The 'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. These process notes and poems by Luisa A. Igloria, Aileen Cassinetto, and Jeremy S. Hoffman on the making of the anthology Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.
Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States, a companion to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, edited by Luisa A. Igloria, Aileen Cassinetto & Jeremy S. Hoffman (Paloma Press, 2023)
In June 2022, we set the intention for a poetry anthology that would support the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) by telling our stories and our communities’ stories of climate change alongside this congressionally mandated report. However, we were also very clear that poetry wouldn’t just be a way to communicate climate science, but that alongside the language and methodology of science, we would be presenting the language of poets, which is one of witness and community. The anthology was released in September 2023, two months before the rollout of the NCA5, featuring over 70 poets and scientists. It won the 2023 American Book Fest Best Book Award, and forged partnerships with over 30 public and private organizations, including Poets for Science and Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University which developed the interactive Dear Human microsite to help “foster creativity, innovation, and discovery”; and the American Geophysical Union (AGU) which produced the Dear Human Earth Day video exploring our “profound connection to the Earth and the responsibility we bear as stewards of its delicate ecosystems.”
LUISA A. IGLORIA
In 2015, around 50 words related to the natural world were removed from the Oxford Children’s Dictionary. Robert MacFarlane lists some of the deleted words, including “acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture, and willow. The words taking their places ... [include] attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail.” Well-known writers like Margaret Atwood and Andrew Motion started a campaign for the reinstatement of these words, and Robert Macfarlane put “The Lost Words” into a beautifully illustrated book for children. Clearly, the capacity to name and describe anything—not least of all the natural world—is connected to the idea of care and attention. And so, now, it seems even more important that we cultivate practices honoring our environment as well as language that will help us face the daily spectacle of global environmental degradations and arm us with a spirit of hope and agency.
When something dies or is taken away, we tend to want to memorialize it by building shrines, erecting headstones, creating simulacra. When what’s taken away is something in the natural environment—what’s been colonized, disappeared, or destroyed—we might rename the scars that are left “preservations.” Not far from where I live, there’s a popular theme park described as a place where “thrills and nature intersect.” Millions of guests come annually to ride the rollercoasters, drink beer, eat themed cuisine, look at gray wolves, bald eagles, and other animals in the park’s wildlife reserve section. In some way, such themed parks evoke World’s Fairs, those grand universal exhibitions or expos meant to display the best or latest achievement of nations. In 1904 St. Louis, MO, this meant displaying more than a thousand Filipinos and other indigenous people in a live human zoo alongside the latest architecture and technology. The 422 acres of the nearby theme park are in James City County, near colonial Williamsburg. These lands were part of the original territory of the Powhatan people. Such displacements run throughout history; it’s hard to think of anywhere now without considering who or what might have been there before anyone staked claims on it. And so, it’s ironic that the park is divided into areas named after European countries—England, Scotland, Ireland, Italy, France, Germany.
The Roman poet Virgil, among the earliest to write in the pastoral tradition, was from a region in northern Italy where his father and other farmers were also nearly dispossessed of their land by Emperor Octavian. In north America, where indigenous peoples have lost almost all the land historically in their possession, accounts show that their relocations were usually to areas less viable to their way of life. The negative consequences of marginalizing policies continue into the present moment. Whatever names these go by (redlining, gentrification, land use and zoning regulations), their effects also put already disadvantaged communities at increased risk from climate change hazards.
Last year, in Norfolk, VA, community leaders from the south side of the Elizabeth River registered their displeasure at a meeting with the local Office of Resilience. They had learned of the city’s proposal to raise houses and plant shorelines with natural grasses along their neighborhoods, while protective walls, berms, and levees were planned for the northside, benefiting wealthier communities (where there was also some concern that the height of the seawalls might compromise the beauty of the landscape). The information gathered by climate scientists shows it’s more than just flooding that puts disadvantaged communities at risk—there’s also a similar disparity in their vulnerability to extreme heat.
Climate scientists and researchers are working hard to gather and present quantitative data to make the case for taking climate action now. Where traditional pastorals have tended to idealize nature and country life, the ecopoetry we write today can offer another intimate barometer to show what is happening to a natural world on the brink of “climate midnight.” This was the hope that led to this anthology of U.S.-based climate change poems. With my co-editors, I share the conviction that the stories we tell, from the ground of our living experience and stripped of jargon, are as important as science and policy in the race to communicate the urgency for collective climate action.
Ode to the Never-ending
The universe says you'll get smacked
with a lesson
as many times as it takes
for you to learn it—If that's so, what
lesson could
possibly be in this tiny,
annoying hair that keeps growing back
in the same
spot, on the right side of
your chin? You stand on tiptoe to get a better
angle at the
mirror; tweezers in hand, you
pull it out, marveling at how a small irritation
commands total
absorption. A week later,
it's back—nagging feeling, indeterminate itch.
