Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks is on my mind – again. On first reading, I paid it scant attention, but it’s nagged away at me. He writes about the publication of a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary in which “there had been a culling of words concerning nature.” If the dictionary’s duty is solely to reflect how and what language is used, then it has no environmental, political, or social duty. However, Martin Robbins’s 2015 Guardian article was a call to arms for parents, politicians and teachers.

Macfarlane reminds us of Amec’s and British Energy’s proposal for 234 wind turbines on the Isle of Lewis’s Brindled Moor – Europe’s largest wind farm at the time, saying that “It was in the interests of Amec to characterise the moor as a wasteland, a terra nullis […] One pro-farm local councillor dismissed the island’s interior as “a wilderness”, suggesting a space both empty of life and hostile in its asperities.” The protesters’ use of language remapped and reimagined Brindled Moor with its bog-cotton, damselflies and greenshanks, refuting the convenient idea of the space as empty. “In their wish to record the particularities of the moor, they shared an ethic if not a tone with Hugh MacDiarmid’s angry poem rebuking a “fool” who has dismissed Scotland as “small”. MacDiarmid “finds in moorland ‘not only heather’ but also blueberries (green, scarlet and blue), bog myrtle (sage green), tormentil (golden), milkworts (‘blue as summer skies’)” and so his list goes on.

School curricula aim to equip the young with required knowledge and skills, and we hear plenty about STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) but where is the time and space to help pupils actually see – and I mean really see – the world they will later serve as its stewards? When do pupils interact with their local environments to the degree that they can name its parts – surely the first step towards seeing and a gateway to the possibility of respect and appreciation? And don’t talk to me about tiny tots running around in forest school, loppers in hand. Yes, it’s a great start but shouldn’t school leavers have a deep knowledge of their environment? If they never feel connected to it, then how are they supposed to care for it?

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Fiona Moore’s latest is the book length poem, Okapi. (Combine a giraffe with a zebra and you have an okapi.) The first okapi Moore shows us isn’t a Congolese forest giraffe at all. Instead, we see the speaker as a child, “playing with my plastic zoo putting her / alongside leopard zebra lion giraffe / whose bright patterns on the carpet’s worn savannah / make the world that began to age at my birth”. The plastic okapi may turn the child’s mind to nature, but it also turns them into a consumer as they amass their first hoard of worldly goods. Its “bright patterns” delight the eye and train the palette to prefer chemical overstimulation, but that brash paint fades and chips – and that plastic zoo, chewed and chipped, will be discarded in the blink of an eye.

The tension between the interests of capital and the needs of nature energizes the poem. The speaker wonders, “will my okapi still have a forest / will the forests still have okapi / solitary treading hidden paths / or will her image survive on banknotes / rotting in an unretrieved hoard”. Blink and you’ll miss the chiasmus – okapi forests | forests okapi – perhaps a nod to the fragile codependence of planet and species. The okapi features on local banknotes in the Democratic Republic of Congo – it’s telling how the natural world is simplified to a set of symbols, stylised and merchandised. We can turn anything into a travesty.

In part at least, Moore’s poem reads as confessional. She worked in the Foreign Office until 2004 and ended up working for the NGO Excellent Development (now Sand Dams Worldwide). She campaigns on environmental issues and this authenticity, this correlation between life lived and words written, lends heft to this poem. She characterizes her speaker as once a “daily reader of the financial times” but “taken aback by the unswimmable / opaque turquoise of a bauxite tailings lake / I began to question GDP”. This isn’t just poetry, it’s a damascene moment, and not one that we can (or should) read through blithely.

Moore alternates between longer-lined, introspective sections and crisp, imagistic observations of the natural world. Following those highly alkaline bauxite tailings, we’re shown “five slavonian grebes”, “an ancient mural of / precious assets / a keeping account” – a counter-narrative to our rapacious perspective on the planet. Those grebes, “the next day three / four two gone” – spaced out on the page, they become an erratic countdown…

Moore’s speaker, musing on our stewardship of Earth remarks: “easy to have a bad conscience the question is / what to do with it how absurd it felt / to have put our bodies on the airport road / hundreds of Cassandras getting arrested / there must be a better way”. A few weeks ago, I reviewed Hannah Copley’s T.S. Eliot Prize shortlisted Lapwing for the T.S. Eliot Foundation – another Cassandra lending her voice to the planet. Moore’s language is deliberate, reminding us that without words, we cannot see the world and that, with them, we can change our relationship with the planet for the better. Okapi’s litany of plants hums with life, shimmers with colour. In the end, Cassandra will be heard, and we will be thankful for her voice crying in the wilderness.

Buy Okapi from Blue Diode Publishing

Related links:

Fiona Moore, ‘The Only Reason for Time’
Fiona Moore, ‘Night Letter’
Fiona Moore, The Distil Point
The Distil Point review for the T.S. Eliot Foundation