Writing often begins before language and thought. It begins as vibration, as rhythm, as a body tuning itself to the frequencies of a place or an environment. 

This issue of Writing Natures emerges from the conviction that ecology is not simply something we observe, think about, or equate with nature, but something we inhabit through sensation, cadence, interruption and resonance. The ecological is not only the visible, or our theories about hyperobjects. It rustles, hums, crackles, reverberates. It unfolds in the murmur of rivers, in the static of electrical infrastructures, in the silence that follows extinction, and in the countless voices that exceed human hearing.

The texts gathered here understand writing as a sonic practice. They ask what happens when language ceases to represent the world and instead begins to resonate with it. Poetry becomes a form of attunement, criticism a mode of listening, and the essay a space where thought acquires rhythm, hesitation and echo. Between word and sound, between meaning and vibration, ecological imagination begins to emerge.

This understanding owes much to Timothy Morton’s invitation to think of ecology beyond the comforting fiction of “nature” as something pure, harmonious or separate from ourselves. Rather than seeking an imagined outside, we find ourselves immersed within dense networks of coexistence, disturbance and dependency. Listening becomes an ethical practice. It requires attention to what remains peripheral, interrupted or nearly inaudible: the more-than-human, the damaged, the residual and the spectral.

The contributions assembled in this issue move through these uncertain territories. They linger among ruins and compost, in atmospheres thick with memory, in landscapes marked by extraction, migration and decay. They experiment with forms that cross the boundaries between essay, poem, score, field recording and meditation. Some texts whisper, others fracture into fragments, others return as refrains. None seeks a singular ecological voice. Together they compose a polyphony of relations.

This issue invites us to cultivate forms of attention that privilege resonance over mastery and listening over certainty. In an age increasingly defined by ecological disruption, poetry and sound offer not an escape from crisis but another way of dwelling within it. They remind us that ecology is also acoustics, every landscape a chorus, every act of writing an attempt to hear what has always been sounding just beyond the limits of our own voice.