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Paper short abstract

This paper takes a narrative ecology approach to ecopoetics, exploring the potential for ecopoetry to disrupt destructive stories and perform ecocultural identities that promote respect for other people and the Earth.

Paper long abstract

The emerging framework of narrative ecology sees stories as playing an important role within the global ecosystems that life depends on, by shaping how humans conceptualise and act in the world. While some stories, particularly the dominant stories of industrial societies, encourage people to destroy the ecosystems that life depends on, other stories encourage attention, care and protection of the natural world. This paper takes a narrative ecology approach to ecopoetics, exploring the potential for ecopoetry to disrupt destructive stories and provide inspirational new stories to live by. The data is drawn from the Ecopoetikon, a project which showcases outstanding ecopoetry from the Global North and Global South. In total, twenty poems are analysed to reveal the linguistic and narratological devices used to perform ecocultural identities. The performance of an ecocultural identity is defined here as an assertion of membership of a cultural group combined with a description of how that cultural group as a whole sees itself as embedded in wider ecosystems. Of particular interest is the storytelling aspect of ecopoetry, how poets weave a world where they belong to particular cultures that are embedded in particular places, while encouraging the readers to forge their own ecocultural identities within their own cultures and places. The analysis will present a picture of ecopoetry as part of the global interaction of stories, challenging dominant stories which represent humans in isolation and conveying ecological identities where groups of humans are deeply embedded within wider ecosystems.