Abstract

In this paper I discuss the various paths I have taken to become a poet who gives voice to some of the key environmental issues of our time. As I map out this journey I discuss a selection of my own poetry that focuses on the topic of environmental ethics and justice. The main influences on my poetry come from: my own childhood experiences with nature, academic research I have done on pain and my personal experience of pain (inspired by Arthur Frank’s book “The Wounded Storyteller’ and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s late essay “The Intertwining”), the question concerning technology (inspired by Heidegger’s essay of this name), philosophical hermeneutics (from Gadamer’s work, especially “Truth and Method”), and the ethical obligation to bear witness to suffering. My goal as an essayist and a poet is to move toward the consilience described by E. O. Wilson’s book of that name and to further the project of Erich Fromm as laid out in his book “To Have or to Be.” Just as poetry by its nature cannot offer programs for social change, poets cannot exhort readers to take action; instead, we must inspire them to change by touching the very fiber of their being-in-the-world.