Elemental Ideologies in Osundare’s Green: Sighs of our ailing planet

This study explores the ideological architecture of Niyi Osundare’s Green: Sighs of Our Ailing Planet (2022), a poetry collection that confronts environmental degradation through the lens of African cosmology, postcolonial critique, and linguistic innovation. Moving beyond conventional thematic interpretations, the study applies Ogungbemi’s (2016) Integrated Model of Ideological Representation in Discourse (IMIRD), which combines insights from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), and lexical connotation analysis, to uncover how Osundare encodes ideologies, resistance, agency, and ecological subjectivity in poetic language. Focusing on nine poems, “Water,” “River,” “The Rainmaker’s Daughter,” “Dewdrop,” “Wind,” “The Lake Which Forgot Its Clothes,” “A Paddle Made of Words,” “Lily,” and “Magnolia (1 & 2)”, the analysis reveals a complex discursive ecology where natural elements are not passive backdrops but sentient, moral agents capable of memory, speech, and protest. Osundare’s strategic use of transitivity patterns assigns action and emotion to flora and landscapes, while metaphors and lexical choices rooted in orality, ritual, and body imagery transform environmental harm into affective, communal experiences. The study demonstrates that Osundare’s ecopoetry functions as a counter-hegemonic discourse that resists capitalist exploitation and anthropocentric worldviews, while affirming indigenous epistemologies and environmental ethics. By giving poetic voice to rivers, winds, and blossoms, Osundare calls for a relational ontology grounded in Yoruba cosmology, where nature is kin and justice is ecological. The findings contribute to African ecocriticism by offering a discourse-level framework for interpreting how poetic form and linguistic structure enact ideological intervention in postcolonial environmental contexts.