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The Compass: Dominion: Dominion: The animals and the poets

Factual

Kayo Chingonyi in Caeverlock Wetlands Centre, Scotland

16/10/2019 GMT

Dominion: The animals and the poets

Dominion

BBC World Service - The Compass, Dominion, Dominion: The animals and the poets

Writers explore our attitude to animals and attempt to uncover what our human values are

Writers explore our attitude to animals and attempt to uncover what our human values are.

Amidst birds passing over or nesting by the Solway Firth in southern Scotland, writer Kayo Chingonyi explores the role of poetry in bringing humans and non-human animals closer. He asks why we turn to poetry to fill the space between human and animal life and discovers ways in which poetry is a powerful human form for entering into the unstructured, more instinctive world of non –human animals. He walks through the wetlands with poet Isabel Galleymore and poetry scholar Sam Solnick. He also talks to newly appointed professor of poetry at Oxford University, Alice Oswald, along with Joshua Bennett and Onno Oerlemans.

The programme features full readings or extracts from the following poems:
Tame by Sarah Howe
Black Rook in Rainy Weather by Sylvia Plath
To A Mouse by Robert Burns
Pike by Ted Hughes
Otter by Seamus Heaney
The Kingdom of Sediment by Jacob Polley
Dear Whinchat by Belinda Zhawi
Limpet and Drill Tongued Whelk by Isabel Galleymore
Self Portrait as Periplaneta Americana by Joshua Bennett
Flies by Alice Oswald
The Moose by Elizabeth Bishop
Elephants by Les Murray

Producer: Kate Bland

(Photo: Kayo Chingonyi with Isabel Galleymore, Sam Solnick and Brian Morrell at Caeverlokc Wetlands Centre. Credit: Kate Bland)

The Compass: Dominion

As awareness grows of the destructive impact of people on the natural world, four writers explore our attitude to animals and attempt to uncover what our human values are.

Two vivid stories of human dominion over the natural world infuse the Abrahamic faiths: Adam’s naming of the animals and Noah’s stewardship of animal pairs to safety during the floods. In both, God is said to have given mankind dominion “over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."

Today, whether dominion means stewardship or power, non-human animals are in serious trouble. The human population is 300 times what it was, while non-human animals are diminishing in species and number.

Set in Holland, Zimbabwe, India and Scotland and building on a story by JM Coetzee called The Lives of Animals (1999), this series explores attitudes to non-human animals at a point in human history when it has never been more important to reflect on the impact of people on the natural world. 

Four different writers from the sciences and the humanities take a different perspective to frame their inquiry.

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