green words

One interesting problem for poets to ponder is how to deal with the vocabulary that's been developed over the last several years around things ecological (or even unecological). The prefix "eco" has become much too convenient to affix to all sorts of things, and yours truly even naively stumbled into the trap, using the dread term "ecopoet" in her very first post here. JS points out that "ecopoet" has become problematic, as it's become a way to very conveniently situate--or limit--oneself within a perceived "genre."

(As an aside, when I googled "eco" just to see what other sorts of products, careers, or services have been placed under this description, the second site that came up was Umberto Eco's author homepage. That's kind of awesome.)

I think when I used "ecopoet," I had a sort of lighthearted vision of beings who were both ecological inhabitant and poet, and thinking of ways of how to juxtapose those existences occasionally (and no, I wasn't thinking of Name of the Rose disciples). Plus the term seemed a little less unwieldy (more wieldy?) than other terms, like "ecological poetry" (which seems so dry and even more prescriptive). More questions: is part of ecopoetics rescuing language from accumulated connotations and restoring its link to the exterior world--its "denotativeness"? Can we rescue some of this eco-vocabulary? Or should we just avoid it altogether?
--MD