People do not act as Homo economicus or ‘rational man’ (yes, it’s usually framed as a man). Homo sapiens lives through stories, makes choices based on irrational, mythic, imaginary, metaphorical engagement with the world around us, including – or especially – the more-than-human, or what we talk of as ‘Nature’. When we think of ‘biodiversity’, what do most people see, hear, feel? When we imagine its ‘renewal’, what kind of a world are we imagining ourselves into?
Sometimes during an online RENEW meeting, I’ll turn to poem-making as a form of processing in an embodied, lively way. During a session on the term ‘Biodiversity Renewal’, I had fun colliding alternative word combinations together:
Biodiversity Renewal
Genetic Carnivalesque
Morphological Kaleidoscope
Mandibular Multifariousness
Hoofish Hullaballoo
Plumage Brouhaha
Organ-ic Overwhelm
Beastly Pedagogy
Critterly Mutiny
Factory Paucity
Abattoir Au-Revoir
Umwelt Seatbelt
Ultra Wilding
Landscrape Payback
Wasteland Counterattack
It always amazes and delights me what can be done by smashing together the particles of language and seeing kinds of energy emerge (Allen Ginsberg’s ‘hydrogen jukebox’ is a great example). Even in this condensed form, poetry makes us take a step back from well-worn phrases and ask questions about them. To journey into, through, around and beyond them. To unpack what other possibilities of language exist and might be deployed to imagine alternatives.
Above: Caleb addresses the room at the RENEW x BookTrust Biodiversity Storytelling Summit 2023 at Kew Gardens, London. “To stand up in front of a big room of representatives from RENEW, as well as its project partners, and reflect back their words as poetry can be a jangly experience.”
In an interdisciplinary setting, making and sharing poems like this can feel daunting. To stand up in front of a big room of representatives from RENEW, as well as its project partners, and reflect back their words as poetry can be a jangly experience. In one respect, I am re-presenting their words, yes. But I also – in a room with statisticians and ecologists and economists – feel like representing Poetry, with a big P. What am I even doing here? What can poetry do in our polycrisis of ecological collapse, biodiversity decline, and their attendant political bafflements?
It’s a gift I can offer my colleagues and peers from neighbouring disciplines. During my three years as a PhD researcher in RENEW, I’ve offered poems at two of the Biodiversity Parliaments, with some interactive tree poetry at the next. I also documented our Early Career Researcher (ECR) retreat in a poem too (all of which are below). In some respects, each is ‘of the moment’: a means of distilling the most vivid instances of communication and connection which took place, when we all got together in a room, or in a meadow.
What I pay attention to and note down might be different to the notes others are taking. As a poet in this context, I’m after spontaneous utterances; prevailing (often unnoticed) metaphors; the curious organizational or institutional lingo that crops up, unnoticed. To me, these are the moments we are most live and lively, most present. Or the moments we’re accidentally speaking in poems. It’s always interesting how – when you share the poem back – people remember the asides, exclamations, the ‘mistakes’, as much or more than the official messages and takeaway statistics.
Above left: Early Career Researchers meet at Dartmoor. Right: An interdisciplinary Call to Arms at the RENEW x BookTrust Biodiversity Storytelling Summit 2023 at Kew Gardens, London “To me, these are the moments we are most live and lively, most present.”
Language itself is a living part of our culture and cultures. Recently, I’ve been reading James Bridle’s Ways of Being. Plants, Animals, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence. One of the assertions he makes is that since language in the Latinate script became self-referential and not pictographic, it has lost its connection to the world around us. (My favourite reference here is that the letter ‘Q’ is from the Phoenician ‘qoph’ meaning and depicting ‘monkey’: Q’s tail is vestigial.) Instead, language can become inert, inward-looking, commodified and corporatized, pointing back at itself – and to humanity – rather than out to a living planet full of lively subjects. In contexts like the Parliament, I see my role as pointing out and reflecting back this liveliness. I want to offer the possibility of a language reinvigorated with an energy to carry back into the vital work and research to which everyone there is attending.
Civic or public poetry, as well as ‘poetry takeaways’ or on-demand poem-making, occupy a fascinating, but under-researched, space in poetry culture and public life. For me, alongside my PhD research, this auxiliary work as a ‘civic poet’ has been a continuation of my commissions for organisations before, including as Bristol City Poet from 2020 – 2022. In 2024, I joined the National Biodiversity Network conference in Liverpool as their ‘field poet’. I reflected back their vital work of gathering data – so often done by volunteers and, as such, done with huge love for the critters they’re counting. That poem concludes:
We cannot remove the love from scientific language, for doing so means turning the subjects of our research into inert ‘natural resources’. How can we speak between disciplines, across political leanings – perhaps, even, across species? It’s going to take more than a few poems to fix all this. But a lively language that reflects this planet’s abundance, which mirrors back the bumptious biodiversity we must strive to save, is far more likely to succeed.
