Caryl Churchill's drama shows a sustained and deepening engagement with ecological issues from her 1971 radio drama Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen, through Fen (1983) (developed for the stage with the members of the Joint Stock theatre company), to the collaborative combination of dance, song and drama Lives of the Great Poisoners (1991), the more recent plays The Skriker (1994) and Far Away (2000), and her 2006 choral work We Turned on the Light. Her focus moves from localized environmental concerns (as in Fen) to the ecological effects of globalization and the alienated consumerism of late capitalism (for example, in Far Away and The Skriker), but there is not so much a simple progression in her work as a recursive, intense dialogue in which elements of her earlier plays are repurposed and complex issues are revisited. In particular, Churchill returns to the idea of the commons - which can be understood both as a localized place, a plot of land unenclosed and of equal access, and also as a planetary concept of shared resources, where the nature of the sharing (perhaps beyond the human?) is open to philosophical inquiry. Churchill works with time as well as place in her ecological dramaturgy, deploying temporal shifts which hint at the multiple rhythms of biology and of capitalist exchange, exploring conceptual legacies of the past which inform current understanding of our relationship to the natural world, and historicizing in the Brechtian sense as she shows paths not taken.