How To Speak With a Tree: Erazim Kohák’s Ecological Personalism and the Ecopoetics of Environmental Disaster

This paper analyzes the efficacy of Erazim Kohák’s ecological personalism in light of environmental disaster. Kohák’s extension of the category of person to non-human creatures in turn demands an emphasis on free responsibility and the capacity of metaphorical language as the distinguishing attributes of human persons. The event of environmental disaster pushes these two attributes to their limits, as is demonstrated through Kohák’s account of the dangers of historicism and romanticism. In analyzing the relationship between fate and finitude as it relates to human responsibility, I argue that the experience of the natural world as finite and fragile elicits a responsibility that refuses to be deferred. Turning to the work of Annie Dillard, I suggest that post-romantic nature writing concretizes Kohák’s effort to “speak with a tree,” demonstrating an ecopoetics of environmental disaster.