Often, writing a poem of this kind involves finding the write container to hold it all. That was certainly the case for ‘On the Wing’: it ended up crashing scales together, by placing a landscape and all the details I had heard that day, on the wings of a Marsh fritillary butterfly. Poems are perhaps uniquely placed to articulate what Scott Slovic calls the ‘trans-scalar imaginary’ and I hope this poem enacts relationships across the butterflies’ habitat in an expansive-yet-intimate way.
On the Wing
Challacombe Farm (RENEW ECR Retreat, May 2025)
Naomi gazes over the tin pits, hidden
in the heather. This landscape written,
overwritten, peatbog topography smudged
across moochy swamps. How Tarmac
bisects what could be the blueprint
for a beaver’s home: conifer road,
redline, constraint. A road which sinks
into the marshes, where the stained-
glass fritillary wings are shattered visions
of landscape. A valley, viewed from above.
Look closer into that yellowing mosaic
and you can see the microscopic cattle,
Naomi’s giant pets; the no-bother magic
mushroomers, gathering in visions;
the lines on these wings, miniscule dry-
wall shiners, the odd dropped corner
still standing, centuries later; all the obvious
tessellations of time: tin-mine time,
chrysalis time, farm time. Don’t be a
marsh fritillary, says Naomi, they are rubbish
at having sex. But they do inspire affection,
competition: a golf cup repurposed as
award for shares of metapopulation. So much
heavy lifting on such slight wings: of loneliness,
connection, delivered door-to-door along lanes,
re-storying figures in this landscape, on the wing.
The hillside weeps water, light green through
inorganic bracken. And hillside recalls when
wolves trod within the pawprints of bears; time
scribed by more than just toes, cloven hoofs.
Walls remember warrens they once hemmed
in for tin-miner protein. How humans move
through the open works of ourselves, camp
on the mosses and lichens in our temporary
lives, lighting sparks of blame and leaving
embers of truth. We are a bluebell blip
on the grazed glaze of this meadow. We
are aggy, spitty, spongey alpacas, peering
over fences – out of place, settled in.
How do you get a signal up here?
On the wing of one of nine fritillaries,
in a meadow slowly dusking into shadow.
How do you get a signal? Here, us flecks
between stone walls, flimsy as pigment.
How do you? One of ten now. How?
One of twelve, hard to spot: so small
and adrift in this brief beam of sun.
Above: The Early Career Research community join Naomi Oakley on Challacombe Farm, Dartmoor. “Naomi gazes over the tin pits, hidden in the heather. This landscape written, overwritten, peatbog topography smudged across moochy swamps.”
Above left: “And hillside recalls when wolves trod within the pawprints of bears; time scribed by more than just toes, cloven hoofs.” Right: “Don’t be a marsh fritillary says Naomi, they are rubbish at having sex.”
Biodiversity Parliament 2023:
On Remembering That We Are Biodiversity
after Ruth Awolola, ‘On Forgetting That I Am a Tree’
A poem in which we wash our windscreens of bugs.
A poem in which our blackberries crawl with larvae
And we hear the King’s Speech, with Chatham House Rules.
A poem in which we turn the crisis into questions,
Are frightened or excited by all these faces
Become a nucleus, spawning all of the Things doing exciting Things.
A poem in which future leaders are uncertain
of a future in which they will lead,
Of walking the walk of alliance and reliance,
That three-legged, twelve-legged race
To the garden where my robin lives.
A poem in which we remember the richness
of the unconscious,
See people from nature’s perspective,
Witness a full moon rising as a starling ephemeration,
Remember to look out our window
At a cinnabar moth, its personalized ecology of ragwort.
A poem in which we’re aware of what we’re not seeing
as well as what we are,
The intensity in dimensions of sounds, colours, feelings,
Where we walk barefoot around this little hiccup.
A digital nature, a nature
Literary, negative – the spider on the slide – ugh!
A poem in which nature lives in
your neighbourhood, body, mind
Because a bucket of rainwater can be a beautiful renewal.
Our cities in the ultraviolet vision
of futuristic birds,
The wild journeys of seven seeds;
the shift work of the tigers on your doorsteps.
A poem full of things eating another thing,
unpalatability, brutality.
