their taken-for-granted sense of self, and to open themselves to that possibility.
In Peter’s previous post for us, Bristol Climate Writers Presents … ‘Desert Island Books’ — a collaborative piece with fellow members of both ClimateCultures and BCW on fiction and non-fiction books they discussed at a public event — he talks about – Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis by Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky, and The Overstory by Richard Powers. He also contributed Lines Written While Reading Hunger Mountain to Day 4 of our Quarantine Connection series during the first UK lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic. And with his Songs for Earth, featured in our Creative Showcase, he asks: How does one sing in the face of the ecological crisis — the disruption of the process of life itself, permanent loss of evolutionary complexity, permanent endings of patterns of being?”
A writer linking the tradition of nature writing with the ecological crisis of our times, drawing on scientific, ecological, philosophical and spiritual sources and participatory perspectives.
Animist farmer & writer Paul Featherreviews the book Six Inches of Soil and finds that progressive stories about regenerative farming could better integrate their roots in Indigenous practices of reciprocity and respect and tap the deeper implications of radical perspectives.
2,900 words: approx reading time = 11.5 minutes
“Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains.” – Paul Harvey (1978) U.S. radio broadcaster
The stories that we tell each other, the stories that we were told perhaps by teachers or parents when we were young, those that we tell not simply in words—though words are very much a part of it, and I return to words in a moment—but that we enact with our choices and continue telling as they were told to us: these stories are the meat and potatoes of culture.
As I write this, my impatient daughter leans over to me and whispers that she is hungry. She speaks softly so as not to interrupt her mother’s conversation with two neighbors about these stories we tell and how we might gather over food one day soon to retell them together. Out of respect for this conversation, or simply because she judges me more likely to stop what I am doing—to stop typing these words—my daughter interrupts me instead of these others to tell me that she is hungry.
Eat another cantaloupe, I tell her. There are leftover potatoes in the skillet on the stove. You made bread at school today, and there is some left. Go eat it.
And we each will have our stories about this. I think to myself that she is bored more than hungry, but I don’t know what her stories are. Maybe that I am boring, or that someone should have made dinner, or that eggs are easy to make but she is tired of eggs.
Every meal has a story.
The stories we all tell about food are bound up with other stories: sometimes with stories about how we gather in community to cook it or eat it or grow it, or about the meaning of the soil and the Earth. They’re existential. They influence how we all act.
From Six Inches of Soil (2024)
Our food is globalized, so now our stories about food are further bound up with other stories about geopolitics and climate and war and just about everything else. It’s gotten rather complicated.
Social movements, scholars, and corporate or government bodies have been trying to unravel this complication and to converge on a viable global story about food, and the collective story has grown to encompass billions of words worth of books, academic papers and all the rest; but anyone with a lick of sense can tell that we haven’t really got it figured out just yet.
So writing about food is a tricky business.
Six Inches of Soil
Over the last few days, I’ve been reviewing Six Inches of Soil, a book accompanied by a documentary of the same name (which I did not watch) that describes the English movement for regenerative agriculture (RA).
The book starts off by introducing itself as a continuation of the documentary project and then the first three chapters establish the background for a conversation about regenerative farming.
Six Inches of Soil
The first chapter summarizes the Green Revolution with a more-or-less mainstream analysis presenting it as “a miracle that created a disaster.” Some readers might object to this analysis and argue that the Green Revolution wasn’t as miraculous as it’s sometimes made out to be, since small family farms have always been more productive than industrial corporate operations. In her 2016 book Who Really Feeds the World, Vandana Shiva points out that small family farms—most less than 2 ha in size—produce 70% of the world’s food while being relegated to less than 25% of the farmland [1]. But Six Inches of Soil sticks to the mainstream narrative here about the miraculous productivity of industrial agriculture, and so that’s uncontroversial in a sense. In any case, every legitimate analysis agrees that whatever the initial value of industrial agriculture, it has made a very big mess.
The second and third chapters attempt to define regenerative agriculture and lay out the soil science behind it. Defining RA is a bit tricky: the billions of words of story about food is sometimes vague on distinctions between regenerative and other frameworks like organic, permaculture, agroecological, conventional, etc. Six Inches of Soil presents RA as a methodology that conforms to certain principles and practices intended primarily to increase soil health—which mostly means incorporating organic material, sequestering carbon, and increasing biodiversity—all good things.
It is a problem that Six Inches of Soil presents ecological farming as an outgrowth of the Green Revolution. The book’s claim that regenerative farming paradigms are a response to the destruction caused by chemical industrial agriculture is completely false. [2] & [3]
Regenerative farming has been practiced for thousands of years by Indigenous people all over the world, and while the book mentions that European scientists began to think about organic farming after studying Indigenous growing methods, its failure to meaningfully and consistently acknowledge the origin of regenerative agriculture in Indigenous thought and practice as well as Indigenous people’s continued contributions to the movement will have implications for later chapters.
