The Earth Writers: Contact and Extraction in Found Poetry
A lens for the entangled histories of exploitation and regeneration, J. Mulcahy's essay examines how art and poetry transform zones of ecological and social devastation into contact zones.
Authored by J. Mulcahy
Coined by Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway, the Plantationocene acts as a counterpoint to the Anthropocene, shifting focus away from the often abstract concept of human impact on the planet and highlighting the concrete realities of how specific systems—such as colonial exploitation, capitalist economies, and large-scale agriculture—have reshaped the Earth. This term encourages us to recognize not just the environmental damage inflicted upon the planet, but also the enduring marks left on landscapes and societies, shaping cultural identities and histories. The Plantationocene calls us to engage with our past, illuminating the pathways through which economic systems have influenced not only the environment but also human relationships and community dynamics.
Ben De Bruyn’s work on “zones” provides a useful framework for understanding this transformation and its varying stages of urgency. In areas devastated by industrial practices—mining, oil extraction, or waste dumping—these spaces become “sacrifice zones,” where both the environment and human life are quietly yet irreversibly degraded. Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” encapsulates this process: a creeping, almost invisible destruction that often goes unnoticed until it is too late. Macarena Gómez-Barris’ notion of “extractive zones,” places rich in biodiversity that are gutted for profit, evokes images of the Amazon rainforest, its trees falling in the name of economic gain while entire ecosystems and Indigenous cultures face obliteration.
In contrast, Bruno Latour’s “critical zones” sustain life but remain fragile. Coral reefs, for example, bleach and die as oceans warm, reminding us of the delicate balance required to preserve life. Mary Louise Pratt’s idea of “contact zones,” spaces where human and non-human worlds intersect, also presents a different kind of intersection—sometimes marked by friction but also by creative energy. Urban parks, where nature and cities meet, force us to confront how we live alongside the natural world. Although this zone-based framework sheds light on how the Plantationocene shapes human and ecological futures, its limitations lie in its inability to fully capture the fluidity of these entanglements. Contact zones, in particular, resist rigid categorizations, existing in a state of superposition—offering possibilities for both exploitation and regeneration. These zones become vital spaces of interconnection, marked by intricate dependencies that challenge simple boundaries.
In the context of Plantationocene art and poetry, the focus often centers on transforming extractive, sacrifice, and critical zones into contact zones—places where creative and symbolic rituals engage with sites of ecological and social devastation. These contact zones are not passive spaces of observation; they are active, where human and non-human worlds collide in complex ways. Joyelle McSweeney’s concept of the Necropastoral provides a compelling example. She describes the Necropastoral as “a non-rational zone, anachronistic, often looking backward and not subscribing to Cartesian coordinates or Enlightenment notions of rationality, linearity, cause and effect.” These spaces challenge conventional frameworks of understanding by rejecting the control and order that have historically justified the exploitation of land and bodies. In doing so, they disrupt the dominant narratives that have shaped extractive and sacrifice zones.
Yet, while approaches like the Necropastoral invite radical reorientations of extraction zones, the question remains: What gestures are necessary to sustain zones as sites of contact rather than further extraction? The symbolic act of transformation has a certain amount of normative power, but what about practices that extend beyond symbolic critique, focusing instead on fostering new relationships and appreciation between human and non-human life? Susen Lattig’s idea of “respeciation” encapsulates this transformative power. She discusses how poetry transports us to other dimensions, stretching and twisting our experience of time and space. This disorientation, or what she calls “perpetual obscurity,” reorients the senses, creating the potential for emotional and intellectual shifts—perhaps even catalyzing change.
Zhu Yingchun’s The Language of Bugs offers a compelling example of this shift. The project involves collecting thousands of leaves marked by insects, transforming these natural imprints into a visual script. This “found” poetry, created by insects, reclaims the space these organisms occupy, turning their markings into narrative forms. It is in these scars left by extraction, in the quiet imprints of insects on leaves, and in the slow decay of texts abandoned in the forest that a new kind of poetry emerges. It’s a language of healing, of listening, where human and non-human worlds find each other again. This found poetry asks us to see the Earth not only as a landscape altered by exploitation but as a partner in rewriting its own story.
Similarly, Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott’s Decomp provides another example. In 2009, the poets placed copies of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in five different ecosystems across British Columbia, allowing them to decompose naturally over the course of a year. After retrieving the decayed texts, they incorporated the results into a photo-essay and prose-poem hybrid, documenting how each ecosystem interacted with and altered Darwin’s text. Through this process of decomposition, the environment provided a unique “reading” of the text, creating a dialogue between human language and ecological decay.
Both Zhu’s insect-imprinted leaves and Decomp show how the environment can rewrite human narratives. By allowing nature to take the lead, these works create contact zones, where natural and human worlds meet and transform one another. Found poetry, especially works like Zhu’s and Decomp, embraces the contact zone through a form of creative extraction. It symbolizes the regathering of resources—whether insect marks or decayed text—into something new, enacting a process of coexistence and exploration. These artistic practices challenge us to reconsider our relationship with the environment, suggesting that the boundary between exploitation and regeneration is not rigid but permeable.
More in line with the project of positive contact—practices such as Indigenous land stewardship that aim to maintain the balance of contact zones, ensuring they remain spaces of coexistence rather than exploitation—this kind of found poetry offers a path toward a more mindful relationship with the non-human world. It predesignates and normalizes new spaces of potential for intimacy between biodiverse animals and landscapes, marking sites where new forms of connection (prior to extraction)—and therefore more than healing—can emerge.
Note on title: Earth Writing (地书, dì shū) is a form of Chinese calligraphy practiced in public spaces like urban parks—‘contact zones’ between people and nature. Using a brush dipped in water, practitioners trace characters on the ground, often reciting verses from classical poetry or calligraphy scripts. Ephemeral and gentle, this practice embodies an impermanent contact with the earth, where meaning arises only to fade—a fleeting exchange that reflects the transient relationship between humanity and the natural world.
J. Mulcahy is a poet based in Shanghai.
(Extracted by The Language of Bugs)
(Extracted by Decomp)
Works Cited
Collis, Stephen, and Jordan Scott. Decomp. Coach House Books, 2013.
De Bruyn, Ben. “Introduction: Beyond the Sacrifice Zone: Zones and the Plantationocene.” Textual Practice, vol. 37, no. 10, 2023, pp. 1475–1498.
Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Duke University Press, 2017.
Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 6, 2015, pp. 151–165.
Latour, Bruno. Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth. MIT Press, 2020.
Lattig, Susen. Cognitive Ecopoetics: A New Theory of Lyric. Bloomsbury, 2022.
McSweeney, Joyelle. The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults. University of Michigan Press, 2014.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.
Zhu, Yingchun. The Language of Bugs. ACC Art Books, 2018.