Eco Poets: A Literary Approach to Fighting Climate Change

August 23, 2024

By Ali Nasir, 2024 Future Blue Youth Council member

Kano State has a problem. The once lush Dala Hills are increasingly bare, trees ripped off the face of the Earth to make way for unchecked urbanization. Farmers who relied on seasonable rain sit idle, witnessing the desertification of their land. The soil which once served as an anchor to life now erodes with the forces of wind and water. In a recent poll, 71% of respondents from the region felt they had been personally impacted by environmental problems and climate change. However, when asked for a possible fix, about 73% chose ‘no response’.

But with ‘no response’, comes the reality of ‘no alternative’ — that is, the massive problem-solution gap in climate education in the region is magnified with each coming year that the situation comes closer to a point of no return. Luckily, Kano State does not come without its fair share of visionaries with the wherewithal to imagine a better world. One such individual is Shamsuddeen Abdulkareem.

While in the paradigm of climate activism his vision is par for the course — to invigorate a passion for solving environmental problems in the youth — it is his mode for realizing that vision which outshines the rest. With his project Eco Poets, Shamsuddeen has made it his mission to use poetry and the creative arts to find connection with students enrolled in middle, secondary, and, more recently, elementary schools in Kano State, Nigeria.

He cites his enrolment in a garden club, aged 13, as the root of his journey. “It became a stepping stone.” But that’s only one half of the story. The next major development occurred when he got his hands on a newspaper report detailing the lack of climate change awareness in his community; to this day, he recalls the exact figure when recounting the story: “only 27% of the people of my community [were] aware of what climate change is.” Although it was only several years later that he founded the Eco Poets Project, this moment marks its inception.

The mission statement is simple: to find what makes people feel the devastation of climate change and use that as a through line to what makes people think. The former is done, of course, through poetry. Shamsuddeen and his team visit multiple schools each month with a guest poet who recites their work for the students; this is supplemented by short lectures about environmental devastation and the dangers of inaction. An impressive feature of this project is the abundance of feedback mechanisms that come with it; student responses about what worked for them (and what didn’t) are analyzed, understood, and fed into the following month’s outreach effort, ensuring that the process is in a perpetual state of flux.

In some of the videos filmed during these outreach programs, students can be seen packed into halls and courtyards, rows upon rows of starched uniforms and bright, inquisitive eyes. While it is difficult to measure the impact of Shamsuddeen’s efforts on students tangibly, this is certainly not a deterrent for him. He believes that the more informal avenue of spoken word poetry reaches students on a deeper level; in a sense, his program seeks to be part of these students’ formative experiences, so that they might — perhaps imperceptibly at first — be changed by it. This change can manifest as a closer connection to their land and a better understanding of the threats it must evade.

The biggest threat to environmental restoration, second only to ignorance, is indifference. This is what makes Eco Poets such a novel project: it goes a step beyond simply informing these students about environmental problems by using excellent style, effective rhetoric, and deeply human stories to arouse their passions.

The organization’s future ambitions include finding a wider audience through social media campaigns promoting environmental poetry.

In fine, Eco Poets takes the best parts of poetry and environmental advocacy and strives to create something larger with these elements.

If not for the planet, then for the young people of Kano State themselves.