Case studies in regenerative farming
The middle portion of the book describes three different regenerative farms. The first is an 800-acre commodity grain operation that has brought sheep into their fields to build fertility and transitioned away from plowing in favor of less impactful cultivation methods. The second is a small start-up market garden that also integrates sheep for fertility and tills only minimally with hand tools. The final case study is a rotationally grazed cattle operation that experiments with silvopasture.
The case studies give the book a more grounded center and—along with the dialogical style arising from the book’s origin as a documentary film—make this a relatively easy read in spite of the complex topic.
The principles of regenerative agriculture presented here in ‘Six Inches of Soil’ are strictly material and omit socio-cultural aspects of RA such as reciprocity, the sacred, or human rights.
All of the case studies present regenerative farming as bit of a struggle—though a rewarding one—and none of the operations are exceptionally profitable. Indeed, none of the featured farms pay their operators a living wage. These growers seem to be motivated mainly by a passion for their work and a sense that they are contributing to a positive social and environmental movement.
What does regenerative farming regenerate?
The final two chapters of the book present first a more spiritual dimension of regenerative agriculture and then a view of the future. These chapters taken together—along with several interludes sprinkled between the chapters—illustrate a fundamental tension within the RA movement. I perceive this as a tension between a mainstream, progressive, modern paradigm and a smaller more radical current that finds in agroecology far deeper implications about cosmology, epistemology, or spirituality. (In full transparency I am firmly committed to the more radical interpretation.) Somewhere in between, we might discern a dialogue that promotes relatively radical restructuring of our economic and social value systems, but does not find modernity to be completely bankrupt and would attempt to evade an epistemological crisis.
The book as a whole maintains a very progressive—and I would argue mainstream—synthesis of regenerative agriculture as a strategy to mitigate climate change. The book promotes a theory of change in which consumer choices and movement-building put pressure on governments and corporations to enact better policy. Most of the interludes and much of the final chapter offer policy suggestions or regulatory strategies that would support a healthier food economy. Progressive readers will be very much at home with all of this, while readers less enamored with progressive politics may be underwhelmed by these portions of the book.
I judge that the mainstream progressivity of the book as a whole arises from viewing RA as a response to the Green Revolution and from failure to acknowledge that Indigenous people have been doing regenerative agriculture for thousands of years and continue to do it in many places.
A 2023 article exploring anti-colonial definitions for regenerative agriculture finds that neglecting the paradigm’s Indigenous origins results in over-emphasis of its biophysical dimensions and tends to omit socio-cultural aspects that are critical to the movement’s success in mitigating global catastrophe. The authors suggest an anti-colonial definition for RA that foregrounds these socio-cultural aspects by making them a container for the biophysical farming practices:
A way of farming comprised of entangled values and practices, and founded in Indigenous principles of loving-caring for the Earth. This approach to farming values 1) reciprocity, 2) respect, 3) collective (human and non-human) wellbeing, 4) knowledge co-creation, 5) (re)localization, and it is often practiced through some combination of 1) minimizing soil disturbance, 2) maintaining vegetative soil cover, 3) maximizing diversity, 4) integrating livestock, and 5) minimizing synthetic agrichemicals. [3]
When we abstract regenerative agriculture away from its origins and away from this broader cultural container of reciprocity and respect, when we pay attention only to its biophysical dimensions, what we end up with will not address the roots of the global environmental crisis. Choices enacted from this narrower interpretation of RA will likely perpetuate environmental crisis.
On spirit
Chapter seven is about the more spiritual side of agroecology.
Chapter seven brings a deeper ecological perspective to the book by gesturing toward the unfathomable microbiological complexity in the soil popularized by scientists like Anne Biklé or Martin Sheldrake; more radical perspectives such as Vandana Shiva’s statement that our sense of self could or should arise from having our hands in the soil; and by including several poignant observations from contributors like Satish Kumar, who observes,
In our modern mechanistic world view we only recognise things which can be measured. What cannot be measured does not exist. I think this worldview needs to change.
Satish Kumar. From Six Inches of Soil (2024).
This chapter seems intended to address the deeper cultural implications of agroecology—and it more or less does—but there is a difference between including a chapter about something and making that something a container for the entire book.
The book has 22 contributors, and for some of them it seems that the movement is mostly about moving carbon from the atmosphere into the soil so that it better delivers ecosystem services and mitigates global warming. This is entirely consistent with a modern mechanical worldview, does not require a deep cultural shift toward values of reciprocity and respect, and according to this interpretation a farm growing sugar for Coca-Cola on land stolen from Cambodian peasant communities could be regenerative if percent carbon in the soil is going up. [4]
Some contributors like Satish Kumar and Dee Woods do consistently foreground deeper epistemological and cultural issues, but the book as a whole does not.
