Helen Moore is a British ecopoet, socially engaged artist, writer, and Nature connector. She has published three ecopoetry collections, Hedge Fund, And Other Living Margins (Shearsman Books, 2012), ECOZOA (Permanent Publications, 2015), acclaimed by the Australian poet John Kinsella as ‘a milestone in the journey of ecopoetics’, and The Mother Country (Awen Publications, 2019) exploring aspects of British colonial history. She offers an online mentoring programme, Wild Ways to Writing, and works with students internationally. Her work has been funded by the Royal Literary Fund, the Society of Authors, and Arts Council England, and has been nominated for the Forward and Pushcart Prizes. In 2021 Helen gave a keynote lecture on ecopoetry and landscape at PoesiaEuropa in Italy, and collaborated with Cape Farewell in Dorset on RiverRun, a cross arts-science project examining pollution in Poole Bay. Helen is currently completing a memoir about her more-than-human teachers and is an editor at ECOPOETIKON.
I’ve lived for around twenty years in the South-west region of England, particularly in Somerset, close to several ‘super quarries’, where between 4-5 million tonnes of limestone are extracted from each quarry per year. With excavations reaching a depth of 160 m, the impacts of these huge industrial operations are various and include: dust, noise pollution and heavy local traffic, the deep scarring of the land, continual haemorrhaging from the aquifer, plus high levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Somerset’s limestone is implicated in the destruction of ancient woodlands in the North of England, through its use in the construction of the controversial high-speed rail project HS2. Quarry companies also profit from the ever-burgeoning house-building industry, which is fuelled by a financialised housing market, flooded by global capital, and unrelated to real human need. In the UK, we’re currently suffering a severe housing crisis, with increased numbers of homeless people on the streets, and other forms of housing precarity. At the same time, there is a cost-of-living crisis, with escalating price rises for energy and food, while energy companies and supermarkets make huge profits. Statistics indicate that we now have more foodbanks providing free food than there are McDonalds restaurants. The UK is additionally one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, with widespread pesticide usage harming insect and soil life, and knock-on effects for humans (cancer is an epidemic to which I’ve lost both my parents and several friends). On top of this, our rivers are frequently polluted with sewage and slurry spills from farms, which kill river life. As global warming raises the temperatures in our rivers, the breeding conditions for keystone species such as Salmon are reduced, while increased sedimentation, caused by topsoil erosion from poorly managed fields, further hampers their ability to reproduce. Despite these myriad, intertwining ecological and social issues, there are many reasons for hope, with powerful activism from groups such as Greenpeace, Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop oil, and numerous projects dedicated to social and ecological justice. The British lawyer Polly Higgins initiated a project to create a new international law in response to ‘ecocide’, the widespread destruction of ecosystems by governments and corporations. The campaign ‘Stop Ecocide’ has gained a lot of traction internationally and ecocide law has already been integrated into the justice systems of several nations. My poem ‘Earth Justice’ was inspired by attending the mock ecocide trial in London in 2011.