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"Sometimes, the environmental 'debate' resembles a juggernaut rushing towards a cliff
while its occupants fiercely contest whether they are doing 105 or 95 miles per hour."
Mario Petrucci.
ecology
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THE ECOPOETRY STUDY PACKS: Resources for Poetry Lessons & Creative Writing
Click here for UNEP World Environment Day: Press Release, June 08
"You are unlikely to find a more relevant or inspiring Environment-oriented writing package for classrooms, seminars and tutorials.
These poems pull no punches - they will intrigue, delight and provoke at every level of emotion, learning and action." The Poetry Society
Increasingly, teachers and educators will have to grapple with environmental issues, through personal creativity as well as in the classroom.
The Poetry Society commissioned Mario to develop the following Environment-centred resource packs, designed for schools, young adults and poets...
1. Poetry : the Environment. Four of the most pressing Environmental themes, comprehensively and inventively explored through poetry.
2. Biomimicry : Poetry. A fascinating new branch of science, concerned with solving problems by imitating Nature, approached through poetry.
3. The Green Poetry Pack. Poems and writing ideas with which to engage the natural world, soil and trees, and local self-sufficiency.
"A lovely thing... a wonderful, living example of principled engagement." Peter Brennan, former Head of English (Latymer School)
"Unique, brilliant and important". The Poetry Society (George Ttouli) Click here for the link to the Poetry Society & free A4 downloads.
"Applying poetry in schools in relevant ways... the kind of tangential thinking that poetry can cultivate".
Click here for an assessment of the Ecopoetry resource in BioInspired! [the Biomimicry Institute newsletter].
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Making Nothing Happen - Mario Petrucci, Neil Astley, Melanie Challenger and Caspar Henderson discuss the role of poetry in a threatened world (London Word Festival, 29 February 2008, Bishopsgate Institute). Chaired by Roddy Lumsden.
Mario emphasises how poetry indeed makes nothing happen, firstly in that it persuades rather than coerces (i.e. poetry
doesn't make anything happen) and secondly that it can foster stillness, thoughtfulness and the receptivities of Negative Capability (which means that certain approaches to poetry can engender
receptive states of mind involving positive kinds of 'no-thing'). His major initial contribution to the event occurs in the final quarter of Part 1;
his poetry can be heard at the end of Part 2.
Click here to listen to Part 1 [Roddy's introduction, individual presentations by Neil, Caspar, Mel and Mario]
Click here to listen to Part 2 [Panel Discussion; questions from the audience; readings by Mel & Mario]
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Mario's powerful, award-winning poems on Chernobyl and fossil-fuel abuse are featured in Bloodaxe's ground-breaking Eco-anthology: Earth Shattering: Ecopoems.
TreeHouse Gallery: Ecopoetry Event (Regent's Park, 2009)
Some provocations...
"The difference between civilization and destruction? When building a civilisation, citizens will do £3000 of work for £30.
When ushering in social disintegration, people reluctanctly do £30 of work for £3000. It's not cost-effectiveness that keeps
the world going, but a communal willingness to embrace effective costs."
"It would be fascinating, were it not so tragic, to study how it is that we can motivate entire nations in national, but not in ecological, defence.
The global crisis facing us now requires collective and individual mobilisation on a scale of both World Wars. We seem able to impel ourselves against
an adversary (however diffuse and illusory) but not towards a friend. Perhaps that's where we've gone wrong in Environmentalism.
For all its contradiction and counterproductiveness, I'm tempted to suggest that we should frame ecology in terms of a war.
Perhaps the only way to get something done is to see Gaia as the ultimate enemy."
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copyright mario petrucci
2001
