The Arts Project Grant In Action: Fusing Poetry and Climate Science Together for Meaningful Conversation
When considering strategies for informing others about the climate crisis, using poetry as a vessel for this teaching may not be the first method that comes to mind. But that’s exactly what Sundog Poetry encouraged through an event held in October at Champlain College with support from a FY26 Arts Project grant.
The event fused climate science with poetry, featuring poetry readings, student workshops, and an interdisciplinary panel discussion. The panel included environmental writer Alison Hawthorne Deming, environmental author and educator John Elder, Vermont-based poet Jody Gladding, poet Jane Hirshfield, and forest ecologist and professor Nalini Nadkarni.
The event’s five speakers, Nadkarni, Gladding, Deming, Elder, and Hirshfield (left to right), participate in a panel discussion.“These conversations positioned poetry — one of humanity’s oldest forms of creative expression — as a bridge between scientific knowledge and human experience,” said Drew Frazier, managing director of Sundog Poetry. “We saw how poetry can transform complex environmental data and scientific concepts into narratives that resonate with human values, emotions, and lived experience.”
A statewide nonprofit, Sundog Poetry seeks to promote poetry in Vermont by providing poetry programming and support to Vermont poets. Its programming aims to stay current to issues important to the state, a desire that motivated this event.
“We live in a rural state where the natural world plays a pivotal role in the lives of so many Vermonters — and today, as climate change and political divisiveness have made the environment an ever-present flashpoint, that feels more urgent than ever,” Frazier said.
Sundog Poetry hoped to foster enriching discussions by bringing two different disciplines together.
“Science and the arts can feel increasingly siloed from one another, and we wanted to explore what happens when those two disciplines are brought into genuine conversation,” Frazier said.
The event brought together people of all ages, from high school and college students to older adults and was live streamed. You can view the recordings here.
Frazier believes it was a success.
“From a content perspective, the event exceeded our expectations,” he said. “Our guests are widely celebrated in their fields and brought invaluable insight and perspective to the topic.”
Elder delivers a poetry reading to the audience.The use of poetry helped to make the complex science of climate change more accessible and digestible to attendees.
“We’ve long observed that scientific facts alone are often insufficient to motivate widespread action on climate change,” Frazier said. “Poetry’s unique ability to engage imagination, empathy, and ethical reflection makes it a powerful tool for helping people process and respond to the crisis in a more personal way.”
The event also brought 10 Vermont letterpress printmakers who made commemorative broadsides featuring excerpts from the panelists. The broadsides allowed attendees to bring home keepsakes that kept the event’s themes resonating beyond its conclusion.
Attendees enjoyed the opportunity to learn about both the scientific and artistic aspects of climate change in one event, Frazier said, and being able to hear from world-class poets and environmentalists at once was a rare experience.
“One attendee wrote that they came away motivated to weave poetry into their science-based conservation work,” Frazier said. “This reflects precisely the kind of cross-pollination we hoped to inspire — not just an appreciation of the intersection between poetry and science, but a tangible commitment to integrating these approaches in real conservation work.”
With the success of this event, Sundog Poetry is eager to combine local talent and out-of-state experts again in the future, potentially on this topic or others.
“We believe that some of the most effective poetry events are those where poetry isn’t explored in isolation, but set in dialogue with other disciplines,” Frazier said. “That’s when attendees seem to experience it most freshly and understand most vividly how it can be applied in the world.”