In Virginia
Beach, 4 dead humpback whales
have washed up on the shore since
the beginning of
the year—you could say
they are also a kind of lesson that hasn't
been learned.
Necropsies show injuries
consistent with vessel strikes in waters
thick with ship
traffic. If the world is ending,
each cetacean body that perishes on sand
is a fallen
leaf, a wound bled open in the middle
of a horizon of false starts. We keep saying
there's time,
the window's still open. Until it's not.
AILEEN CASSINETTO
June is low season and monsoon where I grew up, wet with winds and storms and waist-deep floods. Before immigrating, I learned to yield to the archipelagic rhythms and torrents that beset Metropolitan Manila, one of the world’s original global cities which linked Asia with the Spanish Americas. June was also the start of the school year, when kids listened to the AM radio for storm warning signals: signal number three was for typhoons, and meant evacuation from low-lying or coastal areas; signal number two was for tropical storms, and meant classes were automatically suspended; signal number one was for tropical depressions, and meant donning our raincoats and braving scattered rains and near gale winds to go to class. Rising floodwaters was one of the main concerns, though a relatively new occurrence 40 years ago.
I first heard about climate change from my fifth grade social studies teacher who hailed from the same typhoon-prone island as my father. Connecting the dots between landslides and deforestation, and garbage pollution and greenhouse gases, she half-joked that thanks to human-induced weather changes, her tiny hometown, nearly 400 miles away from Manila, was only a category five tropical cyclone away from being wiped off the map. (She may also have alluded to colonialism’s role in the Philippines’ increasingly low forest cover, and indeed, the 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report recognized colonialism as a major cause of the climate crisis, which continues to hinder the implementation of equitable solutions.) Today, the Philippines is one of the places most vulnerable to sea level rise—same as my current hometown on the San Francisco Peninsula, bordered on either side by the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean, with the Santa Cruz Mountains running through it. I suppose it was inevitable that I would end up here, with the seawater in my veins, calling out to the mighty Pacific to find its way back to me.
They say that each of us contains the
“signature of everything that has ever been,” all the bright things, and the
good things, and the wretched and very human things. Across the San Francisco
Bay Area, more than 5,200 toxic sites—some dating back to the 19th century—are
at risk of coming into contact with rising groundwater caused by climate
change, which means that “everything we’ve done in the past is coming up to
haunt us.” It wasn’t so long ago that more than 300,000 prospectors rushed to
California to earn a fortune. The quest for gold in the Old West forever
changed the land—irreparably impacting local fauna and flora, impairing
watersheds and food chains with mercury, and displacing Indigenous American
communities that, precontact, lived sustainably for thousands of years. Their
descendants, possessing the knowledge and pathways needed to rebuild ties
between people and land, are a vital resource in envisioning a more viable and
creative climate response.
In the same vein, poetry is how we move in this world in relation to others. As
a poet, many of my published works tackle themes of migration, boundaries,
belonging, and nuances of home. While most of my poems will likely not be
considered ecopoems, they are based on human ecology which is a way of looking
at the world in terms of how we relate to our natural, social, and built
environments. I choose to write and interrogate these kinds of poems—poems of
beauty and fury, with their environmental threads, however flimsy—as a reminder
that we all carry within us a world of trauma and grace, and that these poems
can help us find a way out of the brokenness of our circumstances. In my poem
below, science was a grounding element where I relied heavily on field notes
and other source material to understand linking parts. It is grief work and
praise work, part mapping project and part autoethnography, and like all poems
in the anthology, holds an ecosystem of shared lives and their histories, and
burdens and shared hopes.
Here be dragons, cetaceans, pink crustaceans, dear humans & a book of remembrance
The cavalry’s here,
loud as thunder, wild and wiser,
like a nobility
of beasts—catch the light
where x marks the spot
and if anyone asks,
this poem is a map
that lapses daily,
sees clearly two seadragons
spinning snout-to-snout
and pods of cetaceans
fueled by clouds
of pink crustaceans—
the shape of the Arctic
is less solid now,
fading into swaths
of milky blue—
and above us, dying stars
consuming their weight
in gas and dust—we’re a
throbbing
mass of grief and limbs
like whale food, or swollen
coastlines—do me a kindness
and repeat this worship
of humans, their book
of remembrance
a cadence of heartbeats
more than a thousand
a minute, short-winged
and foraging for flowers
which bloomed much earlier.
