Nature Writing As Solace: The Embodied Ecopoetics of Barry Lopez and Mary Oliver

The threat of climate change and its catastrophic impact on natural ecosystems and human populations alike are propelling many mental health issues such as ecological grief and ecoanxiety. Concurrently, many communities are still processing the widespread trauma caused by the ongoing global pandemic. Intersections of science and art, healing and ecology, are needed more than ever. Embodied ecopoetics, encompassing creativity, deep ecology, and somatics, may offer a useful framework for wellness through transformative engagement with the natural world.

Embodiment has been defined by Körner, Topolinski, and Strack (2015) as, “an effect where the body, its sensorimotor state, its morphology, or its mental representation play an instrumental role in information processing (p.1).” Embodied cognition is an area of psychological research often described in relation to therapies that foster mind–body connections. Ecopoetry has taken on several meanings, but is generally considered to be nature writing that expands from nature as subject/object to ideas of interdependence. According to Street and Fisher-Wirth (2013), ecopoetry is “poetry informed by a biocentric perspective (p.xxix).”

Integrating these concepts, a new definition of embodied ecopoetics is offered here as a way to describe the sensorial and redemptive experience conveyed through creative writing, inspired by direct immersion in nature, and informed by empathy for and awareness of the nonhuman world. There is extensive literature on the mental health benefits of expressive writing (journaling, poetry, etc.) for treating conditions such as post traumatic stress disorder, depression, and eating disorders (Mazza & Hayton, 2013; Pennebaker, 2018; van Emmerik, Reijntjes, & Kamphuis, 2013).

Heath and healing coming from exposure to or time spent in nature, sometimes referred to as ecotherapy, is an important field of study (Howell, Dopko, Passmore, & Buro, 2011; Summers & Vivian, 2018; Williams, 2017). Surveys during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic found that people turned to nature-based activities for solace and comfort (Morse, Gladkikh, Hackenburg, & Gould, 2020). However, the causal effects of nature-based writing and ecopoetics on mental health and well-being are less widely known and deserve further investigation.

Barry Lopez and Mary Oliver are two of the most prestigious North American environmental writers. Of the same generation, Barry Lopez won the National Book Award for Arctic Dreams in 1986 and Mary Oliver's collection American Primitive won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1984 establishing their long and lasting literary presence. Consequently, both experienced profound personal trauma in their early life. Revisiting their work through the lens of recovery, it becomes obvious that their respective literary journeys exemplify embodied ecopoetics and offer ideas for future research and practice.

Lopez and Oliver have both recently passed (2020 and 2019, respectively) and it is important to note that neither wrote extensively about the trauma they experienced in their core award-winning texts. As highly influential, successful, and inspirational authors, it was not until later in their writing careers, after many publications and acclaim, that both Lopez and Oliver shared this information with their readers and the public at large.

In his 2013 Harper's article Sliver of Sky, 27 years after Arctic Dreams was published, Lopez wrote in great detail about the sexual abuse he experienced as a child. He admits that he avoided this trauma for most of his life and ultimately long-term therapy helped him to fully process and accept it. He writes, “Most of the unresolved fear and anger I once held on to has now metamorphosed into compassion, an understanding of the predicaments nearly everyone encounters, at some level, at some time, in their lives (p.8).”

In an interview with NPR (2013) about why he chose to write Sliver of Sky and how he found solace in nature, Lopez replied:

I know this: That when I was so compromised as a child that there was no zone of safety for me, no place was safe and especially adults weren't safe for me, the thing that felt safe in the sense that I felt that surge towards lyricism when … I saw something outside myself, the world beyond the self … and I felt this surge of lyrical pleasure in the way the wind sounded, for example, in eucalyptus trees. I knew that I could carry that with me. I could carry it as a memory, and I could carry it as a structure to help me build a safe place in the world.

