Environmental sustainability and ecological consciousness in Iman Budhi Santosa's selected poems
In the context of Indonesian literature, the poet Iman Budhi Santosa holds a significant position as one of the poets who consistently incorporates natural landscapes, local wisdom, and human–environment relationships into his poetry. His works not only represent nature as an aesthetic backdrop but also as an ethical and symbolic entity intertwined with issues of sustainability, spirituality, and a critique of exploitative modernity. This study examines sustainability rooted in local cosmology and the daily practices of communities on the slopes of Mount Merapi through the relationship between humans and nature in Iman Budhi Santosa’s poetry. Data sources were drawn from Iman Budhi Santosa’s poems titled: (1) Perumput Merapi, (2) Sujud Petani Lereng Merapi, and (3) Di Puncak Gunung Bibi. The results indicate that these poems can be categorized into two forms: (1) environmental sustainability, and (2) the relationship between humans and nature. Environmental sustainability in Iman Budhi Santosa’s poetry articulates sustainability as a practice of coexistence, respect for nonhuman agency, and the community’s ability to maintain and restore its ecological relationships. In the section on the relationship between humans and nature, Iman Budhi Santosa’s poetry constructs motifs of environmental sustainability through representations of human–nature relationships grounded in non-anthropocentric ethics. “At the Summit of Mount Bibi” affirms the ecological kinship between humans and the mountain; “The Grass Cutter of Merapi” illustrates the multispecies coexistence that sustains ecosystem balance; while “The Prostration of the Farmers on the Slopes of Merapi” demonstrates the ecological resilience born of acceptance of nature’s dynamics.
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