"If science tells us what is happening to the planet, art helps us feel it"

Looking into a rock pool, I was struck by the chalky hue of a limpet’s conical shell, its ridges radiating outward like a tiny starburst. The longer I watched, the more I saw: the limpet wasn’t still at all, but almost imperceptibly twirling. Among the bright, attention-seeking sea anemones and the dog whelks in their nondescript uniforms, this mollusc was a kind of slow-motion carousel. Later, after much googling, I learned that it was probably grazing on algae, its saw-like tongue – the radula – scraping whatever its hunger desired from the rocks. But in that moment I wasn’t thinking of biology; I was captivated by comparison. The limpet looked like a miniature party hat. A single barnacle clung to its side like a monocle.

The words and metaphors that arose as I crouched there for twenty, maybe thirty minutes, didn’t seem to come from me. They seemed to issue from the limpet itself, or from some shared space between us, in the act of noticing. It was the first time I had really paused to see a limpet, and the first time I understood the power of perceiving nature. Among all the things I could have been doing – scrolling on my phone, shopping, rushing to a meeting – this deep attention felt strangely radical. To give time to the nonhuman world, felt like a small act of resistance.

In recent decades, ecopoetry has become an increasingly vital literary form through which we explore our relationship with the living world. An ecopoem might be a sonnet for childhood landscape, a polemic against fracking or an elegy for the vanishing birdsong of spring. My own practice has ranged from fieldwork in my local park to collaborations with marine scientists studying ocean acidification, and even a month-long residency in the Peruvian Amazon. Yet the limpet on the north Cornish coast remains a lodestar in my writing. It reminds me of the intricacy and intrigue embodied by those uncharismatic species we overlook, but on which our ecosystems depend. It throws into relief our biases for animals that have a face, that we can see ourselves in, feel some familiarity for. Our need for nature to be charming, loveable and entertaining.

In my last collection of poetry, I decided that rather than avoid these biases, I’d dive straight into them to try and better understand the tensions in our relationships with nature. As part of a wider AHRC Fellowship on the prospects and problems of cuteness in contemporary environmental culture, I wrote portraits of wild animals and stuffed toy animals. A research trip to Disneyland Paris helped me trace the anthropomorphic desire at the heart of our connection to nature as I documented our wish for the wild to “wave back.” I realise now that this wider, entangled perspective is influenced by Juliana Spahr, a contemporary American ecopoet I admire. Nature poetry, Spahr says, tends to “show us the beautiful bird but not so often the bulldozer off to the side that was destroying the bird's habitat.” This is where the importance of ecopoetry lies; in holding the lyric and the political in the same frame.

If science tells us what is happening to the planet, art helps us feel it – and feeling can lead to transformation. The imagination carries us toward new ways of seeing, new ways of being in relation to the world we share. And perhaps most importantly, the imagination belongs to everyone. It doesn’t require a degree, technological gadgetry, or a specific know-how; only the willingness to pay attention, ask questions, and reflect on our fears and hopes for Earth. To imagine is to participate; to take part in the ongoing conversation between human and more-than-human life. As leaders prepare for COP30, the arts remind us that change begins not only in policy, but in perception. Writing ecopoetry, for me, begins with that moment beside the rock pool: the act of slowing down, looking closely, and discovering new worlds of being that were there all along.