Why We Need Poets to Help Us Understand the Climate Crisis
In our "Let's Change Culture" series, we explore the urgent need for creativity and reflection in the face of the climate emergency. Today, we turn our attention to poets and why their words are essential to helping us understand the world we’re in. Since the beginning of civilization, poets and creatives have helped us navigate the complexities of the human condition. They’ve given us language, empathy, and insight—tools we desperately need as we face environmental and societal challenges that threaten to overwhelm us.
The Power of Words in Understanding Crisis
Our energy systems and technology have advanced so quickly that we’re living through experiences that we don’t yet have words for. The language we have hasn’t caught up with the reality we face, but finding the right words can empower us to better understand and deal with the immense changes happening around us.
Take, for example, the term gaslight. A word that’s now commonplace, but not long ago, most of us had never encountered it. Yet many of us had experienced being gaslit—manipulated into doubting our perception of reality. Before the term entered the mainstream, it was confusing and unsettling, with no name for the experience. Now that we have a word for it, it’s easier to recognise and deal with the power dynamic it describes.
The concept of gaslighting comes from the 1938 play Gas Light by Patrick Hamilton, where a husband manipulates his wife by dimming the gaslights in their home while insisting she’s imagining the changes. That simple term now holds a wealth of meaning, helping us to understand manipulative behaviour and the psychological toll it takes.
Finding New Words for a Changing World
If the term gaslight can help us comprehend and confront toxic power dynamics, how many more words do we need to help us understand the climate crisis? The challenges we face are new, vast, and deeply personal. But often, we lack the vocabulary to articulate them.
Think about how many of us talk about eco-anxiety—a word that’s increasingly common but still limited in scope. Yes, we feel anxiety about the climate emergency, but that anxiety includes a wide range of emotions: grief, anger, helplessness, and even hope. These feelings are more than just eco-anxiety; they reflect a whole emotional landscape we are only beginning to explore. My friend, poet Micha Colombo, introduced me to the idea that there’s a richness in this landscape that needs deeper exploration, beyond the oversimplified terms we tend to use.
Other words have begun to emerge that help us articulate these complex emotions:
Solastalgia: The distress caused by environmental change, particularly when familiar landscapes are lost.
Ecological Grief: The mourning for ecosystems, species, and ways of life lost to climate change.
Eco-paralysis: The overwhelming feeling of being unable to act in the face of the climate crisis.
These words help us start to unpack our emotional responses to the climate emergency, but we need more. Our rapidly changing world requires new language to capture the depth of our experience.
Energy and Language: Finding Poetry in Power
Beyond emotional responses, we’re also grappling with the language around energy systems and technology. Our entire way of life is built on these systems, yet we struggle to describe their impact. From electrification to digitalisation, new power dynamics shape our world, and we need the language to reflect that.
In our work with Art and Energy, I’ve found a kind of poetry in the words we use to describe energy and its by-products. Words like:
Kinetic: Energy in motion.
Entropy: The measure of disorder within a system.
Fugitive Emissions: The unintended release of gases from industrial processes.
These terms may sound technical, but they evoke ideas of movement, chaos, and loss—concepts that reflect our current reality. As we continue to live through this energy transition, new words will emerge, and with them, a deeper understanding of how energy shapes our lives and our planet.
Poets: Helping Us Navigate This New Reality
As we face one of the most complex moments in human history, with climate change, energy systems, and technology reshaping our world, we need poets and creatives to help us navigate this new reality. These shifts are happening so quickly that we haven’t yet had time to process their impact or find the language to describe them. But that’s where poets come in.
Poets help us find the words we need to process the unthinkable. They help us name the things we feel but can’t yet articulate. By naming our experiences, they make the abstract concrete, giving us tools to confront the challenges ahead. As we move forward, the language of poets will continue to evolve, offering us new ways to understand and engage with the world around us.
What Words Will Help Us Next?
So, what’s the next word we need to help us describe the changes we’re living through? What new terms will emerge to capture the complexities of the climate crisis and the shifting energy systems we rely on?
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Have you encountered any words or concepts that have helped you better understand the world we’re in right now? Share them in the comments section below, and let’s continue this exploration together.
Stay tuned for more insights in the "Let's Change Culture" series, where we’ll keep delving into how creativity can help us navigate the climate emergency and build a more sustainable future.