Something missing
Sitting here now and returning to wrap up this review after letting it simmer overnight, I am again writing between interruptions from my daughter about the food we will eat. She is neither bored nor hungry today. She is chatting with me while cutting up pears and apples and roasting them as an after-dinner treat for company visiting this evening—a service she proposed as an exchange if I would boil potatoes for dinner, and to which I readily agreed.
And so today as every day we enact our stories about our food, and inside of this story where my daughter is cutting up pears I will try to cut to the center of my thoughts with these awkward words and to have time left over to boil the potatoes before the guests come.
From Six Inches of Soil (2024).
There is a sense that however many billions of words we have written, there remains something missing from our stories about regenerative agriculture. A 2022 literature review comparing agroecology and RA frameworks explores whether politics are the thing that is missing:
One aspect of agroecology that does not always fit comfortably in the realm of regenerative agriculture is political activism, or the place and emphasis that the “social” dimension takes in the definition of the social-ecological system. This is perhaps one of the reasons why agroecology is more closely associated with peasant movements, for whom claims on rights and access to natural resources are urgent, while regenerative agriculture is an approach increasingly—but not exclusively—also adopted by commercial, often large-scale farmers or external investors less concerned with natural resource access or food sovereignty issues. [5]
The mainstream trend in the RA movement does actually promote political activism, but I think it somehow remains apolitical in the sense that it’s progressive rather than radical.
To the extent that an ecological worldview finds our disconnection from the land rooted in deep cultural dysfunctions, and to the extent that progressive politics fail to address those dysfunctions, I wonder if the mainstream current within RA might be agroecology without the ecology?
Whatever framework we use, if it isn’t held within a cultural container of reciprocity and respect, it is without a soul.
Six Inches of Soil could more naturally address these deeper dysfunctions if it better acknowledged agroecology’s roots in Indigenous farming practices and the cooption of those practices by Western academics and scientists who adopted “regenerative” methods without acknowledging the central values of the cultures who invented them and who, in coopting these methods, failed to perceive that regenerative values are integral to the methods themselves.
But these are fraught and thorny issues, and perhaps it isn’t reasonable to expect this book to adequately address the deep dysfunctions of our culture. If portions of Six Inches of Soil fall short here, it does also clearly advocate that consumers get their hands in the dirt and visit a farm—that we all build better relationships with growers and make some connection to the soil, and that we make opportunities for children to do the same. If the book is effective in that advocacy—if people read it and then tear up their front yards to plant a garden with their children, or even if they grow a bit of kale in a pot on the patio—then I think it is a successful project and I am grateful for it.
[2] Six Inches of Soil p25: “There have been a series of ecologically or biologically based farming systems that have responded to the roll out of industrial farming. The first response was biodynamic farming, and then came organic farming in the late 1930s. Permaculture, agroforestry and agroecology arrived during the 1970s, and then finally, we have regenerative agriculture.” See also the chart on p26.
[4] This is just one example where this sort of claim gets made, e.g. ‘Nature-based solutions’: Land grabs in nature’s name (2022), published by PAN Asia Pacific (PANAP), one of five regional centres of Pesticide Action Network, a global network dedicated to the elimination of harm upon humans and the environment by pesticide use, and to the promotion of biodiversity-based ecological agriculture. Six Inches of Soil does not make explicit claims that projects associated with clear human rights violations are regenerative, but neither does it consistently and unambiguously clarify that they are not.
Six Inches of Soil: How to heal our soils, ourselves and our communities through regenerative farminged. Molly Foster, Priya Kalia & Jeremy Toynbee (2024) is published by 5m books. Contributors: Mike Berners-Lee, Matt Chatfield, Henry Dimbleby, Adrienne Gordon, Vicki Hird, Anna Jackson, Andrew Jackson, Hannah Jones, Satish Kumar, Tim Lang, Claire Mackenzie, Nicole Masters, Josiah Meldrum, Lucy Michaels, Emma Mills, James Murray-White, Marina O’Connell , John Pawsey, Tom Pearson, Colin Ramsay, Nic Renison, Lizzie Sagoo, Ben Thomas, Ian Wilkinson & Dee Woods. The book consists of seven chapters and six ‘interludes’:
Chapter 1: It’s a miracle, but that miracle has created a disaster Chapter 2: Regenerative farming, what is it? Interlude I: Are we using our farmed land wisely? Chapter 3: The science of soil Interlude II: Regulation, greenwashing and co-option Chapter 4: Regenerative mixed farm: Pig Pink Farm, Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire Interlude III: Subsidies, Brexit and trade Chapter 5: Organic market garden: Sweetpea, Caxton, Cambridgeshire Interlude IV: Food security and UK self-sufficiency Chapter 6: Pasture-fed beef: Treveddoe, Bodmin, Cornwall Interlude V: Applying agroforestry in mixed regenerative farming Chapter 7: Soil as soul Interlude VI: Enterprise stacking Chapter CHAPTER 8: How do we build a sustainable future for food and farming? Epilogue – Act now
In parallel to the book, the documentary film Six Inches of Soil, directed by Colin Ramsay, tells the story of British farmers standing up against the industrial food system and transforming the way they produce food. The film website includes additional reading and resources, including an impact campaign.
