Ecosystem Poetry Quotes

In the summer, as the heavy moths beat their powdery wings against his window screen, he wrote to her about the island, describing how the berry bushes were laden with fruit, and where the most succulent oysters could be found, and the way the bioluminescence lit the lapping waves and filled the ocean with twinkling planktonic forms that mirrored the stars in the sky. He translated the vast, wild, Pacific Rim ecosystem into poetry and pixels, transmitting them all the way to her small monitor in Manhattan, where she waited, leaning into the screen, eagerly reading each word with her heart in her throat, because by then she was deeply in love.

It shouldn't be here. This sedge grass is decorative bullshit he imported from Northern Asia. The lab spent two years modifying it to slot into our ecosystem, all so that the mountain would literally smell of honey. Terra di latte e miele, she said, mockingly. Thank god my father went into business, not poetry. He's far too much of a romantic. I laughed, incredulous at this portrait of my stiff employer, and Aida reddened. It is romantic, if you think about it. He planted the grass for my mother. She's one of those Catholic Koreans, painfully devout. You know. The promised land, Canaan, found after forty years of wandering the desert. The land of milk and honey.

So much world all at once--how it rustles and bustles! Moraines and morays and morasses and mussels, the flame, the flamingo, the flounder, the feather--

While native cultures had inhabited the Maine woods for ten thousand years and left the ecosystem intact, white colonizers devasted it in a matter of decades. Enlightenment science was showing how false traditional cosmology was and replacing it in intellectual history by various kinds of post-Christian/scientific pantheism-most notably Deism, which had been the prevailing conceptual framework among America’s intellectuals…including America’s Founding Fathers. Deism considered art and science to the true religion because those practices engaged us with the immediate reality of the cosmos and that reality itself was the divine. There were various versions of pantheism among Romantic poets and painters, for who the natural world evoked a profound sense of awe, awe they could only explain as a kind of religious experience.

Seeing small pieces of a larger jigsaw puzzle in isolation, no matter how hi-def the picture, is insufficient to grapple with humanity’s greatest challenges. We have long known the laws of thermodynamics, but struggle to predict the spread of a forest fire. We know how cells work, but can’t predict the poetry that will be written by a human made up of them. The frog’s-eye view of individual parts is not enough. A healthy ecosystem needs biodiversity. Even now, even in endeavors that engender specialization unprecedented in history, there are beacons of breadth. Individuals who live by historian Arnold Toynbee’s words that “no tool is omnicompetent. There is no such thing as a master-key that will unlock all doors.” Rather than wielding a single tool, they have managed to collect and protect an entire toolshed, and they show the power of range in a hyperspecialized world.

A story, whether it be novel, short fiction, screenplay, play or poetry or any form of non-fiction, is like an ecosystem in which everything relates and feeds into the life of the story.” –– Andrew Binks "Brilliant writing and storytelling, the kind we can learn from by example, transcends gender, sexuality, race and religion..." –– Andrew Binks

When creating green spaces or attempting to rewild an area, it’s not about planting one tree, but many. It’s not simply about the overstory, but the wild grasses and shrubs and living creatures in the understory. This anthology hopes to be both the canopy and the soil—not just a community, but a living ecosystem made stronger by all its parts. As Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in Braiding Sweetgrass, “All flourishing is mutual.