We are pleased to offer this second annual installment of “Nature’s Nature,” a suite of poems and one lyric essay gathered around the subject or location of the “natural.” I can think of no more necessary focus for our writing and reading than to consider the environmental—and fundamental—challenges we face.
On November 15, 2015, the day I finished ordering and arranging the poems and essay for this feature, I noticed in my local newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch, two articles printed on the same page. The first piece, from Reuters, was titled “As glacier slides into sea, fears get worse” and reported that the Zachariae Isstrom glacier in northeastern Greenland is slipping quickly into the sea on a bed of its own melting matter. The glacier contains enough ice to raise the world’s ocean levels by twenty inches which, in turn, will extend “ice losses to all corners of the vast remote island.” The article continues: “Another study has estimated that Greenland lost a net 211 billion tons of ice annually from 2000–11.”
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