In his previous ClimateCultures post, Dystopian Farming: an Inquiry, Paul introduces ‘dystopian farming’ as resistance as well as sustenance and a search for joy and meaning that makes our dire times tolerable: the potential for liberation. And in Super Wicked Problem – or, the Crisis Formerly Known as Climate, he seeks the meaning of our planetary crisis in local spaces of resistance that serve as the wombs from which deeper understanding will be born.
An animist farmer and author whose artistic interests include the courtship of landscapes for food and seed and translating animist thought into the language of physics.
Writer and filmmaker James Murray-White, in conversation with Veronica Strang about her new book, Water Beings, finds connections with his own work at a time when water is under threat and we need to rebalance our elemental relationship.
2,850 words: estimated reading time = 11.5 minutes
“Water serpent beings’ abilities to be monstrous also traverse scales. They can lurk within the individual psyche and represent the seething inner sea of instincts and emotions, or they can reflect tensions and fluid capacities for disorder at a societal level, such as the chaos represented by war or revolution… At a cosmic level, they can represent apocalyptic events – the Flood, the volcanic eruption, the earthquake, the tsunami.”
— Veronica Strang, Water Beings: From Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis.
‘Water Beings’ by Veronica Strang (2023)
Water in crisis
Recently I’ve been sensing a disconnect between me and water. I live close to an iconic river, in which I learnt to swim and as a teenager had lucrative summer jobs punting tourists along it. However, the River Cam, like most if not all UK water systems, is heavily polluted, and I know of many local cases of humans and dogs who have been seriously unwell after a dip.
The data for the newly designated bathing status at Sheep’s Green in the Newnham area of Cambridge recenly showed high levels of e-coli and other nasties that have leached down from a sewage pumping station some miles away. In addition, the heavy winter, spring and now summer, rains we are getting in this normally drier part of the land often wash off concrete and create epic floods, with run-off washing into the rivers and through the soil.
I’ve just made a short film about one of East Anglia’s chalk streams, the Newmarket Brook, and I have been learning from geologists and hydrologists about chalk streams’ unique qualities and fragility. This one is in varying states of health. I also helped a friend, Tony Eva, make Pure Clean Water, a film about Hobson’s Conduit, which flows from the springs at Nine Wells, by the hospital, through various colleges and into Cambridge. It is in a perilous condition, continually abstracted and contaminated.
Away from just this one city, the human world is at war, and water gets scarce and used as a threat for those being persecuted and bombarded. We’re in a water crisis and if we are to survive as a species and remain equitable with our ecosystem, our relationship with all the elements must rebalance. Recognising this disconnect is the start, and framing our connection to the sacred and to older knowledges feels like an important way forward. A crucial way forward.
It’s timely then to discover Veronica Strang’s body of work, and engage with the growing movement towards river/nature rights. The vast body of human creativity around water and water beings comes to the fore in her book, which really resonates and brings joy to this jaded mind. If many of us unite around care for water and becoming water guardians, from a variety of faith beliefs, political and ecological opinions and none, our human power can make a real difference.
I’ve recently been a participant in two University of Cambridge conferences on water-human relationships where Veronica delivered keynote lectures. Her research straddles anthropology, archaeology, theology, philosophy and more — ranging across human history, our experience with and belief in beings that inhabit watery realms, and our cultural imaginations and psychological systems.
Water Beings – from Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis is a very deep dive into watery worlds inhabited by a vast array of extraordinary more-than-human beings, and into our imaginative nature as an ancient species. Every society has developed complex and intricate beliefs and knowledges around water beings and their values, roles and responsibilities, including our projections on them as either benign or monstrous. Living alongside them, dreaming of them or even being devoured by them, has given humans a sense of fear, worship, adoration, and veneration. Perhaps now is the time to fully merge our substantive presence on the earth with water creatures?
Muisca tunjos, votive offerings to ancestral serpents believed to inhabit Lake Guatavita, Colombia, 10th–16th century CE, gold.
