The term that modern Western art history has given to one of its most celebrated categories, still life, is very revealing. Painters depict cut-open fruit, freshly broken bread, gleaming fish, heavy grapes, and freshly picked flowers. We see abundance, texture, fertility, harvest—that which nourishes life. A bountiful table. But we call it “still.” Despite the life it is and that it nourishes, we call it unchanged, motionless. In Portuguese, this category goes even further: “dead nature,” natureza morta.

I believe this paradox lies in the gaze that named it. Nothing on that table existed on its own, not even the table that was once a tree. Bread carries with it the wheat, the rain, the soil’s microorganisms, and the hands that sowed and harvested. Fruit carries pollinators, seasons, winds, rivers, trees, and human communities. Even after being harvested, these foods remain part of a living metabolism of transformation, decomposition, and nutrition. A living, moving metabolism.

What the category “still life” obscures is not only the life of the food, but the vast network of living relationships that made it possible.

Here lies a brief history of modernity. A culture that has learned to admire abundance without recognizing the kinships, affinities, and relationships that sustain it. Without acknowledging impacts and responsibilities. It contemplates, without involvement, the fruit without the tree, the meal without the territory, the food without the ecosystem... The table remains full, but the relationships that nourished it disappear from perception. Extinguished entangled perception. From the perspective of relational cosmologies, labeling these paintings “still life” is an exile from kinship, a silent mutilation of soils, waters, fungi, insects, plants, animals, and humans, in what appears to be nothing more than a still basket of fruit on a bountiful table.

Subscribe now

Share ꉓꂦꌗꂵꀤꉓ-ꉓꃅ꓄ꃅꂦꈤꀤꉓ ꉓꍏꋪ꓄ꂦꁅꋪꍏꉣꃅꀤꍟꌗ

One of the modules of the ecopsychology course I teach is about the “Ecological Self.” But I’ve been brewing, digesting and dreaming, for over a year now, of the idea of the Swarm Self. It’s been unsettling while deeply fecund.

The idea of the “swarm self” was initially forged based on a reading of Joseph Dodds’s book, Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos (2011), in which the author explores the concept of “swarm intelligence” at the intersection of complexity theory, psychoanalysis, and the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. Interestingly, upon rereading, I was looking for the term in the book, only to realize that I had projected the expression “swarm psyche” onto the text, since this term does not appear in the book—or anywhere else, for that matter. A fertile lapse that ultimately gave rise to a new layer of inquiry and praxis. The Swarm Self proposed along these lines goes beyond the distributed and functional intelligence described by Dodds, as it implies a collective, sensitive, and migratory psychic field, rooted in relational, ecological, and non-modern ontologies.

This idea is aligned with complexity theory and Deleuze/Guattari, not as a centralized entity, but as a distributed intelligence, where multiple elements (neurons, bodies, symbols, affects, ecologies) co-organize themselves in a continuous process of emergence, contagion, and adaptation. It is a mind in motion, with no fixed subject, no clear origin, and no central command.

*

Although the term “Swarm Self” was a lapse of intuition (maybe of the swarm itself), this is not a new idea. It is an ancestral and future way of sensing the psyche as a collective, migratory, sensitive, and undisciplinable living meshwork. It is the recognition that the psyche is not inside you, but passes through you as a swarm, as a murmur, as a crossing:

• It is not internal; it is porous and a passage. The dream is not just yours. The anger is not just yours. Memory is migratory.

• Emergent, plural, rhizomatic. The psyche is not organized by fixed structures (id, ego, superego) but by flows, pulsations, and contagions.

• Mobile, situated, but not fixed. A flock changes direction without anyone “deciding”; so does the psyche.

• Relational, intensive, ecological. There is no separation between psychological feeling and the social, ecological, or spiritual realm.

• Chaotic, fertile, untamable. Chaos is not the loss of order, but the cradle of the unprecedented.

Imagine the migration of birds or the flow of a school of fish—direction emerges from the relationship, not from individual leadership. I propose the Swarm Self is trans-subjective, a process, and fundamentally relational, in an I that is not fixed, but entangled, ecological, multicultural, and changeable. A Self that recognizes itself as a knot in a living tapestry, more like a vibrational field than a defined identity. The Swarm Self is like a meshworked ecological cognition, where:

• Knowing is not possessing, but resonating with emerging patterns;

• Thinking is dancing with affections, signals, instincts, and living territories;

• Relationship is metamorphic metabolism, not structure;

• And change is not reform, but transmutation, achieved collectively, not by the isolated individual.

{these are our psyches dancing together}

Swarm Self versus Modern Subject

The Swarm Self directly challenges the modern, individual, self-centered, rational, and separated subject. It disrupts the very foundations of modernity, because it is driven by emerging affinity rather than by control.

And this can be unsettling, as the modern impulse is to quickly ask, “Who leads this swarm?”, “What is the purpose?”, “Where is the reason and the goal?”

But the Swarm Self responds with a different logic—one that is rhizomatic and rooted in radical kinship. Perhaps it is not a matter of understanding or mastering this concept, but of sensing when it is happening—in a gathering of birds, in a marching crowd, in an idea that springs up in several minds at once. In experiences in constant flux, spilling beyond boundaries and spreading like contagion, in a collective, wandering, and relational sensibility.

I want to offer the care of the ceremonial mantle that protects and guides those who approach the Swarm Self, with a desire to wear it, because you must first learn to listen, cohabit, and co-respond. It is a living concept, not a step on the ladder of knowledge, it is a collective being that demands care and connection.

The Swarm Self moves as part of a fluid collective, it knows how to be the rhythm of relationships, moves through listening.

I’ve been gathering notes on these ways of experiencing the Self beyond the modern subject, and I even created a questionnaire on the topic. The Swarm Self moves like a murmur, a flock, a school, a thunderstorm, in migration, contagion, and attunement. It is seasonal, contextual, sensitive, deeply kinesthetic, and in affective attunement. But the existential challenge is feeling without a flock and out of rhythm. So the practice is to listen, and then listen some more.

This calls for a collapse of the isolated Self … the modern Self must die so that the Web-like and Ecological Self and the Swarm Self can be born … multiple, embodied, disoriented, and open to the sensible. All this requires tolerance for discomfort, not rushing to fix or silence it. The Swarm Self reveals itself when we allow ourselves to be affected by the tangle, even without knowing where to go. Might it be an antidote to individualistic narcissism, either through belonging to the wounded Earth, and the dissolution into the sentient collective?

We bring the Self home, but to a home that is migratory, alive, seasonal, plural, and respectful of the Earth, of feeling, of ancestral knowledge, and of embodied thought.

If the Web-like and Ecological Self is the Self that recognizes itself as a node in multiple living networks—historical, ecological, symbolic, spiritual. Entangled by everything that touches it, visible and invisible. Deeply connected to the earth, to place, stories, and rhythms. Emerges when you feel the Earth’s grief, listen to the stories that precede you, and recognize your visceral interdependence

The Swarm Self is the Self that emerges from sensitive collective movement. It has no center, but a shifting orientation. It is not stable, but listens to rhythms, attunes itself to the field, and dances with the unexpected. It is a migratory, process-oriented, and inter-affective Self. The Swarm Self emerges when there is confusion, chaos, disorientation—when rational knowledge fails, and the body needs to attune itself to the field, to feel with others before knowing what you feel. Both emerge when we stop trying to be “finished, final individuals.”

