Nature Poem by Tommy Pico is a book I read my Freshman year for an English class, Environmental Justice and Global Literature and it changed my perspective of what nature is and how to protect it. The book is 74 pages of raw, unfiltered thoughts about how to live on a planet that is dying while also just trying to fit into a world designed to privilege a fraction of the population. Everyone should read this book and hear his perspective as he demonstrates beautifully what intersectional environmental activism can look like and the important role it will play in solving the climate crisis while simultaneously making our world more hospitable.
Tommy Pico has mastered writing about nothing and writing about everything. He declares on page one “Ugh I swore to myself I’d never write a Nature Poem” and in that statement he sets up exactly what to expect from a book titled Nature Poem written by a city-lover. By refusing to write a nature poem Pico perfectly demonstrates why we must continue fighting for equal opportunities for all. He who describes “how freakishly routine it is to hear someone died”, who spent childhood learning “which halls not to walk down” to avoid getting beaten up for being gay, or “what to do when yr cousin high on crystal points a gun at you”, cannot spare much time worrying about nature.
This nature poem is at the heart of what environmental justice stands for. Not everyone has the privilege to be able to worry about the environment. When someone does not know when their next meal will be they cannot be worried about their carbon footprint. A large part of environmental justice is fighting for equal opportunities for all so that everyone can have freed up time and energy to focus on solving large issues such as the climate crisis, thus making the fight to end poverty and reducing pollution one in the same. Society as a whole will improve as less people are struggling to survive and fighting oppression around every corner. As Pico puts it, “it seems foolish to discuss nature w/o talking about endemic poverty / which seems foolish to discuss w/o talking about corporations given / human agency which seems foolish to discuss w/o talking about / colonialism which seems foolish to discuss w/o talking about misogyny” (12). Everything is so interconnected and when we start to see the world in this way, we can finally start to see necessary change. This is the root of intersectional environmental justice.
In my economics class we talked about the Kuznets curve and the environmental Kuznets curve. Which essential says that as the economy grows inequality will increase until we hit the peak of the curve, then it will naturally start coming down. The same thing is said to happen with environmental issues such as pollution. While this made sense to me, I found it very hard to listen to my professor talk about such large issues in such a passive tone. The first day of class my professor made it clear that economists can tell you what could happen but not what should happen. Personally, I think it is messed up to allow so many people to suffer at the expense of economic growth. Maybe if we start prioritizing people over profits our world could become a more hospitable place. What Kuznets’s did not understand was that those inequalities and environmental issues were the same problem—some people being viewed as deserving of mistreatment.
Pico made me feel foolish for thinking environmentalism is preventing glaciers from melting, or saving the bees, or the turtles. While this is an aspect of the movement, it is a luxury few can afford. Nature is not only majestic mountains, pristine water and endless big skies. It is us, and it is ugly. It is “Ray Rice punch[ing] his girlfriend unconscious on camera and drag[ing] her out of the elevator, and I am supposed to give a f*ck about pesticides” (7). It is every time someone is devalued, every time someone is oppressed, every time someone is viewed as sacrificial.
The nature I know is calm. I grew up with a supportive family, who took me to see the Glacier National Park every year since I was old enough to hike. Nature, to me, is walking through bear grass taller than me, it is Princess Grace and Princess Morgan bedtime stories in our small four-person tent after a long day of hiking, it is watching two cow moose and their three babies feed in McDonald creek as a swan slowly floats by, it is where I feel most whole.
The nature I know is rare. Many have become much more familiar with the kind that requires parents to wonder when they must teach their children how to interact with police officers, one where pepper spray is no longer reserved for grizzly bears but clutched in their daughters’ hands as they walk into the Walmart parking lot, where couples wonder if holding hands might land them a black eye if they walk down the wrong street, where land is fragmented and destroyed, water is not drinkable and air is unbreathable. It is suffocating to live on a dying planet.
If this is the first time reading or hearing about environmental justice, I have attached links to two articles that describe it way better than I ever could as well as a video of a spoken word poem and a ted talk.
Racism Is Killing the Planet | Sierra Club
Why environmentalists should support the Black Lives Matter protests | Grist