Facing the Environmental Crisis with Contemplative Attention
The Ecopoetics of Don McKay, Tim Lilburn,and Russell Thornton.
By Susan McCaslin
All three of these poets identify “nature” not simply as the environment or physical worldwhich surrounds us, but as that which rises up as the central “dream of the earth,” to
borrow a phrase from writer-ecologist Thomas Berry, of which humans are finite
expressions. They challenge a merely anthropocentric worldview and move to shift the
exploitive, patriarchal gaze into what McKay calls the non-grasping, non-controlling
“geopoetic” or earth-centered imagination. Rather than asking how we imagine the earth, geopoetics turns to ask how the earth might
imagine us. Their work needs to be located within a broader conversation about “deep
ecology,” a term derived from Norwegian eco-philosopher Arne Naess in the 1960s to
describe the intuition that every being and life form has intrinsic worth as part of an
organic, interconnected whole. They write in the wake of earlier North American nature… (AnnWaddicor. sends this ) <onlyann@hotmail.co.uk>
Date: May 4, 2012
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