When the modern subject crumbles, a multiple, hybrid, seasonal Self emerges.

A Self capable of taking root without hardening, skilled in migrating without forgetting where it comes from. A Self that recognizes itself as body and place, history and rhythm, attunement and wound, offering and longing. It is not a matter of choosing between web or swarm, but of listening to how each layer responds to different contexts with distinct forms of wisdom. It is about recognizing that both coexist, and that every part of us adapts according to the environment, the web, the cycle, the call.

Subscribe now

Share

May there be fruitful paradoxes! This is one of them—quite painful (*), but fruitful…the ambiguity of ecopsychology, which seems “abstract” because it disrupts what modernity has conditioned us to accept as evidence and the only possible truth.

The point is that, for a modern psyche, “reality” means talking about the individual, self-regulation, symptoms, choices, internal narratives, and emotional productivity. But speaking of air, noise, heat, food, territory, water, home, ancestry, coloniality, neighborhood, work, and ecosystem as components of the psyche seems “confusing” because it invites us to shift the very foundation of what counts as psychological.

The armor of resistance is modernity shielding itself from this clash, in a defense against confusion, in which the separate self attempts to preserve its central status in reality.

The isolated individual is an elegant and sophisticated abstraction, naturalized as reality. The body and living places, however—materially concrete, breathing, and inevitably intertwined—have been mutilated, exiled, and forgotten by the psyche. In fact, we call “abstract” that which does not inhabit our bodies, something formless or not reflected in our experience of reality.

*

So, before shedding the armor and waking from the anesthesia, the image that comes to mind is that of a “sleeping beauty” wearing an armor, we can distinguish three layers of the challenge as we navigate the meanderings of ecopsychology:

1. Linguistics: yes, there are new words (old-new worlds, I would say).

2. Perceptual: because there are relationships that have been unlearned and rendered invisible.

3. Ontological: there is a “self” that feels it might lose its centrality and has no frame of reference for what this even means.

The third is the deepest and most painful, requiring us to cultivate patience and tenderness. We need warmth and a loving embrace, because the separate self is not transformed by arguments. It can shed its skin, little by little, when it encounters experiences of belonging that are secure enough to prevent it from withdrawing and collapsing out of fear of fusion, fear of disintegration, guilt, or defense mechanisms.

*

Let us now hold onto the question, which may seem like a challenge: what kind of psychology only became possible after separating and removing ecology from the psyche?

Note that we are not trying to replace psychology with ecology; however, we must acknowledge that modernity calls “realist” the most abstract subject it has ever invented—an individual without territory, ancestry, metabolism, ecological debt, dependence… without a world.

Fortunately, and as I often say, I stand on the shoulders of giants—authors, practitioners, and researchers who have raised these questions—which helps me bring references here that name this paradox.

Ahenakew, Stein, Andreotti, and colleagues define separability as a socially imposed and internalized alienation from our place within the Earth’s living metabolism. These authors argue that this is not merely a matter of individualism, but rather a rupture between humans and nature, among humans themselves, between humans and their own selves, and between humans and their responsibilities toward the Earth. They call this an onto-epistemological foundation of the polycrisis and link it to neurocolonization—the domestication and shaping of ways of thinking, feeling, perceiving, relating, desiring, and imagining according to separation, superiority, and subjugation. I’ll add that this is also how we cease to grapple with the real impacts and consequences of our actions.

Now, when we talk about ecology or how our emotions are not just our own, the (modern, priviledged and normopathic) reaction is “this is too abstract,” and although there is also a reaction to the “difficult” vocabulary, what is really happening is that a perceptual defense is being raised, a discomfort is being avoided, or even a “I need more time”. This is legitimate and part of the process of unlearning.

Because what is being asked is not just to understand a new idea, but to temporarily abandon the innocent shelter of the “separate inner self” as the sovereign locus of psychological reality—which is easily confused with reality itself. Ecology becomes “abstract” because it threatens to make everything that modernity taught us to keep out psychological—the city, water, exhaustion, food, colonial history, the climate, noise, the earth, the dead, non-humans, the rhythms of the body. What seems abstract is the attempt to restore body, place, and world to a mind trained to imagine itself without grounding, without a web, and without a place. Devoid of a wider embrace.

Radical ecopsychology has already intuited this when Andy Fisher speaks of the need to “turn the psyche inside out,” for just as the human psyche has exteriority, so too does the nonhuman world possess interiority, agency, depth, and creativity. The task of ecopsychology is not to add “nature” to conventional psychology, but to dismantle the modern dualism that has severed the connection between mind and nature—including the body itself and, above all, culture itself.

Because ecopsychology is not abstract, it makes the concrete—which had been removed from the category of the psyche—visible once again.

*

Returning to the discomfort this causes, we cannot ignore that, for many people, shifting one’s frame of reference is experienced as a loss of stability and even of identity. The words “territory,” “kinship,” “interdependence,” “non-human,” “coloniality,” “place,” “Creation,” “living metabolism” are not merely new concepts, but invitations to shift the center of reality. It is no longer “my inner world” that explains everything, and suffering can no longer be confined solely to individual biography. Now anxiety reveals its connection to precariousness, speed, heat, noise, isolation, extraction, ecological collapse, lack of community, and the loss of the world. This can bring relief, but also a profound sense of vertigo.

Arthur Blume helps us delve deeper into this shift by proposing, drawing on an Indigenous psychology from Turtle Island (present-day United States and Canada), that psychological health does not begin with the individual, but with Creation as a broader community. Creation is always unfolding, emerging, happening. Self-care begins with caring for Creation, for identity, meaning, belonging, and well-being depend on these relationships. He specifically critiques the anthropocentric and hierarchical bias of colonial societies, which prioritize the human and the individual at the expense of the living, relational whole.

So, when the armor of defense is removed, perhaps confusion needs to be honored as a symptom of ontological transition. Confusion, discomfort, and unease may be the moment when the old framework no longer fits, but the new one has not yet taken shape.

So, when it seems abstract to you, you can ask: abstract for which part of me? For the mind accustomed to separate concepts? Or for the body that breathes air, eats food, lives in a house, navigates noise, depends on water, feels loneliness, and belongs to a wounded Earth?

There may be a part of us that prefers ecology to remain abstract because, if it becomes intimate, there will be a metamorphosis in how we feel, care, suffer, take responsibility, and belong. And this is far more demanding than “learning concepts,” for when we venture to shed our armor and expose our fragile, porous skin to the world, we also unlearn the anesthesia that keeps us captive.

(*) I should note that this paradox is especially painful in my cultural context, where there are still very few references to other ways of being-world (there are bubbles and collectives that, fortunately, go beyond the norm, of course). This is a hegemonic, colonial, and conservative normative context that avoids, as much as possible, touching on what hurts us all. Generally speaking, those who come to me don’t even have the words—much less the acceptance or points of reference—for the severity of these intertwined crises, and the expectation is “to feel at one with nature.” I bring up this context because it’s important to note that I am addressing a cognitive layer that hasn’t even shed its armor, much less woken from the anesthesia.

