Ecopoetics is a term for poetry and poetics that treats ecology as a formal and intellectual concern in its own right, invoking the environment as an active subject rather than as a mere backdrop to a poem.
In 2001, Jonathan Skinner put the term into contemporary circulation, founding ecopoetics, a journal that appeared roughly once a year and was dedicated to “exploring creative-critical edges between making (with an emphasis on writing) and ecology (the theory and praxis of deliberate earthlings).” Poets and critics often trace this sensibility back well before Skinner gave it a name, citing poets such as Robinson Jeffers who developed a philosophy he dubbed “inhumanism.” Defined as “a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to ‘notman’; the rejection of human solipsism,” Jeffers urged his readers to set aside human self-importance and recognize what he called “the trans-human magnificence” of the natural world. Decades later, Gary Snyder developed his own interpretation of human-decentered poetry, poetry considered by Skinner and others within the movement to be an influential voice in proto-ecopoetics.
Skinner drew a deliberate line between ecopoetics and the wilderness-focused nature writing that had long dominated American environmental poetry. “Ecopoetics isn’t about getting to go to Alaska or Yosemite,” he said. “It’s really about observing what’s happening in your backyard.” He also described the journal as a corrective to a field that recycled, in his words, “the same five or seven writers over and over again,” poets who were, as he put it, “mostly white, mostly male.” Ecopoetics grew up alongside ecocriticism, the literary-critical study of literature and environment that took institutional shape in the 1990s. Where ecocriticism mostly interprets existing texts, ecopoetics is generative, investigating how form itself— meaning syntax, sound, collage, and procedure—can register ecological relation and rupture, and it has drawn freely on experimental traditions such as Language poetry rather than treating lyric description as its only mode.
In 2013, Trinity University Press published The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street with a foreword by Robert Hass. Rather than settling on a single definition, the editors organized the book around three intersecting strands of practice: poems that turn to the natural world chiefly as a source of imagery and wonder, poems written out of active environmentalist advocacy, and poems more interested in how language and perception themselves construct the line between nature and culture. The editors resisted ranking these strands, describing them instead as “planes that meet at various angles to create the larger whole that is ecopoetry.”
Poets associated with the ecopoetic movement include Wendell Berry, Camille T. Dungy, Forrest Gander, Brenda Hillman, Ed Roberson, and Juliana Spahr. In 2024, Ada Limón published the anthology You Are Here: Poetry and the Natural World as part of her U.S. Poet Laureate signature project, which also installed poems along trails in national parks.