If I could I would
gather this shimmer—
this wonder of stars,
stop the world from burning,
the seas from rising—
be the cavalry
or a reliance of stewards:
remember what it means to love
you
JEREMY S. HOFFMAN
Poetry has helped me understand climate science and share its conclusions with new audiences for many years. When I was a graduate student studying paleoclimatology at Oregon State University, I started writing poetry—specifically haiku—to help me digest and summarize landmark publications in my field of study while preparing for my comprehensive oral exams. Like many milestones along the winding path that leads to earning your Ph.D., these exams carry an immense amount of pressure and stress to perform at a high level—and as they should, since failing them could put your entire Ph.D. journey in jeopardy. I found that writing these brief yet dense poems provided a way to not only internalize some of the foundational knowledge relevant to my field, but also gave me an outlet for channeling my anxiety about the upcoming exams into a creative endeavor. Since that time, I have always sought ways to incorporate the fine arts—from music, to poetry, to theater, to even stand-up comedy—into how I communicate about climate science and continue to internalize the meaning of new scientific discoveries.
This approach, along with my research focus on how climate change disproportionately impacts our neighbors with fewer resources and a history of marginalization, has allowed me to collaborate with people all throughout the country on ways to empower, lift up, and center community voices in the process of building equitable climate resilience in new and creative ways. Just in the last five years, we’ve discovered so much about the disparity in climate risks that permeates our country’s neighborhoods, rooted in a history of decisions being made by few to impact many, reverberating in the present day as pockets of heat illness, flood damage, and dirty air. These discoveries have galvanized community organizations and residents alike to join together to create new parks on empty parking lots, plant native trees to shade future generations, advocate for policy that prioritizes investment by need and history, and grow food and cohesion on vacant lots to reshape how local economies function. All over our country, amidst these perilous conditions, people are joining together to engage with climate science in new and exciting ways to build a sustainable future. These stories need creative outlets to be shared broadly, too.
As such, Dear Human at the Edge of Time began as a science communication experiment. It grew into the volume you see before you; an accompaniment, companion, and counterpart to the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5). The NCA5 is a congressionally-mandated summary of the latest scientific literature on how climate change is accelerating the climate risks experienced across our great country. Many hundreds of scientists spent many thousands of hours working together to synthesize the latest research and conclusions about how climate change is impacting our country, its residents, and their day-to-day lives. I hope that these poems provide additional context to the findings presented in the NCA5 as well as some creative inspiration for you to engage with climate science in a new way in your own back yard.
Paleoclimate Haiku
holiday music
the songs “white christmas”
and “baby it’s cold outside”
might confuse my niece
paleoclimatology
if you look closely
the Earth writes vivid stories
with ice, mud, and rock
PETM carbon
humans are wily.
we emit carbon faster
than the ancient Earth.
climate proxies
like mute temple scribes
in Earth’s cryptic languages
they pen climates past
attribution
we spot fingerprints
of humans loading the dice
for extreme weather
age models
one centimeter
does it capture a decade
or millennia
oxygen isotopes
the light one moves fast
the heavier one moves slow
the science of mass
foraminifera
Your calcite lattice
affected by the ocean
is the Earth’s yearbook
Originally from Baguio City, Luisa A. Igloria is the author of Caulbearer: Poems (Winner, 2023 Immigrant Writing Series Prize, Black Lawrence Press, 2024), Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Co-Winner, 2019 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Prize, Southern Illinois University Press, 2020), The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018), and 12 other books. She was the inaugural recipient of the 2015 Resurgence Poetry Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by a panel headed by former UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion. She is a Louis I. Jaffe Professor of English and Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Old Dominion University, and also leads workshops for and is a member of the board of The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk. During her appointed term as 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-22), Emerita, the Academy of American Poets awarded her one of twenty-three Poet Laureate Fellowships in 2021, to support a program of public poetry projects. luisaigloria.com
Aileen Cassinetto was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow in 2021 and YBCA 100 honoree in 2023 for her contributions in building regenerative and equitable communities through poetry. She has launched art & science makerspace pilot programs, and her ecopoetry projects were featured in Copenhagen’s Nature & Culture Poetry Film Festival, Lift-Off Filmmaker Sessions, and in Americans for the Arts’ Arts Link magazine. She is the author of five books, and her work has appeared in American Poets, Anthropocene, Poetry, and poets.org, among others. aileencassinetto.com
Maw Shein Win's most recent poetry collection is Storage
Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) which was nominated for the Northern
California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book
Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the
inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. Win's previous books include
full-length poetry collection Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins
of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. Win often collaborates
with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and her Process Note Series
features poets on their process. She teaches in the MFA Program at the
University of San Francisco. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary
Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a new literary community.
Win’s full-length collection Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) is
forthcoming in Fall 2024. mawsheinwin.com