What role does ecopoetry have in such a time as ours? It reminds us of our place in the universe in terms other than expropriation and exploitation. It reminds us of the richly textured life all around us, in which we are embedded, and of the infinitely complex and beautiful beings that make up that life. It reminds us that, as Hans-Otto Pörtner and coauthors write in the preface to their 2021 “IPBES-IPCC Cosponsored Workshop Report on Biodiversity and Climate Change,” “It is the nature of complex systems that they have unexpected outcomes and thresholds,” and that all the intricate and exquisite pieces of those complex systems do not and cannot exist “in isolation from one another.”
Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology, published in March 2025, resumes the work of The Ecopoetry Anthology, a groundbreaking compilation that we were fortunate to coedit. The Ecopoetry Anthology features US nature poetry from Whitman to around 1960, when the term ecopoetry entered general parlance, and US ecopoetry up to 2010. Since it was published, in 2013, environmental catastrophes have worsened, and a great deal of important, powerful poetry has been written that we wanted to celebrate. Happily, Trinity University Press agreed that this was an important project to continue.
Attached to the Living World contains ecopoems written and / or published since 2010 by more than one hundred fifty established and emerging poets who did not appear in The Ecopoetry Anthology. Like the original, this new volume addresses the ever-emerging and hydra-headed ecological crises of our time, while continuing to demonstrate, with even more diverse work, poetry’s capacity to reconnect us to the other-than-human world.
Some ecopoetry speaks of social and environmental injustice, such as Anthony Cody’s harrowing “brd,” and Tiffany M. Higgins’s “Chewing the Sun,” in which she writes,
we sleep in the ashes
men of meat
send soy to far-off kingdoms
to be fed to meat
animal orders
the breathing green
replaced
by pale steers
chewing equatorial sun.
Some corroborates natural disasters, especially those caused by climate change, as in Catherine Pierce’s “Anthropocene Pastoral,” which Ecotone’s editors selected to begin this issue. “In the beginning, the ending was beautiful, Pierce writes,
even as
we held each other, warmth to warmth,
and said sorry, I’m sorry I’m so sorry while
petals
sifted softly to the ground all around us.
Some ecopoems, such as the late Martha Silano’s “Self-Portrait as Southern Resident Orca,” tell of creatures’ lives:
For I was misnamed whale killer by
Spanish explorers.
For I am a dolphin.
For each year I ingest 7 million quarts of
motor oil washing into the Salish Sea. . . .
For I am a mother carrying her dead
newborn. For I have been carrying him
for days.
Some offer prayers: “for the silence of the future” and “in the promise of the future,” as Ned Balbo writes in “A Spell for Lamentation and Renewal,” or “Beyond the ground and sky / may my body always be a border,” as does Rossy Lima in “Water Path / Aguacamino.” Some sing praise, as jason crawford does in “A Double Sonnet for the River”).: “and because this is a poem about joy, it too must have a river flowing / from its greedy jaws.”
That is to say, ecopoetry doesn’t do just one thing. In all these various ways, it returns us to life more abundant. It says, with January O’Neil writing, in “The River Remembers,” about an oxbow where enslaved people hid “wait[ing] for their chance to escape up north,” “Here’s where flow and marvel and history converge. / This harmjoy. This beautiful sadness.”
The Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency of the United States’ current administration cherry-pick science to refute established international scientific consensus.
Over one hundred fifty years ago, the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote optimistically in “God’s Grandeur,” “But for all this, nature is never spent.” Hopkins’s confidence, however, no longer feels so true. Humans are certainly spending nature at full throttle, some of us with horrifying exultance. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrote in its second assessment report, “There is a discernible human influence on global climate.” The Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency of the United States’ current administration cherry-pick science to refute established international scientific consensus—for instance, as Jeff Tollefson wrote in Nature in September 2025, the controversial US Climate Panel, all of whose members were critical of climate science, was disbanded in the wake of a lawsuit but did not withdraw its initial draft report. And yet, on January 27, 2026, the 2025 Doomsday Clock maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists had us at eighty-five seconds before an emblematic midnight of “human-made global catastrophe.”
The poems in Attached to the Living World are antithetical in every way to the methods and mentalities wreaking havoc on our lands, air, waters—on our human and beyond-human lives—with a combined speed, greed, and carelessness that is hard to fathom. Today, all signs of resistance to our latest political and environmental degradations are vital. Ecopoetry, crucially, continues to be one such sign. And it asks us, as Jane Zwart writes in “I read that the moon is rusting,” to be among “those who, done or undone, change next / into another kind of wonder.