A confluence of knowledge and imagination
While grounded in academic scholarship, Water Beings reads like a flowing chronology of connectivity, an important congregation of how the planet’s climate and delicate ecosystems and the human creative impetus to respond all come together. Ultimately, this work is about narrative, fact and fiction: stories and images of water beings are part of our human construct, and now is a time to acknowledge and honour them. What might they mean? What might they anticipate?
The book’s ten chapters categorise types of water entities — irrigating beings, supreme beings, demonised beings, reformed and transformational beings and more — and frame our ways into their study. A key final chapter then sharply focuses on the now, why we are in this condition of crisis and dis-connection, and ways we might return to a closer, healthier framing. I’ll return to that important chapter.
Unknown artist, Nyai Blorong, Goddess of the South Sea, Java, before 1928, watercolour on paper.
I was particularly delighted to discover in chapter 8, ‘Supreme Beings’ — as Strang moves forward with her story, societies become urbanised and with that comes monotheistic faith structures and practices — an image from William Blake, ‘Moses erecting the brazen serpent’.
This chimes with an ongoing absorption into Blake’s prophetic work I have through the Finding Blake project, a fascination with his fourfold vision. Here, in an underwater realm, serpents are coiling around humans, literally squeezing the life out of corrupt sinners, while Moses stands watching upwards to the head of the main water serpent. Here is an image of the entwining of watery beings which has become the symbol of medicine and healing: caduceus.
William Blake, Moses Erecting the Brazen Serpent (Nehushtan), c. 1800–1803, pen and watercolour on paper.
Water is rare in Blake’s paintings, and where it does appear it often represents the subconscious, a metaphor for yearnings, regrets. Here it is a vessel, dominated by these beings of great power, human victims in their coils — and yet the interplay between them and Moses is highly significant: dominion and dominance. I’m not aware of Blake referencing the Thames in his work, despite living very close to it for most of his life, yet surely it played a role within his unconscious knowledge of the world. I wonder if he saw serpents and watery beings on his daily walks alongside it? I’m led to believe he and his wife Catherine could see the river from their last flat, where he died, which is now under a major London landmark hotel.
Chapter 10, ‘Reformed beings’, flows up to contemporary times, and the use of images of water beings in literature, films and more. This makes me think of the local town of Ely, once a town of eels, fished for and captured in plentiful supply and shipped off to London as a commodity. Now the eels are gone, with the last remaining eel catcher, into mythology of both creature and trade. Eels live on in artworks, sculptures by the river, and paintings aplenty in local galleries and markets — a symbol of this fenland town. Many tales of the fens are marked by the beings that once inhabited waterways since cut as agricultural drains: part of the industrialisation of land reclaimed from watery bog.
‘Turning The Tide’, the final chapter, forms a confluence, bringing together knowledges from countermovements — indigenous activists, campaigners for social and ecological justice, nature-worshipping religious groups, legal activists, and scholars — to include learnings and imaginings from all kinds of creative practitioners, strongly making the case for recognition of the rights of the more-than-human, and water itself: ultimately, the vessel and element that holds us all.
Here, the full power and resonance of the author’s research comes to the present day, and she offers the full weight of her learning and sharing:
“Today, in a world urgently in need of a change in direction, the stories that water serpent beings tell, and their capacities to represent alternate visions of human-non-human relations, may be the most crucial role that they have ever had.
“As our water serpent beings have shown, societies that have achieved long-term sustainability have done so by maintaining steady-state or circular economies, rather than embarking upon spirals of growth and expansion.”
Returning to my home city of Cambridge, plagued by the constant over-hanging clouds of development and the ‘growth agenda’, this message needs to ring loud — and just maybe the water beings may rise again from the Cam, or emerge in eel-like form to teach humans this lesson of steady state fluid dynamics. Human and watery other.
Double-headed water being in the form of a ship, Viking Age plate brooch from a grave in Lillevang, Bornholm.
Water Beings: a Q&A with Veronica Strang
JMW This is such an extraordinary work of rich, deep scholarship. I appreciate greatly the visual, literary and historical journey you take the audience on, and feel enriched by this book.
VS Thanks for this kind comment — this research has been a wonderful experience for me. Although water beings appear regularly in folklore, ethnography, history and theology, no one has previously researched aquatic deities systematically and comparatively, and venturing into this new research area has been an extraordinary adventure. Water beings have so much to tell us.
JMW Can you share how this study started, and tell us some of your journey following the waters and the watery beings?
VS My research as an anthropologist has always focused on human-environmental relationships, people’s beliefs and values, and particularly their engagements with water. I have explored a range of issues relating to water: ownership, governance and management; conflicts over water; religious beliefs about water; and rights to water, for humans and for non-human species and ecosystems. Much of this work has been in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, and more briefly in Malawi. But the issues around water that interest me recur all around the world.
