Introduction

Ecojustice poetry lives at the intersection of culture, social justice, and the environment. Aligned with environmental justice activism and thought, ecojustice poetry defines environment as “the place in which we work, live, play, and worship.” It is poetry born of deep cultural attachment to the land and poetry born of crisis. It is poetry of interconnection.

One of the inspirations for me in creating an anthology of ecojustice poetry was Camille T. Dungy’s Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. This was the first ecopoetry book I read that dealt with social, cultural, historical, and political concerns as part of its exploration of nature poetry. Though not all of the work is political, and I would not expect it to be, Dungy points out that you cannot collect African American nature poetry without also including social concerns; those concerns are part of the experience of being black in America. Reading this anthology, after a lifetime of reading nature poetry written mostly by white writers, I was able to see more clearly that, as humans, our relationship to the environment is always shaped by culture and history.

Each culture has its own story of land use, connection, dispossession, and cultural resistance. We can find a wide body of nature 
poetry among working class, Appalachian, Chicano, Latino, Mestizo, Asian American, and Native American poets. So it seems important to ask, why are these poets not more fully represented in our nature anthologies and ecojournals? I recently picked up an anthology of early Native American poetry, Changing Is Not Vanishing: 
A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930. These poems, written in English during a time of colonization, displacement, re-education, and genocide, are poems that had been all but forgotten; how differently might we understand our current environmental crisis if more of us had been exposed to these creative works?

I began work on Ghost Fishing: An Ecojustice Poetry Anthology (forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press) three years ago. Many of the poems in this portfolio are part of that collection. The anthology began as a quest to understand how poetry responds to environmental and social crises. I looked for poems that contained both the complexity of this ecological moment and a social consciousness — an awareness that environmental crisis is social and political crisis. I sought out voices that have long been underrepresented among nature poetry collections: those of people of color and those of low-income populations, whose environmental situations are often the most dire.

In collecting poems for the anthology, I’ve learned to fully appreciate the role of culture in connecting us to the environment, as well as the historic way that colonization, war, white supremacy, and other forms of dispossession have robbed generations of their cultural connection to the land; poetry and other arts have served throughout as a form of resistance, an act of resurgence, and cultural memory.

Poetry has a lot to offer a world in crisis — and, in particular, in environmental crisis. For centuries, poets have given voice to our collective trauma: naming injustices, reclaiming stolen language, and offering us courage to imagine a more just world. In a world such as ours, poetry is an act of cultural resilience.