changing minds through poetry

Ursula Le Guin's writings over many decades are of the genre speculative fiction. Bridging sci fi and fantasy, speculative fiction helps us with the hard job of seeing the world in a new way. One of her themes is the idea of seeing the natural world as kin, as family. If people felt they were related to animals, plants and rocks, that they were as important as their human family members, the natural world wouldn't be in the precarious state it's in today.

At the present time, lots of people see nature as resources to be exploited to help humans - to make money, and to provide them with power and food. Real, profound shifts occur in societies when people change their minds, opening their minds to new possibilities. I think this has to happen before we can change our behaviour.

' To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it.'

Le Guin reminds us what ecology has taught us, that our environments consist of a web of connections, of which we humans are one part.

'Descartes and the behaviourists wilfully saw dogs as machines, without feeling. Is seeing plants as without feelings a similar arrogance? ... 

I guess I'm trying to subjectify the universe because look where objectifying it has gotten us? ... 

Poetry is the human language that can try to say what a tree or a rock or a river is, that is, to speak humanly for it... by relating the quality of an individual human relationship to a thing, a rock or river or tree, or simply by describing the thing as truthfully as possible...'

In her poem The Salt Le Guin expresses the inseparable inter-relationship between humans and the natural world.

The salt in the small bowl looks up at me
with all its little glittering eyes and says:
I am the dry sea.
Your blood tastes of me.

Seeing human nature as part of a fragile ecosystem is also a recurrent theme in Michael Leunig's work. 

For Le Guin, science and poetry complement each other, science describing things accurately from the outside, poetry describing things subjectively, from the inside. Physics deals with space, time, energy and matter, and the relationship between them. In Hymn to Time Le Guin also deals with space, time, energy and matter - poetically, without the need for mathematical formulas. It's another perspective on what it means to be human.

Time says "Let there be" 
every moment and instantly 
there is space and the radiance
of each bright galaxy.

And eyes beholding radiance.
And the gnats' flickering dance.
And the seas' expanse.
And death, and chance.

Time makes room 
for going and coming home 
and in time's womb
begins all ending.

Time is being and being
time, it is all one thing,
the shining, the seeing, 
the dark abounding.