Subscribe now

Share ꉓꂦꌗꂵꀤꉓ-ꉓꃅ꓄ꃅꂦꈤꀤꉓ ꉓꍏꋪ꓄ꂦꁅꋪꍏꉣꃅꀤꍟꌗ

References:

• Ahenakew, Cash, Sharon Stein, Vanessa Andreotti, Ninawa Inu Huni Kui, Lisa Taylor, Stacey Prince, Jaya Ramesh, Chelsea Williams, Rene Suša, Rose Vukovic, and Claudia Diaz-Diaz. “Decolonizing Mental Health in the Polycrisis: Pathways Toward Neuro-Decolonization.” American Psychologist 80, no. 8 (2025): 1297–1312. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001540.

• Blume, Arthur W. A New Psychology Based on Community, Equality, and Care of the Earth: An Indigenous American Perspective. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2020.

• Fisher, Andy. Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life. 2nd ed. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013.

• Fisher, Andy. “What Is Ecopsychology? A Radical View.” In Ecopsychology: Science, Totems, and the Technological Species, edited by Peter H. Kahn Jr. and Patricia H. Hasbach. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

Ok, so hear me out. While I roll up my sleeves and pour you some herbal tea. Sugar? Honey? Please stir and blow on your tea—it might be a little hot.

Through the Eco-Mythological skin, let’s walk the wild path of the impacts that different mythic ontologies have on our nervous systems. Because different cosmological legacies enable different possibilities of relation.

Ok, so if stories are indeed living ecologies, they teach bodies how to relate—to land, death, strangers, uncertainty, power, and time itself. So different stories and distinct mythic assemblages yield far more than mere thematic variations, for they foster diverse ontologies—the kinds of beings produced within each mythic field turn out to be radically different.

For instance, a Myth of Imperial Domination produces vigilance, the “need” or “value” of accumulation, constant separation, naturalized hierarchy, the demand for permanence, and, of course, the deep anxiety of projected and idealized control over uncertainty:

Drought Slayer

When the drought came, the rivers dried up and the fields died. A man swore to defeat the famine, so he dug deeper wells and diverted the rivers.

He fought the drought as one fights an enemy. And he won. The crops flourished and the man became king.

While a Myth of Ecological Relation might generate a naturalized habit of attunement, subconscious reciprocity, adaptive wisdom, grief literacy, seasonal awareness, and a sense of direct participation in transformation:

People of the River

The elders say there was a year when the river nearly disappeared.

The people gathered, but so did the willows, the otters, and the moss-covered stones. All summer long they listened. Eventually they changed the cattle’s paths, planted alders, while certain areas rest.

When the rains returned, the river returned as well. Not as it had been, nor as the people wanted. But as the river knew.

Please sip some tea and feel these different short stories. They taste different, don’t they?

You see, the fixed identity of Myths of Control & Domination has scarcity as an organizing principle and a deep fear of death and instability (all those billionaire bros searching for immortality in “self-made” bunkers). This mythic posture produces managers (the hero that conquers chaos) and subjects of empire while striving for purity and boundary oversight, for difference becomes a threat:

Last Dragon

It was said that there were dragons in the mountains. They devoured herds and terrified travelers. A knight set out alone to slay them. Found them one by one and killed them all. He returned covered in glory, celebrated by the kingdom.

While the relational and emergent identity of the Myths of Cyclical Relation has interdependence as an organizing principle, recognizing death as a regenerative threshold—the Trickster who navigates complexity. This mythic meshwork assembles caretakers, porous participants in ecosystems skilled in negotiated coexistence and cocreation, for diversity is a necessity for life’s continuity:

Council of the Heather

When the fog shrouded the mountains for seven years, no one knew which way to go. So the heather gathered the goats, the shepherds, the wolves, and the underground streams.

Each knew only a part of the path, none knew it whole.

It was by following fragments of knowledge that they made their way through the fog. And when it lifted, they forgot part of the journey. That is why they continue to gather every spring. Because the path is never learned once and for all.

I guess your tea might be cold by now. May I pour another cup?

Relational mythic structures enable knowledge growth through participation in a natural kinship and metabolic web; there are pulsating cyclical rhythms for even the self exists through relations.

The trouble is that the autonomous self, the one that projects Nature as an adversary or mere resource, facilitates the extraction of knowledge from the world, and is bound by time as productivity, is taken as the “natural human.” For this is the myth of modernity's mythlessness, used to define its own supposed objectivity and superiority, shrouded in neutral and universal truths—progress, rationality, and individual freedom, to name a few. A hierarchical and authoritative colonial technology used to flatten other worldings as inferior, superstitious folklore, while concealing its own foundational cosmology that creates an extractive and disconnected system.

…

. . .

Hmm. I’m all out of tea. See you next time?

Subscribe now

Share ꉓꂦꌗꂵꀤꉓ-ꉓꃅ꓄ꃅꂦꈤꀤꉓ ꉓꍏꋪ꓄ꂦꁅꋪꍏꉣꃅꀤꍟꌗ

Today, I’m bringing one of the most delicate areas of ecopsychology in relationally eroded contexts such as modernity: the reality that we are not merely facing a lack of ecological information, but a massive clash of perceptual defenses. This invisible yet heavy social taboo of acknowledging or speaking about eco-anxiety or eco-grief—of silencing, shaming, and humiliating intense ecological emotions as mere “excessive sensitivity.”

Here, in modernity, we have been trained, for decades, generation after generation, to survive in a narrow reality… to be functional, not to feel too much, not to disturb the family, not to “dramatize,” not to speak of death and much less of collapse, not to touch on coloniality nor name the loss of worlds. And then we arrive at ecopsychology, hoping to “feel good about nature”, because that is the only acceptable emotional contract our culture still tolerates.

But on this ecopsychological path, we do not offer nature as a sedative to the modern individual. We venture to co-create a path, slow and relational, to undo the fantasy that we were ever separate.

Ecopsychology drips reality drop by drop onto privileged and anesthetized bodies (that is, those who have not yet directly felt the devastating impacts of the multiple crises already here), in an art of waking from relational anesthesia. What has happened to us that the Earth, the air, the water, the heat, the food, the noise, the territory, and the future are no longer felt as part of our psychic life? We need to create places where the world’s pain can finally cease to be a silenced, concealed, and private threat, becoming a matter of connection, lucidity, and collective responsibility, so that we can collectively open ourselves to the necessary and inevitable difficult conversations.

We recognize that the taboo is a collective defense and not an individual failure

The taboo against speaking of the polycrisis is not merely apathy or ignorance. It is a defense against pain, powerlessness, guilt, historical shame, the loss of a future, and the fear that, if we truly look, the life we know will cease to be livable. It is a taboo that weighs tons in unprocessed emotions, unacknowledged grief, and violence turned into culture.

The literature on anxiety and ecological grief shows that these responses are not pathological in themselves, as they can be reasonable responses to real, anticipated, and unequally distributed ecological losses. Cunsolo and colleagues emphasize that anxiety and ecological grief arise in relation to physical losses, loss of environmental knowledge, and anticipated future losses. These impacts disproportionately affect Indigenous peoples, farmers, young people, climate scientists, and other highly exposed groups.