Water beings swam into my research very early on. In the early 1990s I worked with indigenous Australian communities in Queensland and learned about the Rainbow Serpent that is so central to their lives. A decade in New Zealand, during which I conducted research with Maori iwis on water ownership, rights and management, brought me into contact with their beliefs about rivers as living ancestors, and their taniwha and other water beings. Realising the vital importance of these aquatic deities caused me to pay attention to them elsewhere.
It soon became clear that — since all early human societies worshipped the non-human domain, which we call Nature — water beings (as well as other elemental and non-human ancestral figures) were ubiquitous in human history. And in all of these early societies water beings performed similarly vital connective roles: personifying the creative and potentially destructive powers of water; forming the world and populating with human and non-human beings; providing humans with consciousness and enlightenment; exerting religious authority and, above all, generating water and life in annual cycles of production and reproduction. So for several decades I collected images and narratives about water beings all over the world: feathered and water lily serpents in Central America; African python deities, Arctic undersea beings; Indian nāgas; Japanese cloud dragons and Chinese imperial dragons; North-American Pueblo horned serpents or, on the north-west coast, wolf or bear headed beings; Amazonian giant anacondas and celestial boas; Celtic deities in rivers and springs; Norse sea serpents, and Eastern European rain dragons.
What happened to these water beings over time in different cultural and historical contexts gives us an illuminating narrative about different societal trajectories and transformations in people’s relationships with water and the non-human domain. And so the project grew into the major comparative study that forms the basis of my book. The study shows how growing instrumental control over the environment altered the relations of power between human societies and their environments, and led changes in beliefs and practices in relation to water deities. As humans gained more technological power over water, and felt more ‘god-like’, a fascinating pattern of deity humanisation emerged. This led to the semi-humanisation of water beings, or their displacement by deities in human form, and culminated in the major monotheisms assigning authority to human, male gods and demonising the non-human beings of earlier religions.
JMW Would you explain a little about how you chose to structure the book, and make these categories of beings? And which of the world wide canon of water beings you have researched most captures you?
VSWater Beings follows the changing patterns in societies’ relationships with water through a comparative study of their water deities. Although these changes happened at different times in different places, the book is loosely chronological, starting with the water beings of the earliest human societies and those that remain central today in place-based indigenous communities. Such societies understood the co-creative role of the non-human domain, manifested in water beings, and sought to have reciprocal and respectful relationships with them. They also maintained relatively egalitarian relationships in their political arrangements, being led by both male and female elders.
The text then moves to examining the effects of greater human control over water, for example in ancient irrigation societies, and considers how their religious and political arrangements changed alongside their new infrastructures. With new hierarchies and centralised governments, power shifted from water deities into the hands of (usually male) priests and deified rulers who became the figures responsible for bringing the rain and maintaining social order.
The following chapters explore how, as societies became more technologically powerful, water beings were made subservient or subsumed by new deities in human form until, with the rise of monotheisms that separated Culture from Nature, and sought dominion over the latter, they were demonised and slain. It also shows how emerging scientific visions disenchanted the world and consigned many nature deities to ‘folklore’. In the final part of the book, however, we see how this alienation from the non-human domain, and the exploitation of other species and environments that it encouraged, has led to the current environmental crisis. There is now an increasing understanding that there is an urgent need for humankind to regain more convivial, and therefore more sustainable, relationships with water, ecosystems, and other living kinds.
The book therefore also examines new visions of water beings in recent and contemporary art, literature and film, in which they are recognised and respected as key manifestations of the co-creative powers of the non-human domain. These emerging images and narratives express people’s growing desire to reconnect more positively with other living kinds and ecosystems.
As for which water beings have captured me the most? I can never choose. My first love was the Australian Rainbow Serpent, but they are all extraordinary and wonderful, beautiful and terrible, and endlessly fascinating.
JMW Anthropological research gives us an opportunity to look back at historical evidence and to engage with local/cultural knowledges. In this case there is such a desperate need to apply all this knowledge to how we respond to water now, which you explore in some depth in the final chapter. How might we look back in 100 years, with your assessment of the current trajectory of human/water relations?
VS My research helps, I hope, by showing how, for many millennia, human societies maintained respectful relationships with water and the non-human domain, in which people sought to protect their needs and interests as well as those of human beings. It shows how and why many societies moved away from such egalitarian visions to seek power and dominion over ‘Nature’ and how this increasing inequality led to exploitative and unsustainable practices. Most large societies are still on this trajectory, led by ideologies of growth and expansion, and the belief that yet more technological control will solve the problem. Meanwhile, species and biodiverse habitats continue to disappear, human populations and their use of resources continue to increase, and it seems that humankind is dragging the world towards a painful and potentially critical collapse.
