Luisa A. Igloria presents the Co-Editor’s Introduction to
The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America's Lands, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders, edited by Luisa A. Igloria, Aileen Cassinetto and David Hassler
A Poets for Science anthology and companion to the first national assessment
of U.S. lands, waters, and wildlife
(Paloma Press / Poets for Science / United by Nature / Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University, 2025)
In April 2022, the very first ever U.S. National Nature Assessment (NNA1) was established under the Biden administration, and Dr. Phil Levin (Professor of Practice in Environmental and Forest Sciences and Lead Scientist at The Nature Conservancy in Washington state) was appointed NNA1 Director. The current administration terminated the NNA1 in January 2025 just weeks before publication of its initial findings. Dr. Levin is now the Director of United by Nature, a collaborative effort to understand how nature shapes our lives and how we can shape nature’s future. Its goal is the same as the erstwhile NNA’s: in the assessment of U.S. lands, waters, and wildlife, to provide a means for scientists and policymakers to anticipate change and better manage our natural ecosystems in the years ahead. It is an invitation to ecologists, biologists, other members of science communities, as well as “any member of the public ... of any age, culture, background, level of information, or career stage” and “interested organizations, such as Tribal Nations or Indigenous Peoples ... [to provide] local knowledge and lived experience; and technical, legal, and scientific content or research from any discipline.” 1
Under the forms of engagement to inform a use-inspired assessment, the NNA1 had listed town hall meetings, public community conversations and workshops, and calls for stories or art— an important recognition that ordinary voices are as relevant as data science in considering the most crucial and ongoing threats to our ecosystems. This idea appealed to my co-editors and I as we conceptualized our anthology; it appeals to me as an immigrant, writer-creative, educator, grandmother, and ordinary citizen concerned about what we on the ground could still collectively do in response to the imminent environmental crises of our time. A note on the anthology sections: “Nature & Well-Being: Self & Community,” “Nature & Heritage,” “Nature, Risk, and Change,” and “Now and in the Future: Bright Spots” were all directly inspired by some of the target topics for chapters of the NNA1. We believe that these frameworks also best described the kinds of considerations we found in more than 1,300 responses to our call for submissions, 209 of which we selected for inclusion in this print anthology.
A recent article from Atmos emphasizes how the language we use to talk about something influences the nature of actions we come up with: “How we talk about the climate crisis matters... [and c]limate language often influences us through metaphors ... because metaphors help scaffold our understanding of a concept, and act as a mirror that reflects our sense of responsibility.” 2
Some new words have been introduced into our climate vocabulary, like weatherbomb (a sudden explosive storm), heat dome (high temperatures mounding in one area), or solastalgia (a longing for a home that still exists but is rapidly changing before our eyes). Heidi Quante and Alicia Escott, through their interdisciplinary project called The Bureau of Linguistical Reality, offer workshops in “collective wordsmithing” that encourage participants not only to co-create language that better reflects experiences they are struggling to give words to, but also allow for the possibility of other outlooks besides fear and hopelessness. For instance, they offer the new word serenteletonic, which contains “the idea that a remarkable chain of events created the present moment and that many possible futures remain, each one dependent on the decisions we make today.” 3
I grew up and spent my formative years in Baguio City, in the northern cordillera of the Philippines, up until my thirties when I left for my doctoral program in Chicago. The once densely forested hills and mineral-rich terrain of Baguio had been turned into a colonial hill station in the early 1900s for the American government (with the consequent divestment of lands from indigenous communities)— and so I have always been aware of how the naming or re-naming of place signifies not just the application of particular conventions, but profound shifts in worldview.
For as much as current understandings of “place” might relate to ideas of ownership and possession; conquest, borders, and regulations, nature itself is always reminding us of the uncontainability of its nature. These lines come from “Optimism,” a Jane Hirshfield poem I’ve always loved: “... the sinuous/ tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,/ it turns in another.” 4 We want to believe there is still something more we can turn to besides despair, or the malaise felt by those who live like me in the diaspora— that feeling of being neither here nor there, of being unable to identify solid terra firma beyond nostalgia while simultaneously being bombarded with late 21st century consumerist messages of freedom and limitless possibility.