What world had to be erased for you not to feel?

In contexts of apathy and dissociation, asking directly, “What do you feel about the climate crisis?” can be disorienting, frightening, and overwhelming. Denial and defense/attack quickly take control of a situation perceived as threatening. The truth is that dissociation is often a form of survival. Due to the weight of social taboo, combined with the emotional intensity of all this, many of us still lack the language, body, community, or inner permission to respond. But let’s try asking in a different way:

• “When you hear about the ecological crisis, what happens in your body?”

• “What part of you wants to change the subject?”

• “What part of you thinks this is an exaggeration?”

• “What family, cultural, or social loyalties are asking (demanding) you not to feel this?”

• “What would be too painful to acknowledge?”

Ecopsychology is not meant to “convince,” but to map defenses with tenderness and precision, to support and embrace complex and highly emotionally charged issues. Joseph Dodds, by crossing psychoanalysis and ecology, works precisely at this threshold between eco-anxiety, denial, defenses, humor, guilt, dissociation, fantasies of control, splitting, and the way the ecological crisis confronts the modern subject with limits they cannot process.

We begin with the discrepancies

In a context where “ecology” still seems abstract, perhaps the first step is to reveal the reversal … for the air we breathe, the water we drink, the noise that pierces us, the heat that exhausts us, the food that reaches our table, the anxiety without apparent cause… are concrete! The home, the salary, the territory, the fear, the exhaustion, the isolation, the screen, the fragmented sleep—all of this is ecological, however fragmented and violent. And yet, as I have been pointing out, we call the abstract, isolated, autonomous individual—separated from the world—“real”!

Co-creating a Refuge

In privileged and numbed contexts, truth without a container triggers further denial, overwhelming us and raising defenses and dissociation. Through ecopsychology, we can create containers of listening that are safe, but not comfortable in the modern sense. That bring truth without crushing us—despite the already crushing of the worlds communities through ongoing neocolonial extraction. Without lulling us to sleep or causing dissociation.

Michelle Cassandra Johnson writes about collective grief as something that Western culture tends to individualize and rush… there is little (or no) space to mourn cultural, racial, historical, and collective losses. When pain arises, it is often tolerated for a short time and then returned to the individual, “here, this is yours alone.”

This intersects directly with the taboo of the polycrisis, for we are not merely afraid of the crisis; we have lost the culture of staying together when the crisis enters the body.

Working with the fantasy of “feeling good with nature”

The expectation of “feeling good with nature” is understandable (and a biological reality), but it needs to be carefully nuanced. Nature, when it ceases to be shackled by a therapeutic setting, is not merely soothing; it is kin, body, wound, otherness, mystery, conflict, death, nourishment, decomposition, interdependence, loss, and regeneration…

Pluriversal and decolonial psychologies help here because they reject a psychology detached from land, history, and power. They clearly affirm that the decolonial struggle for land is also a struggle over systems of reciprocal relationships and obligations, and that Western psychology has often ignored the land as a nourisher of the soul, culture, community, and identity.

Because ecopsychology is NOT therapy with a pretty landscape, but a reconfiguration of the psyche as a relational territory, amid wonder, grief, trauma, contamination, destruction, enchantment, and love.

Dissociation as a loss of the world, not as a moral defect

In colonial, conservative, and normopathic contexts, many people wear an armor that was not freely chosen—it was inherited, imposed, and necessary for belonging. Through ecopsychology, we do not want to tear off the armor and be left raw, but to listen to it and ask what it has been protecting. For perhaps it is preventing contact with one’s own life.

I often say in class that there is no shame in this process; it is not a personal failure or mistake, nor is it an accusation, but rather the naming of our collective context. The pedagogy of the polycrisis offers firmness without humiliation, because your numbness is not your fault. But now that you are beginning to see it, it becomes a responsibility.

Making pain a collective competence

Camille Sapara Barton shows that grief does not have to be merely private or clinical. It can be a communal practice, a generative force, a way to create intimacy, trust, and interdependence. Barton specifically critiques the Western tendency to help people “move on” and return to productivity, rather than recognizing grief as a force for transformation and connection. We must cultivate and nurture these other ways of relating to intense emotions, for without them, pain crystallizes into panic, cynicism, collapse, or moral superiority. With a collective container or refuge, pain can become connection, lucidity, fierce tenderness, responsibility, and localized action.

Aww, I’m so glad you made it this far ❤️.

Let’s re-educate the nervous system!

Perhaps the role of ecopsychology, in these modern-colonial contexts, is to humbly and generously accompany a layered journey:

• From nature as a backdrop to nature as a relationship.

• From individual well-being to relational health.

• From anxiety as a private problem to a shared field symptom.

• From crisis as an abstraction to body-place-history.

• From paralyzing guilt to situated responsibility.

• From hope as anesthesia to commitment without guarantee.

• From armor to porosity with margins.

• From fantastical dissociation to contact in transformation.

Subscribe now

Share

• Barton, Camille Sapara. Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2024.

• Bednarek, Steffi, ed. Climate, Psychology, and Change: Reimagining Psychotherapy in an Era of Global Disruption and Climate Anxiety. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2024.

• Comas-Díaz, Lillian, Hector Y. Adames, and Nayeli Y. Chavez-Dueñas, eds. Decolonial Psychology: Toward Anticolonial Theories, Research, Training, and Practice. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2024.

• Cunsolo, Ashlee, Sherilee L. Harper, Susan Minor, Katie Hayes, Kimberley G. Williams, and Courtney Howard. “Ecological Grief and Anxiety: The Start of a Healthy Response to Climate Change?” The Lancet Planetary Health 4, no. 7 (2020): e261–e263.

• Cunsolo, Ashlee, and Neville R. Ellis. “Ecological Grief as a Mental Health Response to Climate Change-Related Loss.” Nature Climate Change 8 (2018): 275–281. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0092-2.

• Cunsolo, Ashlee, and Karen Landman, eds. Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017.

• Dodds, Joseph. Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos: Complexity Theory, Deleuze|Guattari and Psychoanalysis for a Climate in Crisis. London: Routledge, 2011.

• Doherty, Thomas. Surviving Climate Anxiety: Coping, Healing and Thriving on a Changing Planet. New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2025.

• Johnson, Michelle Cassandra. Finding Refuge: Heart Work for Healing Collective Grief. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2021.

• Johnson, Rae. Embodied Activism: Engaging the Body to Cultivate Liberation, Justice, and Authentic Connection. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2023.

• Parra-Valencia, Liliana, Saulo Fernandes, and Dolores Galindo. Psicología y descolonialidad: Saberes para curar en palenques y quilombos (Colombia-Brasil). Bogotá: Editorial Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia, 2022. https://doi.org/10.16925/9789587603637.

• Wray, Britt. Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Anxiety. New York: The Experiment, 2022.

Well then, gather round the fire, for this story calls for calm and a deep breath.

‡

The people say that, long ago, in a village squeezed between the river and the mountains, people were weary of everything they didn’t know. When things got complicated, they would immediately cry out: “Untie the knot! Set life straight!”

