This approaches in an academic way what we South Australians are currently experiencing in relation to our developing awareness that we need to save the River Murray. We are aware that we need to love differently on the land to the way that we have been, even if we are not sure what this might involve. The word we use to give expression to this public mood is sustainability and we connect it to the urgency of the environmental crisis in the Murray-Darling Basin.

That public mood is addressed in academic speak by Michael Peters and Ruth Owen. They say:

"Our aim, broadly stated, is to respond to the question: “What frame of mind could bring about sustainability—and how might we develop it?” In the first part of the paper, we comment on Jonathan Bate’s notion of ecopoetics and his discussion of Heidegger.....Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth, as he says, is a book about, “why poetry continues to matter as we enter a new millennium that will be ruled by technology.” He elaborates further: “It is a book about modern Western man’s alienation from nature. It is about the capacity of the writer to restore us to the earth which is our home.” Restoring us to the earth is what good ecopoetry can do and ecopoetics (rather than ecocriticism).... is poetry itself .