Nature for poetics or poetics for Nature?

"The poetic real" -- J.V. Foix

Today I was confronted with same important question on a few different fronts.  If a poet does not explicitly engage in an overt concern for the environment as an environmentalist or conservationist, how is it possible to argue that the work is indeed doing good for nonhuman entities?

The question is hugely important for my work right now.  As I see it, following the work of others and in my own readings, the question is a most pertinent one for first wave ecocriticism, which insists on bringing Nature writing back into the forefront of academic research and pedagogy because it is overtly environmentalist, a term to be understood as historically specific, placed-based and nature-obsessed.  As ecological criticism begins to expand outward into other cultural interactions with nonhumans the same esthetic dam does not always hold against the flood (Heise gives a great example of African American conceptions of the rural as an example of this).

My own view, following Morton and U. Heise in particular, maintains that texts can be more provocative if they are implicitly ecological.  That is, they don't issue performative statements proclaiming some position, but rather enter into a certain type of relation with nonhumans.  I usually find this non-position more subtle and productive because it becomes indicative of other positions yet to come.  This might involve a conscious utilization of "Nature" for a poetics.

After being pressed on the question in some helpful comments, I found myself reading a commentary by Perejaume on Joan Brossa: "Let literature come down to earth".  This paragraph and poem come from his marvelous essay:

That literature come down to earth, that both the direction of Brossa's images and the density and weight of the written work lead literature to touch down, presupposes, in effect, at the very least a certain literary conception, a certain earth(l)y conception.  The earth on which Brossa writes, the earth of which Brossa speaks, the earth in which he inscribes himself, is as close and as remote as the closest and the most remote things we can imagine.  The capacity of this earth is enormous, unfathomable, inexpressible.  Brossa embraces, with an exceptional degree of breadth, the obsession with the marvelous and the common sense of reality.  It is for this reason that literature and things are indissociable in his work.  The enigma is totally earthly, manifest, as near and as vast as the earth itself, with no doctrines, with no dogma, to shield it.  And Brossa wanted his literature to be as real as the earth.

And P. gives the following example from B.:

Harlequin I: He crosses a bridge.
Harlequin II: The ruin of a bridge.
H.I. A bridge over the river.
H. II: The bridge has no balustrades.
H. I: The bridge that will serve.  The
H. II: bridges, exactly.
H. I: A bridge curves.
H. II: Over the bridge.
H. I: The bridge a woman sees.

And follows with a great phrase: "everything invokes the strangeness of what is closest, the experience of strangeness, the mysterious suspension that is produced in our understanding by the powerful presence of objects".  

I do not want to suggest, however, that writers how openly identify themselves as part of some ecological/environmental movement are less worthy of discussion.  This is certainly not the case (e.g. my interest in J. Riechmann).  I think it is the case that we are not entirely certain about what this means yet and, as many have pointed out, environmentalism is an ideology historically specific to parts .  To me, this is the exciting part about the work to be done.