They wanted the world to be smooth and obedient. But the world, stubborn as ever, never stopped taking twists and turns.

It was then that a girl named Lucia of the Threads was born—a girl who didn’t straighten anything out, but rather tangled it up. Where others saw confusion, she saw a meshwork; where others wanted clarity, she saw a song. The neighbors would say: “Lucia is crazy… she weaves without order and spins without a pattern.” But the old women knew: “Some learn from books, and some learn from tangles.”

‡

When she grew up, Lucia was put to the test. They sent her to solve three problems that not even the village sages knew how to untangle:

• A fisherman’s net that caught more wind than fish.

• A loom that wove backward, with the threads running in reverse.

• A ball of wool that burned instead of bundling up.

Lucia sat on the floor, breathed slowly, and called upon her invisible helpers: the Seven-Legged Spider, the Weaver Fairy, and the Wind from the Heart of the Mountains. Together they taught her the secret: “It’s not about untying the knot, but about inhabiting it.”

Lucia plunged into the fisherman’s net, danced with the loom, and smelled the burning wool. And, instead of trying to solve it, she listened. She heard the sea within the thread, the spindle breathing, and the fire saying: “Everything that burns also illuminates.”

‡

Seven moons passed. The girl emerged from the tangle with hands blackened by smoke and a still heart. She showed the people what she had learned:

“Not every knot is a prison; some are an embrace.”

From that day on, she taught what she called the art of cultivating complexity:

• When something seems confusing, slow down.

• When you want to run away, sit right in the middle.

• When doubt hurts you, listen to the sound it makes.

People began to follow her example. They built spiral gardens, told stories with pauses and silences, and discovered that time had more than one direction.

‡

Prayer of the Tangle

The village elders say that when your mind is spinning, it’s a sign that your spirit is trying to learn its own loom. To keep from losing your way, they teach the Little Knot Prayer:

• Take an old thread—from clothing or hair.

• Wrap it three times around your finger and blow your restlessness onto it.

• Whisper: “Neither simple nor certain—may the world embrace me in uncertainty.”

• Then, bury the thread next to a living root.

If, after three days, the earth is soft and smells of rain, it’s a sign that your knot has turned into a path.

‡

And that is how the story is told to remind us that the world was not made to be straightened out, but to be lived within—intertwined, multifaceted, and alive.

Subscribe now

Share

This story was threaded from the following article (it is part of the eco-mythological exploration I wrote to highlight paradigms, concepts, ideas, and practices that, at first glance, seem obscure to our modern minds; from the portuguese book Rezos do Vento e do Barro):

Etymologically, supernatural comes from the Medieval Latin supernaturalis: super = above, beyond, over; natura = nature. The word entered English via French/Medieval Latin, initially with meanings linked to the divine, to revelation, to that which exceeds the natural order. Only later, starting in the 19th century, did it become more associated with ghosts, the occult, and the paranormal. (etymology online)

We must not lose sight of the fact that natura comes from a lexical family linked to birth, origin, that which is born or comes into being. “Nature” derives from the Latin natura, associated with natus and nasci, “to be born.” (wiktionary) Therefore, at its core, super-natural means that which is above or beyond what is born, what emerges, what has a body, a cycle, generation, growth, and death.

And pow, we’re back in the wound again… but now with a ladder.

Supernatural is not just about “there being more than we can see.” The word itself implies there is a natural order and another superior to nature. The sacred comes to be imagined as that which is above the world, rather than what pulses within the world. Mystery and the world cease to be fertile and immanent—river, bone, wind, humus, dream, death, animal, lightning, ancestry, fungus, birth, decomposition—and are displaced to a higher plane.

It is a vertical word, full of steps, that only go up.

This verticality and ascent are decisive. Because they reorganize perception into an idea of the inferiority of matter and the body, of instinct, of cycles and finitude, of inferiority—that is, of “nature”; and, on the steps up there, in a lofty and superior manner, we find the spirit, transcendence, the miracle, truth, salvation—that is, the supernatural. Above nature and cycles, outside the thickness of the world.

The same ladder and verticality emerge in the dimensional antonyms: supernal and infernal. Supernal, now fallen into disuse, retained the upward direction of the “celestial,” of that which belongs to the heights; infernal, on the contrary, remained alive as a mark of condemnation, associating the low, the deep earth, and the underworld with the demonic. Thus, the inherited language itself preserves this division: the high as purity, light, and salvation; the low as fall, danger, and curse. Let us not forget that before this vertical moralization, the underworld was not merely hell, but the dark womb, humus, cave, root, decomposition, and initiation—a place of fermentation and fruitful transformation.

Belonging to this legacy, the ladder-word, supernatural, abandons the body, the earth, the animal, and the visible down here, elevating the spirit, the sky, the human, and the invisible to the top as “more real.” The consequence is subtle, yet profound… the sacred is exiled from matter.

The demonization of the below has not only separated heaven and earth, but has also impoverished our ability to recognize that much life is born precisely where modernity has learned to fear the descent. Even when used as a specter, it is the overarching place that welcomes what could never belong and be-world—ghosts, the occult, and the paranormal.

Now, in cosmologies where the sacred is territory, river, mountain, forest, animal kin, fire, home, ancestor, wind, or food, the term “supernatural” may fail, because these cultures do not separate the spiritual from the ecological and the soul from the territory. What modernity calls “supernatural” may be, in other worlds, simply relational, ancestral, non-human, living, sacred, territorial, the thick present, teeming with visible and invisible life.

The word supernatural opens not only to divine revelation, but also to a modern inability to recognize mystery unless we tear it from the Earth—if it is sacred, it cannot be merely water; it must be “more than water.” Rupture. Perhaps water has never been “merely” water.

Because “supernatural” arises from an ontology where nature has already been previously impoverished, torn apart, and separated from its sentience and agency.

We reduce nature to mute matter, mechanism, resource, backdrop, exteriority, and then, when something in it still haunts us, we must invent a category above it to contain that excess. But this excess may not be above nature… it may be nature itself that transgresses the modern grid of perception, reductively rationalist.

This ladder-word, “supernatural,” functions as a structure of separation because:

1. It strips away the sacred — The spirit ceases to be the breath of matter and comes to belong to a separate realm, up there on the next rung, without touching the ground.

2. It devalues nature — Nature becomes the lower plane, that which must be overcome to access the divine mystery, or ghost, for that matter.

3. It creates a vertical hierarchy — Above/below replaces and erases the folds of within/with/between.

4. It transforms relationship into belief — The bond with rivers, mountains, animals, ancestors, and places can be reinterpreted as “supernatural belief,” rather than being recognized as relational ontology.

5. It facilitates epistemological coloniality — Many spiritual-territorial worlds are viewed from the top of the ladder as superstition, myth, childish animism, or folklore, precisely because they do not conform to the separation between nature and transcendence.

