Thinking with Leaves: Poetic Resonances with Nocturnal Creatures

Abstract

Like creatures of the deep sea, nocturnal animals navigate not only the ongoing destruction of their lifeworlds, but also a moral oblivion that comes with living in environments which escape the primary human senses. It is both due to the remoteness of their habitat, and their elusive appearance—they forage in the treetops at the dark of night—that Australia’s possums and gliders are rarely subject to human care and concern. While disasters like wildfires evoke waves of compassion for select species like koalas (McAvan), more rigorous responses to the underlying root causes of habitat loss and extinction are lacking for a wide range of species, land- and seascapes. The cool mountain forests of East Gippsland, where I traced threatened species with ecologists and activists in the aftermath of the 2019-20 "Black Summer" bushfires, are a site of the "patchy Anthropocene" (Tsing et al.) where temporalities of the evolutionary past, colonial present, and the climate changed future collide. Here, links to the Gondwanic rainforests exist alongside clear-felled coupes and burn patches, the compound disturbance of logging and wildfire upsetting the balance between life and death, and the generative capacity of more-than-human relationships over time. This "double death" (Rose) is both a result of the fast violence of disaster, and the "slow violence" (Nixon) of capitalist expansion which unfolds gradually, dispersed across time and space, and remains often unrecognised. How might we strengthen our connection to species that go unnoticed, even as their worlds collide, such as creatures of the night or underwater? While I was fortunate to dive into the worlds of possums and gliders during my fieldwork, such encounters are ephemeral, causing challenges of translation and representation. In a collaborative research article in this issue, six researchers with different multispecies research projects explore how to recursively relive and (re)write encounters with other creatures and their worlds through a process we call "sensoriographic" (Hey et al.). Thinking poetically with leaves from my fieldwork, I thereby explore the potential of poetry to relate to those creatures and their diminishing worlds. Like withering leaves, each verse offers a glimpse into the lives and lifeways lost to the double pressure of logging and wildfire, highlighting the potential of poetry as a resonant method for multisensory research (Paiva). It is in the ambivalences between the vivid field encounters with possums and gliders, leaves and trees, and the slow violence of their neglect, that we might ponder ethical responses to ecological collapse and extinction through poetry.