The Waste Land
Issue 21’s The Waste Land is a curated art project by our art editor Francesca Gavin that ruminates on the need for a more poetic kinship with nature.
In ‘Deep in Admiration’, a lecture-essay on nature and writing, the late Ursula K Le Guin called for a rethink of how we regard the natural world. The piece, collected in the recent anthology Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, argues for a new poetic kinship. “Both poets and scientists are extending the rational aspect of our sense of relationship to creatures without nervous systems and to nonliving beings,” Le Guin wrote. “One way to stop seeing trees, or rivers, or hills, only as ‘natural resources’ is to class them as fellow beings – kinfolk.” The artists here have used various media to rethink our relationship to nature in the face of climate disaster. The results are poetic, painful, hopeful and heartbreaking in turn. Art, like poetry, is a way “to save us from merely stockpiling endless ‘information’ that fails to inform our ignorance or our irresponsibility,” Le Guin argues. If facts cannot save us from destroying our relationship to the “kinfolk” around us, perhaps art can.
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THE WASTE LAND IS THE THIRD SECTION OF ISSUE 21. Snag a copy of Issue 21 here.
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