Subscribe now

Someone kindly told me, “I like your work, but you’re always circling civilization and humanity… I prefer nature.” And there was silence between us, revealing a deep wound. Because what for me is a return to the earth, digging into the culture that severed me from kin, seems like a detour to others. But how can one love the earth without passing through the wound of modernity that taught us to use it, measure it, and flee from it? What seems “around the human” is, for me, the dirty and necessary work of removing the psychic and historical debris that still prevents the body from feeling that it belongs. Not to invent a new path, but to return to the earth with knees on the ground, without romanticism, without performance, just presence in friction.

Even when said with affection, it sounds like that old schism: as if “nature” were somewhere outside the wounded body that tries to love it. As if we could inhabit the world without passing through the filters, wounds, and ghosts of a culture that for centuries has separated body from earth, human from animal, feeling from knowing.

This well-intentioned comment reduces my work to “circling man and civilization,” which for me reveals the extent of cultural anesthesia. It unearths just how invisible colonial mediation has become in our ways of loving the earth. It is as if someone were to say: “I just want the garden,” but forgot that toxic cement still covers the roots, that the soil has been packaged, that the names of the flowers have been forgotten, or worse, privatized.

Meanwhile, I kneel in the cracks and fissures, trying to remember how to hear the stories of cement and soil, of amputation and memory, of scars and ancient names beneath all that.

Because reaching nature isn’t just walking outward; it’s also digging inward. Decolonizing the skin and the bones while licking the wounds of forced isolation. Pulling the thorns from inherited metaphors and decomposing the fantasies of purity and innocence. And this is the work, around civilization, like someone looking at a wound that never healed, exactly because that wound lies between us and the earth.

Perhaps I don’t know how to convey that my questions are ecological because they are situated and embodied. I speak of the “nature” that runs through the digestion of patriarchy and neoliberal capitalism, of shame, the linear calendar, and of the existential weariness that can never lie down on the ground because the ground has been cemented, silenced, and privatized.

Because my connection to the land involves recognizing how much I have been cut off from it. And that separation lives within me as orphanhood, hunger, fear, urgency, and voracity.

My work is not to circumvent modernity, but to traverse it. Because without crossing it, there is no listening. And without listening, what we call a ‘connection with nature’ tends to be projection.

This is a path that lacks glamour but possesses relational dignity. We do not intend to return to an ideal past, but we assume the commitment and responsibility to stay with the fractured present.

On the other hand, more and more people are changing their lives, and more and more rural collectives are chasing subsidies, gardens, and solutions, driven by the urge to return to nature and solve the modern predicament. And I understand. But there’s often a missing muscle: that of deep cultural listening. Few want to touch the buried layers, the colonial hunger for recipes, and the discomfort of not knowing. Little room for cultural confrontation. Lack of openness to the counter-narratives that reveal how the very desire for a solution can be colonized. Little ground to ask: “Who are we, here, now, in our amnesia? What are we trying to avoid while seeking solutions?” And I understand why, because it hurts. Because it’s easier to plant a tree than to dig up the place from which our feelings have been exiled.

We want to regenerate the soil, but not the wounded soil of our own perception. And what I bring is not a map, but a living territory, full of raw questions that insist—can you stay? Can you feel without running away? Because maybe the earth doesn’t need more projects. Perhaps it needs someone to whisper, “I’m sorry. I’m here. Not to fix you, but to learn to listen to what you never stopped whispering.”

Subscribe now

Share

❋

They told me, even gently, that my work revolves a lot around “civilization and man.”
And that they prefer “nature.”
And I stood there, between nervous laughter and firm silence, processing it.

Because what they told me isn’t rare. But it reveals so much.
As if it were possible to reach nature without passing through the wound.
As if the earth were separate from the concrete, the calendar, the fear of feeling.

As if our subjectivity hadn’t been shaped by centuries of extraction, domination, and erasure.
As if the body that tries to love the earth still knew how.

My work doesn’t revolve around the human out of vanity, but out of responsibility.
Because there is a wound between us and the living world.

And that wound has a name: modernity.
It has the texture of a cut, the temperature of amnesia, and the taste of control.
And it has symptoms of spiritual voracity, ecological romanticism, in the search for solutions “outside” when what hurts is inside.

I am not looking for more.
I am unlearning excess.
I dig downward.

Because the earth is not accessed from above.
But through the body.
By listening to the cracks, the leftovers, the edges, and what has lost its voice.

And when I speak of the human, of civilization, of intergenerational trauma, I am not turning away from the earth.
Remembering that the earth is also here, in my speech, in my fear, in the lump in my throat, in my not knowing.

❋

I do not want to replicate rituals from other places.
I want to mourn my own disconnection.
I want to relearn how to sit with the earth without demanding that it heal me.

My work is to descend.
To decompose. To unlearn the ways of cutting and isolation.
To stay with the tension.

And to say: no, we don’t need more.
We need to start feeling enough again.
And perhaps, just perhaps, when we stop running from the wound,
the earth itself will whisper to us:
“Cry with me, not for me. You are what I need to remember.”

A storm is brewing, “El Niño”.

I want to view it as a disturbing metaphor—the boy or the child. I swear I really didn’t want to write this article at all.

“El Niño” is the name given to an ocean current that is now out of balance, a climate cycle that alters rainfall, droughts, harvests, fires, and storms on a global scale. Today, the disruption of the major currents that help regulate the Earth’s breathing.

The World Meteorological Organization has stated that this El Niño is expected to intensify throughout the remainder of 2026, causing more extreme weather conditions across much of the globe. Several forecasts from national meteorological agencies suggest it could become one of the strongest on record—a possible “super” El Niño. (from here)

There is an irony in the name El Niño, for, before it was a global climatological category, it was a name given by fishermen in northern Peru to the warm current that arrived in December, at Christmas time: the Child, the Baby Jesus, the divine child. But when this name passes through modern, Christian, and detached grammar, something shifts. The child ceases to be a local relationship with the sea, food, cycles, fishing, survival, and now names a planetary anomaly. The Child becomes a sign of deregulation. And this association is a brutal image of modernity itself, of this pseudo-adult culture that, having lost the capacity to care for its children and its mother currents, links childhood to catastrophe, threat, excess, and disruption. Not because the child is so, but because the world that receives it has become incapable of reciprocity.

The child as cataclysm

Industrial modernity has domesticated childhood. It has isolated the child from the community, separated them from the territory, confined kids to specialized institutions, and transformed development into a matter of individual performance.

Childhood has become simultaneously overprotected and profoundly abandoned. And the child now returns tempestuous, demanding the tenderness that is owed to them.

Protected from immediate risks but abandoned to the erosion of the bonds that sustain relational and ecological maturity. Instead of learning that they belong to a living world, they often learn that they inhabit a world composed of resources, services, and objects. Their task becomes to compete, stand out, and adapt to the existing system. Children do not inherit a community or territory, but a curriculum and a market. Much criticism from indigenous and decolonial psychology points precisely to this individualization of suffering and the loss of the relational contexts that produce well-being and identity.

When a culture ceases to know how to welcome and embrace its children, it ends up producing displaced and gigantic forms of childishness within its institutions. Deregulations that include limitless desires, unrestrained impulses, hunger without reciprocity, and of course extraction without maturity. But all legal.