When revisiting Lopez's earlier creative nonfiction, keeping these revelations in mind, one may see how his hard past echoes throughout his eloquent prose, perhaps subconsciously. In an early essay “Gone Back into the Earth” from Crossing Open Ground (1989), Lopez writes: “The living of life, any life, involves great and private pain, much of which we share with no one. In such places as the Inner Gorge the pain trails away from us. It is not so quiet there or so removed that you can hear yourself think, that you would even wish to; that comes later. You can hear your heart beat. That comes first (p.53).” This passage is both comforting and instructive on how being in nature can facilitate a connection to the body that leads to a sense of safety. Decades before Lopez's confessional Sliver of Sky, this essay reveals how he employed embodied ecopoetics to process his own “private pain.”

In another essay, “Landscapes and Narrative” Lopez (1989) writes “Each individual, further, undertakes to order his interior landscape according to the exterior landscape. To succeed in this means to achieve a balanced state of mental health (p.67).” This essay indicates Lopez was occupied with his own healing as he was in the heart of his writing career. Perhaps this vulnerability is what makes his writing so precise and impactful? His profound care for other places and creatures, like wolves, may have directly stemmed from his own sense of shame and loss. Although it is impossible to know this definitively, it is helpful to consider this possibility when trying to define and understand embodied ecopoetics in action.

Although Mary Oliver was less revealing about her childhood, as compared with Lopez, she did share some specific details of her life in her final interviews and her second to last publication Upstream (2016), a collection of essays. In the essay “Staying Alive” she writes, “I quickly found for myself two such blessings—the natural world, and the world of writing: literature. These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place (p.14).” One can only imagine what that “difficult place” was for Oliver, but this confession is important when looking back at the breadth and depth of her poetry. She later writes, “I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness.”

In a 2017 New Yorker article “What Mary Oliver's Critics Don't Understand” author Ruth Franklin (2017) observes, “Walking the woods, with Whitman” in her knapsack, was her escape from an unhappy home life: a sexually abusive father, a neglectful mother. “It was a very dark and broken house that I came from,” she told Tippett (On Being podcast). “To this day, I don't care for the enclosure of buildings.” She began writing poetry at the age of 13 years. “I made a world out of words,” she told Shriver in the interview in O. “And it was my salvation (p.4).”

Much of Oliver's early work focuses on the lives of animals and the landscapes near her home. She approached her subjects with great care and reverence. In light of these later interviews, it is possible that her writing and artistic process (she notoriously took a walk and wrote at her desk every day) were patterns of self-preservation established early in her life. Nature was a longtime companion for her work and, possibly, her emotional survival.

Oliver only approached the topics of trauma and grief in her later poetry collections, after the death of Molly Malone Cooke, Oliver's long-term partner. In “The Uses of Sorrow,” from Thirst: Poems (2007) Mary Oliver wrote:

Someone I loved once gave me

a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift.

This is a simple yet powerful Oliver poem, shorter and more self-reflective than most of her work. However, it serves as an important glimpse into why she wrote poetry and how a lifetime spent observing her external environment nurtured her and offered reprieve.

In a New York Times article, naturalist and author Helen Macdonald (2020) reflected on the many abnormal nature events, both real (wild goats traipsing through Welsh streets) and imagined (dolphins appearing in Venice canals) that resulted from people staying home during lockdown. MacDonald, whose book H is for Hawk is a profound meditation on bird watching and grief, posed a resonant question in this essay: “What are we so desperate to see in the natural world right now and why?” As the cannon of enviornmental writing evolves and becomes more inclusive of diverse perspectives, this question becomes increasingly more complicated in terms of both care and resilience in the face of ongoing personal and environmental health issues.

Embodied ecopoetics, combining writing and nature-based activities, can be a pathway for processing trauma, ranging from abuse to ecological grief, and cultivating post-traumatic growth. The continuum of being in nature, having sensory and spiritual experiences in this context, and then processing observations through creative writing may facilitate discovery and self-reflection that is more emotionally and somatically effective than conventional therapeutic approaches. Reflecting on the life and work of Lopez and Oliver, it is important to see how their creative work functioned as both a refuge and a guide.

Along the way, they inspired others to seek solace in the natural world and cultivate an appreciation for habitats and ecological systems that continue to sustain us on a physical and emotional level. Continued exploration of connections between environmental humanities and mental health fields is needed and may lead to future innovation in both craft and practice.