If the mission of environmentalism is to help us gain a meaningful relationship with the nonhuman world and to encourage more ecologically oriented behavior, then how does poetry fit in? Does language, with its interdependence on thought, distance us from the physical experience of the natural world? Or can language weave us to nature?

I would like to assist conference participants in exploring questions like these, and to propose specific poetic strategies that can potentially promote, even enhance, one's relationship to the physical world.