Greeting a Ginkgo: How anthropomorphism in poetry can inspire eco-empathy

Thatcher, Christina ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0105-6797 2024. Greeting a Ginkgo: How anthropomorphism in poetry can inspire eco-empathy. Ede, Amatoritsero, Kleppe, Sandra Lee and Sorby, Angela, eds. Poetry and the Global Climate Crisis: Creative Approaches to Complex Challenges, Routledge, pp. 80-90. (10.4324/9781003399988-9)

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Abstract

The United Nations (UN) considers climate change to be the biggest threat that modern humans have ever faced. As climate change worsens, communities across the globe can expect more extreme weather conditions as well as increased wildfires, droughts and ocean temperatures which threaten animals’ survival and people’s livelihoods. This self-reflexive chapter explores how writing poetry which ‘puts a human face’ on trees and waterways – or ‘anthropomorphises’ them – might help readers to feel the consequences of climate change and encourage them to act. To this end, I will highlight the debates surrounding anthropomorphism and empathy. Using Poetry Inquiry as a research method, I will discuss how localised data linked to climate change; the debates surrounding anthropomorphism; as well as the empathy-helping two-stage model and the empathy-altruism hypothesis inspired two poems from my collection-in-progress, Breaking a Mare. Using these two pieces, I will consider the ways in which poetry can use anthropomorphism to invoke empathy in readers. At the centre of this chapter is an attempt to understand what it means to write anthropomorphic poems during a global climate crisis and how poetry written in this way might teach about empathy, and a desire to act, in those who read it.

Item Type:	Book Section
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	Routledge
ISBN:	9781032508542
Last Modified:	20 Oct 2025 14:41
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/160385

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