Across cultures, there has always been an abundance of stories about the creation of the world. Out of “nothing” or near-nothing (which again could simply mean a state for which there were then no words yet), taxonomies arose— islands, waters and their tributaries; mountains and plains; forests and farmlands; creatures feathered, finned, and human-skinned. Their very names, catalogued, are a marvel of language. Here is Richard Jones: “Plain-capped Starthroat, Black-shouldered Kite,/
Black-crowned Night-Heron, Olive-sided Flycatcher” and here is Nancy Huggett: “... Bristlecone,/ panania, red wood, chestnut,// black ash, whitebark pine.” Even as the ozone layer may be disintegrating, the stories we want to tell aren’t just narratives of banishment or exile from an Eden, or of some divine rule of stewardship broken because of self-gratification or curiosity. While it’s true that “The unattainable visits our day/ to suggest we cannot possess it, cannot/ stay” (Barbara Sabol), we can witness “Stones/ slip[ping] on their slow moss sweaters” (Traci Brimhall).
There is no lack of sorrow and painful deprivation in times of human- and other natural-caused disruption: “We know how it feels/ to be pulled up by the roots” (Cassandra Bousquet). But there are also many stories of fortitude and collective survival, audacity and hope-informed action— “you observe quietly this new power you have/ to change the course of history with a small gesture” (Jason Harris). There is destruction, and there is also the will to repair: “the sea is a sheet of glass that breaks/ to pieces, breaks to pieces—wounds that suture/ themselves, working as fast as they can” (Erin L. McCoy). David Hassler writes: “I pledge allegiance to resilience and resistance/ to our blind, tenacious spirit, ever adapting;” and we cheer with Charles Finn who discloses “My Vote for the Secretary of Energy goes to the Sun./ My vote for Secretary of Education to the Milky Way.”
I want to believe that even in the rubble and on the brink of the seemingly irreversible edge of climate midnight, we might find joy again— as well as refuge, hope, and sustenance. If geology and other earth sciences do not just map the earth but also materially and politically transform it,5 then perhaps the language of poetry is one of the ways for mapping a different possibility for the future. Noa Kizhnerman writes, “If reaching new worlds means reaching/ the end of ours, I’m content staying here,/ where light/ gives way/ to light.” Thus, we are grateful to all the poets who so generously shared their words and light with us. Emily Knight writes, “I don’t let go. What if you wanted/ a love so much you would take its poison/ on your own tongue”? And so, I am grateful to my co-editors Aileen Cassinetto and David Hassler; the Wick Poetry Center and Poets for Science; and Alex Catanese, principal designer at each+every, for their belief in that kind of love, which also resides in poems.
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1 “Framing the National Nature Assessment,” Science and Technology Policy Office, 31 October 2022
2 Becca Warner, “Can Better Words Lead to Better Climate Action?” Atmos, 24 July 2025
3 Ibid.
4 Jane Hirshfield, “Optimism,” Each Happiness Ringed by Lions, Bloodaxe Books, 2005
5 Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, University of Minnesota Press, 2018
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During her appointed term as 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-22), Emerita, the Academy of American Poets awarded Luisa A. Igloria one of twenty-three Poet Laureate Fellowships in 2021 to support a program of public poetry projects. Luisa is the author of Caulbearer (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 11 other books; in 2015, she was the inaugural winner of the Resurgence Prize (UK), the world's first major award for ecopoetry. She is lead editor, along with Aileen Cassinetto and David Hassler, of The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America’s Lands, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders (Paloma Press, 2025); and with Aileen Cassinetto and Jeremy S. Hoffman, for Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the U.S. 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.
www.luisaigloria.com https://linktr.ee/thepoetslizard
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