But in almost all societies there are also passionate counter-movements: social and ecological activists and indigenous communities striving to promote alternate ways forward. They share a transformational vision of human and non-human equality, circular economies, more sustainable lifeways, and beliefs and values that recognise the vital co-creative role of the non-human world. These movements are growing: more and more people are pushing their local and national governments and international bodies to make better choices. What the world looks like 100 years from now will depend on whether they can succeed in turning the tide. And in this battle — and it is indeed a battle for human and non-human survival — water beings, as compelling personifications of non-human power and creativity, are a vital narrative device for communicating ideas about how we might engage with water differently.
JMW Do you feel positive about us working with the more-than-human to assert the rights of nature and the rights of water within human law/psychology?
VS How could one feel other than positive about working to uphold the rights of all living kinds in what is fundamentally a shared interconnected world, in which human and non-human wellbeing cannot be separated? This is surely the only rational and ethical position from which it is possible to see a future in which all of us can flourish. So yes, I feel immensely positive, and indeed privileged, to be able to work with these amazing water beings and their wonderful capacities to communicate a more hopeful vision of the future.
Find more
Water Beings – from Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis by Veronica Strang is published by Reaktion Books (2023). Veronica is a Professor in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. You can explore her work — and watch a summary video of a planned TV series based on Water Beings — at her website.
Ecopoet Helen Moore celebrates global ecopoetries through a new project gathering poets from Global South and North. Ecopoetikon offers a powerful indicator of intersecting crises and inspiration for a tipping point in our relationship with the living world.
1,410 words: estimated reading time = 5.5 minutes
Are we yet at a cultural tipping point, which makes conversations about climate change and environmental degradation “many, various, and unavoidable”? Doubtless this is the work of contributing artists to ClimateCultures, and it’s the vision of British ecopoet Caleb Parkin, who sees poetry “with its scalar shifts and ability to hold multiple perspectives and ambiguities” as being uniquely placed within the public imagination “to support the representation of massively distributed temporospatial (time/space) violences to the entire biosphere”.
Caleb’s insight is taken from a statement he wrote for Ecopoetikon, a new online showcase of global ecopoetries, which was launched in September 2023. It aims to provide a powerful poetic indicator of how ecological and intersecting social crises are affecting people across the world, and as such, adds significantly to these unavoidable conversations. Caleb is one of twenty ecopoets featured on the site, which I’ve been co-curating over the past year. His contribution includes his richly textural poem Almanac of Lunar Songs — a poem “inspired by human and more-than-human lunar behavioural influences – from microorganisms to ‘supermoon baby booms’ [, which] weaves through the various names given to the full moons each month” and written to be performed under Luke Jerram’s ‘Museum of the Moon’ in Bristol Cathedral. Almanac of Lunar Songs was a Bristol City Poet collaborative commission, with Miranda Lynn Barnes.
March
The plough moon brings on spring, softened soils. Equinox moon. Longer days, last of winter, earth’s movement emerging. Worm moon. Earthworms surface, converge on winter’s wastings, fertile, gleaming. In like a lion, out like a lamb, March brings the wind moon, crow moon. Sweetness seeps from the birch and the maple beneath the sugar moon, sap moon. How it glows in the half-light. How we ache towards the solstice.
With each ecopoet nominated on the basis that they demonstrate commitment and creative innovation in their practice, the site is currently showcasing the work of poets from Australia, Botswana, Colombia, Estonia, India, Italy, Mauritius, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, the Philippines, the UK, and the US, and offers a rich tapestry of perspectives.
Global ecopoetries: a network of solidarity
Although the definitions of ecopoetry remain contested, at Ecopoetikon we define it as poetry written with engaged ecological and social consciousness. For us, ecopoetry should be informed by a level of ecoliteracy, an awareness that we live within ecosystems and in reciprocal interaction with the more-than-human world. We also see the intertwining social and ecological crises as having the same roots — i.e., globalised, industrial, white supremacist, patriarchal capitalism, and materialism. And more deeply, as a crisis of perception and imagination, emerging from a paradigm of separation: human from Nature and Nature from culture.
Ecopoetikon was originally inspired by a student interview conducted by Kathryn Alderman with Craig Santos Perez, an acclaimed ecopoet from the Pacific Island of Guam. In late 2022, Perez called for poets from the Global North to read and support poets from the Global South, and to teach their work, and so the idea for a ‘world ecopoetry share’ was born. Categorising countries according to their economic and developmental status, as in the ‘Global North’/’South’ binary, is problematic; however, Ecopoetikon’s ethos is more broadly one of building a network of solidarity, and transcending Eurocentrism and the Western literary canon to highlight less privileged voices.
