With books like "Woman and Nature," she pioneered a unique form of creative nonfiction, linking violence against women to the ravaging of the environment.

Susan Griffin, an influential poet, playwright and prolific feminist author who pioneered a unique form of creative nonfiction, blending propulsive, poetic prose with history, memoir and myth in books like "Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her," a touchstone of ecofeminism, died on Sep. 30 at her home in Berkeley, Calif. She was 82.

The cause was advanced Parkinson's disease, her friend Nina Wise said.

Ms. Griffin's themes were the pernicious effects of a Western belief system -- a patriarchal system, in her view -- that explored how capitalism, science, religion and even the porn industry have subjugated the natural world to its detriment and ours, and how that subjugation is a gendered one.

Like other feminists of her generation, she saw discrimination and violence against women as akin to the ravaging of the environment, through strip mining, agricultural practices, the clear-cutting of old-growth timber and pollution. Hence the term ecofeminism, of which she was a leading voice.

She was also a Berkeley personage, among those who contributed to the city's intellectual life through their writings, activism, bookstores (like Cody's Books, a hub for the counterculture and free-speech activists) and restaurants (Alice Waters's Chez Panisse, among others).

Ms. Griffin wrote for Ramparts, the provocative leftist magazine that published Susan Sontag, Angela Davis and Noam Chomsky, and for Scanlan's Monthly, the even scrappier muckraking periodical that lasted less than a year but managed to irritate President Richard M. Nixon by calling for his impeachment two years before Watergate. For Ramparts, Ms. Griffin wrote a lengthy essay on rape; for Scanlan's Monthly, she interviewed women who had had illegal abortions.

Ms. Griffin was among the first poets published by Shameless Hussy Press, the upstart -- and possibly the country's first -- feminist press run by Alta, a salty poet who was herself a Berkeley fixture. And in 1975, Ms. Griffin won an Emmy Award for "Voices," a play about the experiences of five woman that was presented on public television and later staged around the world.

Yet it was "Woman and Nature," out in 1978 and consistently in print ever since, that made her a feminist rock star.

The book almost defies description. Composed as a work of poetic prose, it traces the evolution of the human species, and the roles of men and women, through the creation of the modern world.

Ms. Griffin uses all sorts of literary pyrotechnics to embed into this narrative what feels like the entire Western canon, along with many, many other sources, including: texts on agriculture and animal husbandry; data on the number of women burned at the stake as witches in various locales during the 16th century; religious pamphlets and biblical passages; manuals on the proper disposal of nuclear waste; quotes from Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the Marquis de Sade, Sigmund Freud, John Keats, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and Emily Post; and information on scientific discoveries relating to heat and motion. (The footnotes fascinate.)

It is a hypnotic and confounding read.

The main theme of "Woman and Nature" is the violence that the male of our species has perpetrated on the natural world, and on women, and how it would benefit everyone, and the planet we inhabit, to rethink the more dangerous advances of modernity and technology.

Ms. Griffin dedicated the book to her friend Adrienne Rich, the noted feminist poet, who called "Woman and Nature" "perhaps the most extraordinary nonfiction work to have emerged from the matrix of contemporary female consciousness, a fusion of patriarchal science, ecology, female history and feminism, written by a poet who has created a new form for her vision."

Rebecca Solnit, the feminist author and activist from the generation that followed, said in an interview that Ms. Griffin was "one of the senior public intellectuals of Berkeley."

She added: "I can't think of anyone else who brought that kind of poetics and visionary quality to writing about intensely political subjects."

Ms. Griffin was very sensual, Ms. Solnit said, citing her 2001 study of the lives of famous courtesans: "She wrote a book about courtesans -- and was, in person, this very pretty queer woman who wore silky, vivid clothing. She liked to dress up. Because she's pigeonholed as a feminist, I don't think she gets enough credit as a literary stylist, for breaking out of category and genre."

In her 1981 book "Pornography and Silence," Ms. Griffin argued that porn -- mechanistic, running on violent tropes -- was anti-sex and anti-desire, in essence an abnegation of the truly erotic.

"In affirming the fundamental goodness and wholeness of the erotic impulse, and connecting sexual repression with the subjection of women," Ellen Willis wrote in her review of "Pornography and Silence" for The New York Times in 1981, "Susan Griffin boldly allies her feminism with the cultural revolutionary tradition of William Blake, Emma Goldman, Wilhelm Reich."

"A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War" was published in 1992 to critical acclaim, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction the following year. The book is a powerful synthesis of personal and public history, and the ways in which trauma is passed down from generation to generation.

Ms. Griffin interwove tales of her own chaotic childhood -- a grandfather's secret sin; her mother's alcoholism and her father's denial of it; her father's sudden death when Ms. Griffin was a teenager -- with the personal histories of those who participated in the worst horrors of 20th-century warfare: the pilot who dropped an atomic bomb; a police officer in occupied France; British soldiers playing soccer before the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

Richard Restak, in his review of the book for The Times in 1992, called it "magnificent."

"With this imaginative recreation of wars and warriors -- while writing graphic and haunting descriptions of battle -- Ms. Griffin sets a standard few authors could meet," Mr. Restak wrote. "She enters the psyches of people known to her only through books and photographs, getting everything somehow just right, and yet she retains a firm grasp on her own singularity."

Susan Griffin was born on Jan. 26, 1943, in Los Angeles. Her parents, Sarah (Colvin) Griffin and Walden Griffin, a fireman, divorced when she was 6. Because of her mother's alcoholism, Susan lived with other family members until her first year of high school, when she moved in with her father.

When Susan was 16, he was hit by a car and killed, and she was adopted by a friend's parents, Geraldine and Morton Dimondstein, artists who lived nearby in the San Fernando Valley. After high school, she attended the University of California, Berkeley, and then San Francisco State University, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in creative writing in 1965 and a master's degree in 1973. She married John Levy, who was studying linguistics at Berkeley, in 1966; they divorced in 1970.

Ms. Griffin's first job after graduation was as an editorial assistant at Ramparts; she stopped working, and started writing, when her daughter was born in 1968. The isolation of motherhood, she often said, was an engine for her nascent feminism. In "The Bad Mother," one of her early poems, she wrote:

The bad mother wakes from dreams

of imperfection trying to be perfection.

All night she's engineered a train

too heavy with supplies

to the interior. She fails.

Despite her literary acclaim -- Ms. Griffin was the author of 21 books and a popular speaker -- she struggled financially. Among her many jobs, she was employed as a waitress, a house painter, an artist's model and a Teletype operator. She also worked for much of her life as a creative writing teacher, which she loved.

She struggled for years, too, with chronic fatigue syndrome and was often unable to work at all; she wrote a book about it, "What Her Body Thought: A Journey into the Shadows" (1999).

Ms. Griffin is survived by her daughter, Chloe Andrews, and two grandchildren.

Poetry is "like music," Ms. Griffin told The Times in 2024. "It expresses things you haven't quite integrated into your rational mind. It's the cutting edge of social change. Things would come out in poetry that later could be articulated in policy or ideas."

Susan Griffin, a Leading Voice of Ecofeminism, Is Dead at 82