The child is not an individual project under construction—this is what many indigenous, communal, and relational cosmologies remind us. It is a collective event, for children belong to the village, the river, the trees, the ancestors, and those not yet born. The child is not seen as an empty vessel to be filled, but as a presence already in relationship with a living world. Their growth is not a race toward autonomy, but a gradual learning of interconnection and reciprocity. Darcia Narvaez describes how many indigenous societies sustain childhood through extensive networks of care, physical contact, emotional responsiveness, and community participation, viewing the child as part of a kinship web extending beyond the nuclear family.

On the other hand, many indigenous traditions describe modernity not as a mature, adult civilization but as adolescent or infantilized—incapable of recognizing limits, accepting reciprocity, and understanding long-term consequences. Inherently irresponsible. A culture that wants everything immediately, that transforms desire into a right and growth into an inevitable destiny.

The return of what was forgotten

In this sense, El Niño can be read as the return of what was forgotten. The planet’s currents now make visible what cultural tides have been doing for centuries: disrupting and disturbing cycles. As if the Earth were mirroring, in atmospheric and oceanic language, what modern culture has been practicing in historical and social language. With devastating impacts for all.

We can also note that in many relational cultures, maturity is not measured by independence, but by the ability to care for the relationships that sustain us. Thus, becoming an adult means becoming a guardian of the world.

In modernity, on the contrary, maturity has often become synonymous with separation, control, and autonomy. I think this is why our children today carry such a particular pain, not only because they will inherit the consequences of systematic omnicides… but because they have been robbed of the experience of belonging to a world alive enough to teach responsibility without terror and reciprocity without guilt.

Before concluding, I want to clarify that this reflection lies in the realm of metaphor, not denial. I present El Niño as a consequence of a way of inhabiting the world, a cultural metaphor, yet without diminishing the gravity of its consequences, such as droughts, fires, floods, crop losses, forced displacement, mortality, and profound disruptions to already fragile ecosystems. Human and non-human lives, species, rivers, forests, reefs, crops, and entire communities are exposed to destruction. The metaphor of an abandoned childhood that becomes a voracious planetary monster—the cataclysmic child—asks what we can (un)learn when currents, climate, and culture intersect.

Subscribe now

Share Cosmic-Chthonic Cartographies

References:

• https://www.britannica.com/science/El-Nino

• https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-54f4e985-a7fb-48b2-8246-f3be0d699402

• Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth.

There are myths, such as that of Pandora’s box, that have always captivated me. I want to bring it here, but, of course, with a twist, in an ontological shift. To shift the image of the box from the source of evil to the box as an open wound of separation.

In the myth, Pandora opens the container, and the evils escape into the world. The classic, patriarchal narrative constructs female inferiority and guilt… a woman, curiosity, and disobedience that inevitably lead to catastrophe.

But I want to open up another possibility. What if what came out of the box were not “the evils,” but the living complexity that the dominant order wanted to keep contained? And what if the terror were the impossibility of continuing to live in a reductive innocence?

Pandora consciously opened the box of interweaving.

And what came out were not isolated evils or monsters, but living threads.

Threads of hunger, desire, death, and care. Threads of guilt, rain, birth, debt, and also of forest, territory, death, and memory.

Humanity was frightened because it could no longer see one thing at a time.

After the box was opened, every gift came with a responsibility, and every landscape returned the gaze.

We follow the path of re-imagining the myth, where the box would not merely be a forbidden container. But the mechanism that kept the world artificially reduced—of the subject separated and nature gutted, of invisible consequences and erased contexts, of severed relationships and damages displaced far from view. By opening the box, Pandora does not “ruin” the world, but disrupts the fantasy that the world could be seen without its entanglements, impacts, and intertwined consequences.

I bring a bit of this perspective in an article I wrote some time ago, Cultivating Complexity, by distinguishing the complicated from the complex—the complicated can still be mapped, controlled, and resolved, but the complex is alive, relational, emergent, impossible to fully master. The catastrophe Pandora unleashes is the experience of a complex, intertwined world. Complexity, not as punishment or confusion, but as perceptual maturation and the end of anesthesia. The collapse of the amnesia and mutilation of entanglement.

In fact, I also brought this metaphor into the article (in portuguese) The Dangers and Limitations of “Prescribing Nature”, where Pandora’s Box appears when ecopsychology risks prescribing “nature” as a simple, decontextualized, ready-to-consume remedy.

I am interested in relating the modern fear of complexity as something labyrinthine (though this adjective is already flawed from the start, see here) to the silencing and distancing from the emerging living context, which touches and traverses our body and psyche.

In this way, we can reimagine Pandora not as the one who unleashed evils upon the world, but as the one who opened the box to context and impact, to consequence and responsibility. Because context, when it returns to perception, seems terrifying in a culture accustomed to living through abstraction and in singular, objective truths.

The point is that context forces us to accept that nothing comes alone. Everything comes intertwined and wrapped in multiple layers and origins. Everything comes with roots, debts, histories, bodies, ghosts, economies, kinships, extinctions, gestures of care, and unrepaired damage. Everything breathes together, and the catastrophe may be the inability to accept this.

Opening the box here is the transition from a distant, consumerist and observant consciousness to a participatory consciousness. The consumer wants fragmented experiences, demanding nature to soothe, myth to inspire, spirituality to elevate, psychology to regulate, and ecology to beautify the self. But the participant begins to be looked back upon; they cease to be pure or distant. They no longer enter the world as one who chooses symbolic products, but as one who enters a web that precedes them, exceeds them, and holds them accountable.

…

In the classic version, hope remains inside the box. Was it trapped, or was it kept safe? Perhaps hope was not released immediately because, without complexity, it easily turns into denial, quick consolation, or a promise of salvation. I think hope needs to remain in the dark until we can bear the world without reducing it. Without cutting it out and demanding that it be the size of a solitary psyche.

When Pandora opens the box, it is not just suffering that enters the world, but the world that enters in its entirety into human perception. From the box emerges the context that had been locked away and separated; the hidden consequences pour out, the forgotten relationships, the links between gesture and effect, between body and territory.

What seemed like “evil” might have been the pain of ceasing to inhabit an untangled reality. We reimagine the opening of the box as the opening of the inevitable complexity of living contexts, the moment when we can no longer consume the world without being touched by what the world suffers, sustains, remembers, and demands.

Subscribe now

Share

As a body that has inherited the colonial hegemonic legacy, and as a questioner and eternal learner of other ways of being-world, I feel there is a fundamental haze in the spiritual practice and in the relationship between modernity and the multiple indigenous, original, native, or aboriginal traditions.

I am referring, specifically, to the fact that, for many modern psyches, the spiritual is that which separates from matter to attain essence, innocence, and purity. But for many indigenous cosmologies—each in its own way and territory—the spiritual is that which reveals that matter was never a resource or available to be dominated, because the sacred does not hover above the territory… it breathes with and through it. The territory is the place where spirituality happens, where it unfolds, because the spiritual relationship is inseparable from the ecological viscerality.

To those who share this modern-colonial legacy with me, I ask that you kneel on the living ground and bring a little earth to your chest.

Without rushing for results.

Simply in shared presence and breath.