Rina Garcia Chua from the Philippines is another of our featured poets, and she writes of growing up in Metro Manila, where she experienced a typhoon that forced her to “swim and walk in flooded highways when it dumped a month’s worth of rain in just a few hours.” One of the three poems I selected for her webpage is titled 113 Submerged Reefs, and visually reveals contested territory in the South China Sea, with oil represented as an omnipresent but less visible text within the poem-collage.
‘113 Submerged Reefs’ by Rina Garcia Chua, featured in Ecopoetikon, first published in g u e s t 17 (2019) and The Global South 19.1 (2023).
Tjawangwa Dema from Botswana touches on the fraught landscape of Elephant populations and expresses right relationship with the forest in their poem Commons:
Here we gather
blistered tongue to blistered tongue and say
no one owns the forest or its flycatchers
nor its trout lilies or lichen. No one
And Zheng Xiaoqiong, whose poems are beautifully translated from the Chinese by Eleanor Goodman, finds her inspiration among the trees, plants, birds, and snakes of Mt. Baiyun, and from factory-work in Guangdong. In Time, wild Nature is contrasted with the factory, where she herself worked from the age of twenty-one, witnessing how “workers are inflicted with occupational illnesses such as pneumoconiosis, dermatitis, lung cancer …”
a lonely bird hides itself in the darkness of the lychee grove the darkness overwhelms the red of the lychees, and the dark branches
turn even darker, the birdcalls have faded, and here
the roar of the hardware factory continues its banging unabated …
Decolonising canon and curriculum
Who should have the power to determine which poems are worth reading? Conscious of the literary gatekeepers who have often raised obstacles to more politically engaged work, including my own, Ecopoetikon’s editors are aware of the opportunity that this online platform offers to transcend political borders and to include more diverse voices.
We aim to avoid exclusivity by including ecopoets who have been nominated by others on the basis of their commitment and creative innovation in their practice, and the editorial team welcomes nominations of ecopoets whose work we’ve yet to discover. In featuring poets from across the globe, we’re also aware that some may not define themselves as ‘ecopoets’, because an ecological worldview is inherent in their culture, and evident in their traditional ecological knowledge.
Funded by the University of Gloucestershire’s School of Creative Arts, and built by student web designer Ardeshir Shojaei, Ecopoetikon features three search tools, one of which is thematic. With poems grouped under ‘oceans’, ‘soil/agriculture’, ‘pollution/waste’, ‘indigeneity/roots’, ‘ecocide/extinctions’, ‘regeneration’, and ‘interspecies communication’, amongst other themes, this function readily provides material for research or learning across a range of disciplines. The site’s bespoke teaching resources, available to subscribers, offer writing prompts too. Over the coming years, the project team plans to evaluate Ecopoetikon’s impacts, and welcomes feedback from site users.
In September 2023, we launched our global ecopoetries project both at the biennial conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment at Liverpool University and at the 2nd Ecocultural Humanities Symposium at the University of Gloucestershire. In 2024, we aim to build awareness of the project through commissioned features, social media and in-person and online events – and again we welcome invitations to collaborate with other artists and networks. Look out for news of these, and why not book onto an evening with Ecopoetikon poets Helina Hookoomsing and Mario Petrucci, who will read at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival’s online ecopoetry event on June 3rd 2024?
A restorative act
When I ask the growing community of featured poets how they feel about the project, Mario Petrucci, whose extraordinary poem Heavy Water, a poem for Chernobyl I selected for the site, emails me saying: “In the ten-minutes-to-midnight cacophony of ignored environmental wake-up calls, Ecopoetikon sings a sweet yet piercingly persistent note. Too often, ecopoetry is met with neglectful silence; it’s profoundly encouraging to join this lively conversation.”
Working together we hope to see ecopoetry serving not only as a cultural tipping point, but also as a restorative act. A signpost towards regenerative cultures, where we value the Earth, and particularly the land/bioregion we inhabit, as our community. A future where the prefix ‘eco’ is no longer needed because all humans inhabit ecocentric and socially just cultures.
Find more
In celebrating global ecopoetries, Ecopoetikon aims to offer equal voice and representation to established ecopoets from around the world. Based in the Creative Arts at the University of Gloucestershire in the UK, Ecopoetikon is a developing research project that showcases a diverse international network of ecopoets through an online mapping project. You can find poems from a growing network of ecopoets around the world, including those mentioned in Helen’s post: Caleb Parkin’s Almanac of Lunar Songs; Rina Garcia Chua’s 113 Submerged Reefs; Tjawangwa Dema’s Commons; Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Time (translated by Eleanor Goodman); Mario Petrucci’s Heavy Water, a poem for Chernobyl.
Artist Michael Gresalfi shares new artworks using leaves, seeds and other natural materials to produce zoomorphic or anthropomorphic masks and sculptures that echo our early ancestors and an approach to the world that recognises, “We are all related.”
