Document Type
Lesson Plan
Publication Date
Spring 2024
Abstract
When faced with the climate crisis, we humans have responded with varying levels of distress. Most of us swing between despair, when we fall into grief at our own stupidity and possible doom, and hope, that a solution is right around the corner. There is a middle ground of apathy, for those who’ve lost all hope and/or become paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of the climate crisis. Regardless of where we are, life under the climate crisis is not easy, and we all need to be reminded that it’s worth going on from time to time. Ironically, many of us have found solace in nature, the very thing we humans are destroying with our own hands. Such an impulse is difficult to rationalize, though we can get closest to understanding why through one medium: poetry. Ecopoetry, to be more precise. Ecopoetry navigates the human’s relationship to nature, through the hope, the despair, and the apathy that we all feel; nature poems guide us through our grief, and eventually, help us rediscover our hope and our humanity amidst the destruction we’ve dealt our home. And maybe, just find it in ourselves to repair what we’ve broken: give back to nature, in handfuls, by our puny human hands. Hands that we must remember are capable of much more than we sometimes care to think. This anthology hopes to distill this process and guide the reader through it, hopefully to encourage, and maybe empathize.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Suhyun Kim , '24 and Peter Schmidt.
(2024).
"Before We Say Farewell: An Anthology Of Ecopoetry".
https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-english-lit/410
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Comments
Developed by a Swarthmore College student, Suhyun Kim, with feedback from Professor Peter Schmidt, as a final assignment in English 71E/Environmental Studies 041, "Ecopoetry and the Climate Crisis," spring 2024.