Writing Isn’t Enough: Working Toward Climate Justice // Claire Caldwell

In her contribution to this guest edited month looking at ecopoetics, Claire Caldwell discusses some of the inspirations and themes in her poetry collection Gold Rush. 

In the decade since my first book, Invasive Species, started to take shape, the climate crisis has accelerated. The global conversation and the way I engage with the environment in my work have both shifted in response to that increased sense of urgency.

In Invasive Species, I was curious about the lines we draw between ourselves and animals, and between our built environments and nature. I wanted to question those lines, to see what happened when they blurred. A “bear safety guide” warned readers to watch out for bears on the subway and on soccer fields. A long poem, Osteogenesis, made unlikely connections between the porousness of the human body and the eclectic ocean community that flourishes around a decomposing whale. 

I was thinking about the permission that certain categories (human/non-human; resource/waste; civilization/wilderness) seem to grant us to exploit, ignore, and devalue. I wanted to show readers the destructiveness and absurdity of these binaries—and the value, wonder, and interconnectedness of so many different forms of life on this planet. I wasn’t trying to solve climate change through poetry. But as a writer, I felt like part of a chorus of voices nudging people awake. 

I hoped that, once woken, people would act. 

Here’s what I’ve learned, though: being awake is not always enough. If it was, wouldn’t I have done more? 

One of the major themes I’ve tried to grapple with in Gold Rush is complicity. I wanted to scrutinize my own relationship with nature—as a white woman, as a settler, as someone who has the privilege of spending significant time in the outdoors. Some of my most formative moments have been spent on portage trails or in the stern of a canoe. But wild spaces are inaccessible to many, and even the concept of wilderness is a colonialist construct. Canada has used the idea of untouched, “virgin” wilderness to steal land from Indigenous peoples and to exploit natural resources. 

I dug into the role of settler women in wilderness narratives. Wild places have often been portrayed as sites of violence against women. But I was interested in the tension between the freedom and empowerment women have often found in the outdoors, and the violence settler women and girls inflict on each other, and on the environment, in these spaces. In “Frontier Diaries,” I used the written accounts of homesteading women from the 19th century to contemporary times in erasure poems that foreground this tension. 

I drew, too, on my own experiences of canoe-tripping with an all-girls summer camp, where I first learned to value my body for what it could do, not just what it looked like—but where girls could also be casually cruel and controlling about each other’s bodies. In “How to See a Moose,” I wanted to emphasize the colonial violence perpetrated by mostly-white settlers in a wilderness context: the summer camp was also a place where “white/ nineteen-year-olds shook buckskin/ rumps and feather headdresses” on land “stolen/ so you could pretend/ to rescue an imaginary/ child from drowning.”

Other poems in Gold Rush tap into a more collective sense of complicity. “Canadian Ninja Warrior” takes on some of the hypocrisies in Canada’s self-image by framing environmental injustices the country has seen in recent years as an extreme sport. 

I’m less certain than ever that poetry—my poetry, at least—can incite climate action. I could probably fill several more books on the themes I’ve described here. But leaning into the discomfort and shame of the harmful legacy I’ve not only inherited, but contributed to—while holding space for the joy and freedom I’ve felt in nature—has pushed me to work harder for climate justice outside of my writing. I hope Gold Rush might encourage deep reflection in readers. But that deep reflection is not a prerequisite for action. 

Claire Caldwell is a writer, a children's book editor at Annick Press, and a kids' writing workshop facilitator. Her second poetry collection, Gold Rush, is available now from Invisible Publishing. Her debut, Invasive Species (Wolsak and Wynn), was named one of The National Post's top five poetry books of 2014. Claire was a 2016 writer in residence at the Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon, and the 2013 winner of The Malahat Review's Long Poem Prize. She lives in Toronto.