The Poetry of Climate Change by Peter Leyland
Oikology - when we need to look after our home In February last year I was preparing to teach a poetry course to my WEA students and I wrote this introduction. The course was cancelled after two sessions and I was left with a large file of unused poems. Never one to throw anything away and looking back over an extraordinary year it seemed an appropriate juncture for me to give the piece, if not the poems, to a wider audience. “Record heat in world’s oceans is ‘dire’ warning on climate crisis.” This was a newspaper headline recently and as I write there is a meeting in Davos, Switzerland, attended by American President, Donald Trump, and 17 year-old Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg, whose book, No One is Too Small to Make a Difference , sits on my desk. Indeed, there is now so much information about the climate problem that it is difficult to pick out one particular aspect that should command our attention. However, as this is a course about p...