A poetic appreciation of nature and our relationships with it remains more or less excluded from serious debate and decision-making about nature conservation on the grounds that it is merely subjective and emotional. Nature poetry seems cursed to fall between two stools: it is either written off as a narrow, escapist activity disconnected from reality, or it is put on an elitist pedestal and viewed as a source of inspiration, precious but separate from 'real' life. A generation Of British schoolchildren that has grown up with the writing of the poets Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes knows this is rubbish. Even poetry which reaches into the cosmos can be grounded in the particular, the vernacular, the everyday and be as rigorously observed as scientific investigation. Despite the hold that science has over our culture, people all over the country are reading, writing and performing nature poetry without apologising for their sense of wonder. Romantics, ecofeminists, spiritual ecologists, shamen, traditional naturalists, environmentalists the whole spectrum of people who take nature as their primal source are developing a new aesthetic of the wild, and inspiring people concerned with the environment. Sure, there's some slushy sentimental twaddle in there, but why use that as an excuse to discriminate against nature poetry in general? It's high time that the supremacy of science was challenged; who better than poets to lead the onslaught.