Event Type
This panel on environmental and ecological justice explores how poetry supports making our communities more equally resilient through the languages of poetry. Panelists identify how to strengthen our communities in a more balanced way and how poetry can contribute to a more inclusive way of speaking about and addressing climate change. Current capital structures change through poetry and poetics' spaces as these spaces change how we use words? Since metaphor scales, audiences will hear points of view at different scales. Local NOLA poets and poets from other localities across the United States all want to point to the language innovations that work toward a more just future? Our panel is moderated by poet and ecologist E.J. McAdams.
Marcella Durand will discuss how words like "natural," "resiliency" and "sustainable" are used to cloak and cover everything from meat products to construction projects. Even "green space" might mean green paint splashed over a square of asphalt. These greenwashing words are no longer denotative or even connotative. Totally unmoored from the realities of climate collapse around us, they mean exactly the opposite of what they say. It is here that poets may rescue language, re-placing words with new possibilities of definition within the poetic space.
Tonya M. Foster will speak about circulatory systems: what we might mean when we talk about environments and environmental justice. How our descriptions are coded or inflected by circulations of money and resources. What is considered worthy of preservation? What is laid waste? And what's money got to do with it?
Tommy Parrie will speak about the symbiotic relationship between trees (how their root system spreads horizontally as it grows and not straight down) and other organisms as a metaphor for our relationship to the environment through a Native lens.
Gabrielle Octavia Rucker will discuss how Suzanne Cesaire's 1945 essay, "The Great Camouflage" guides her thinking about eco-solidarity across climate, labor and race.
James Sherry will talk about connectivity and ecology from the perspective of the words we use in poetry about the environment to make it more active and more aligned with our intentions. Words like eco-poetry and nature are based on assumptions that cannot persist in an environmentally aligned world.