The University of Sydney’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences continues to be the standard bearer for everything that is desperately wrong with modern academia. In October, the university’s Environment Institute hosted a two-day symposium entitled ‘Unsettling Ecological Poetics.’ For the uninitiated, ecological poetics, also known as ecopoetics, is a relatively new genre of profoundly pessimistic poetry which laments the supposedly irreversible damage that human beings have wreaked upon our planet.