A poem in which England’s rash of absences
means I forget what that ‘I’ stood for
Among the slow-quick quick-slow
of the pointillism of tree-data.
A poem which is an old-skool graph,
a stained-glass map of a forest city
Which burgeons into 2025, 27, 30.
Each year an awakening of Missing Youth,
of 100 Black Women Professors
Now, the work nested in the ferns’ vicious cycles.
A poem in which we do not pretend
the incline is the same for all hikers,
Where some of us know how to describe
a trunk and some of us, a tail
And we long to lichen our knowledges
and to log our disciplines.
A poem in which Alex the Farmer
has a recipe for sufficiency,
An inclination to know Nature,
Where a chough, a coal tit and a dunnock walk into a bar
at the side of a PowerPoint slide
And farmers unite through hedgerows for the first time.
A poem in which the landscape
is replete with opportunities,
Clusters of potential in hedgerows, grasslands,
Reversioning into upward arrows
of buzz-whizz and wing-flit
If. Done. Right. The final bullet point:
A poem in which we replace the word
tool with human interactions
And conjure tipping points,
metrics of Intactness,
What is here that used to be here.
A poem in which we measure what matters
And break barriers to understanding
With a scatter of dots, the computer
problem which is Me.
A poem with upstream effects,
A skyscraping skyline overspilling
yellow arrows of ecotoxicity.
A cocktail of energy by 2050
and not wishy-washy –
Where a change is made, its pawprints tracked,
the scat of its easily digested information,
Semi-elasticities and indices dwindle
into horrifying simplicities.
A poem in which you imagine some part of the Amazon,
The carbon here the same carbon here;
How do you think about this uncertain world?
A poem in which the ending is a surprise.
Biodiversity Parliament 2022
Day One:
Act Natural,
everyone. Big enough to be a programme,
but small enough to be a project. Become
both minnow and heron. Consider
the personalized ecology of your wings,
your fins, as both are taken in. Are you
a renewal, a restoration? Will your wings
regrow? Are you rewilding, unwilding –
a reinstatement, revolution, a Renaissance?
Does your AI reconfigure your KPI, saying:
people-in-nature, nature-in-people, in-
people nature, de-natured people; does it
network a value, or does it node; do you
know your shoal, pack, flock, herd, colony,
your murmuration? Are you re-newing
bridges, de-newing links, de-nuding bonds
and what are we newing when we re- it?
The land before is Inaccessible Island, populated
with inconvenient mice, a Schrödinger’s paradise
with a subtext of baked-on footprints. The Rocky
theme tune plays from a mobile phone, but there
is no montage, fastforward to a final bell,
a many-specied specious victory. Frontstage
in the ring, lights, camera, glossy Wildlife TV.
Backstage: ecology. On-screen: jet-skis,
close-up, CGI injuries, patchy bodies tumble
the rock side into a cacophonous sea. Where
do you go to haul out? Where do we go
not to be seen? Where are we undisturbed
but not disturbing? Dig into the cinders, the ash
of what is happening now: divine this Cinderella
story of soil. The Fairy Godmother waits for
her cues, with her wings, but nobody knows
when midnight is – which glass welly might fit.
Above: “Does your AI reconfigure your KPI, saying: people-in-nature, nature-in-people, in-people nature, de-natured people; does it network a value, or does it node; do you know your shoal, pack, flock, herd, colony, your murmuration?”
Day Two:
Multifunctional
Where is the riverbed of Capital,
the tributaries of cashflow,
the gritty maths of it? When is
a job a vocation – a doing, a being?
Production at all costs; existential
intensification, the dread of scarcity
dug ever deeper. The cultures of farming
self-propel: which of their tractors chug on
to pin-badges on Parliamentary lapels?
Plant some trees, stop the flood, but
can you capture those figures,
in buckets, in troughs? A giant donut
rolls towards tomorrow’s overcooked globe:
an independent body, rumbling with calls
from all peoples, future peoples. A tanker
brimming with unrealised ‘dustbin piccalilli’
lumbers towards India’s shores. Meanwhile,
smaller robots scurry the shadows
of squillion-pound combine harvesters.
Genes shift, perhaps to make way
for forests. A menu celebrates
its GM tomato. What feeds our feeds?
A glistening cricket-cake on Bake Off.
Which plates are mainstream TV?
Not the extinction debt, flambéed.
Not the climate emergency, served with
a garnish of possibilities. Who tunes in,
knows the language of the land?
Look: on this channel, academics are
parachuting on to farms, trying to
wrestle the combine’s wheel,
its furrow-swerves rich and jagged.