In the modern Western psyche, especially after the great separations between nature/culture, body/mind, matter/spirit, human/world, spirituality tends to be imagined as something that “rises,” transcends, purifies, abstracts, elevates itself out of the body, the earth, the mud, politics, and, of course, overall ecology. The spirit tends to be associated with the disembodied invisible, the private inner self, individual belief, or salvation outside the intricacies of the materiality of the living world. Even when it speaks of “sacred nature,” modernity easily transforms it into an ornament, an individual therapeutic metaphor, an inspiring landscape, without ever daring to touch the deep wound of separation.

On our knees on the ground, we lower our chests to the earth to feel its ancient pulsating murmur, the one that traverses time and bodies.

But in many indigenous cosmologies, with their diversity of peoples, languages, and territories, the sacred is not an “idea about nature.” Spirits belong to places. The sacred is the living relationship with Creation, with the Earth, with beings, with cycles, with ancestors, with the invisible and that which exceeds human understanding, while remaining here—it does not flee upward, but encompasses both above and below, the constellations and the ground, cosmic-chthonic. It is a spirituality that lives in attentive and respectful action with all of Creation, relating to all things as sacred and inherently valuable. In responsibility, reciprocity, and respect—not in an idyllic out of conflict fantasy, but right here in the messy middle.

In other words, in these collective legacies, the spirit has never been separate from matter; for matter is not an inert object devoid of agency or consciousness; the territory has never been merely a backdrop, nor the body a vessel, and certainly not ecology merely a resource. The spirit is relational, metamorphic, situated, embodied, and deeply territorial. The sacred is not an escape from the world, but an intensification of the obligation to participate in it with reverence, reciprocity, and care—tending to boundaries, consequences, and impacts, following protocols of respect and integrity in favor of the unfolding of ALL life. The sacred lies in the interstices and mysteries of interweaving, of how we are world together.

Our knees are already starting to ache, and we feel an itch from having our chests full of earth.

The reality is that this is truly difficult for modern psyches, as it undermines two central fantasies. The first is the fantasy that the real is only that which can be objectified, measured, extracted, or managed. The second is the inverse, yet complementary, fantasy that the spiritual is only “pure” when separated from the body, the earth, conflict, politics, and history. Both maintain separation; while one desacralizes matter, the other dematerializes, disembodies, and deterritorializes the sacred.

In indigenous cosmologies, which we approach with respect and responsibility, the great mystery of Creation is not an abstract entity up there. It is an immanent depth that is and exists as the river, the wind, the plant, the animal, the food, the mountain, the womb, the blood, the dream, the ritual, the community, the memory of the dead, and the responsibility toward those not yet born. Because the spirit has never been separated from the body, the mind, decisions, family, community, and place.

On our knees and with aching backs, we now lay our foreheads on the earth—perhaps thoughts, chains, expectations, and innocence will spill out; perhaps the earth will swallow and compost them.

Because I want to destabilize a “New Age” or purely therapeutic reading of this “spiritual,” especially when it is appropriated and extracted without connection or responsibility from traditions that do not belong to us. Sacred territory is not merely what regulates, inspires, or heals me, but is kin, agent, memory, law, obligation, sustenance, medicine, wound, and continuity. Intimate kinship and multilogue. Therefore, when speaking of sacred territory, one cannot overlook stolen land, demarcation, expulsion, mining, forced conversion, racism, the destruction of languages, the contamination and domestication of rivers, and the gutting of forests. The sacred is also political, for violence against the territory is cruelty against spiritual, ancestral, bodily, and communal relationships. The literature of decolonial psychology precisely reminds us that “decolonizing” cannot become a comfortable metaphor if it does not address restitution, rematriation, and the restoration of spiritual and ancestral relationships with the Earth.

Therefore, when we say “the sacred is the territory,” we are not romanticizing nature, but rather undoing a bit of a painful ontological mutilation.

We recognize that the Earth, the body, the spirit, the community, the ancestors, and the future are not separate realms. That to wound the Earth is to harm both a carnal and a spiritual relationship, and to defend the Earth is to defend an ecology of kinship, memory, and continuity.

Because, in modernity, the spirit has often been exiled from the Earth. Yet in indigenous cosmologies, the Earth has never ceased to be spiritual, precisely because it is a living meshwork.

After all, the earth pressed against your knees, chest, and forehead—even weary and contaminated—has blessed you.

Subscribe now

Share Cosmic-Chthonic Cartographies

References:

• Comas-Díaz, Lillian, Hector Y. Adames, e Nayeli Y. Chavez-Dueñas, eds. Decolonial Psychology: Toward Anticolonial Theories, Research, Training, and Practice. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2024.

• Narvaez, Darcia. “Principles of an Indigenous Way of Being.” Psychology Today, 2021.

• Waitoki, Waikaremoana. “Indigenous Psychology in Aotearoa.” Em Te manu kai i te mātauranga: Indigenous psychology in Aotearoa/New Zealand, editado por W. Waitoki e M. Levy, 115–133. Wellington: Roopu Mātai Hinengaro, New Zealand Psychological Society, 2016.

What must we erase in order to believe that an emotion arises solely within us?

What have we mutilated, exiled, rendered invisible, and silenced so that it becomes a cognitive habit—this automatic reorganization of everything into an internal psychological narrative?

Almost everything has been erased… from the light streaming through the room, the noise of the screens, the accumulated fatigue, the economic urgency, the architecture that constricts the chest, the lack of food. But also the news trembling in the body, the temperature, the smell, the time of day, and the season, the family history, the slow violence of institutions, the forgotten territory. Obliterated.

For an emotion to seem strictly “mine,” much had to disappear from the field of perception. Modernity has taught us to seek the origin of feeling in an internal hall of mirrors, where each emotion returns a fragmented image of the self, my history, my wound, my personality, and my individual responsibility. Inescapable as a prison we cannot see, so captive are we. And we continue to rummage within this interior of reflections and fragments, a wholeness that exists only in relation. With nerves exposed to the world’s pains, yet lacking the references to name them as such.

These involuntary reflections of reorganizing experience into an internal psychological narrative are not merely a cognitive habit, for they also inhabit the body—a profound training in separation. Even when the world touches the body from all sides, we learn to tell the story as if everything began and ended within us. The real context becomes an indistinct background or is quickly absorbed into a personal symbol… in the forest as the unconscious, in the wind that becomes the state of the soul, in the fatigue that turns into a failure of emotional management, or in the sadness converted into an individual theme. We sacrifice entire ecologies, sucking them in as inner layers of the self, silencing them again and again. The modern psyche looks so deeply inward because it has lost the world. And the more it loses the world, the more compulsively and obsessively it observes itself.

The modern psyche not only interprets the world from within itself, but captures the world within itself, until the relationship disappears and only interiority remains. Isolated, empty, without grounding. We have ceased to know how to “be-and-feel-with.”

I do not believe the path lies in analyzing ever more deeply, but in relearning how to perceive. To shift our posture and rehabilitate our monolithic perception, in a sort of eco-relational physical therapy. We can ask again: what air was there? what ground supported the body? what rhythms ran through us? what systems were present? what beings, human and non-human, made up that emotion? Not to deny interiority, but to return it and weave it back into the world, so that it feels part of it again, not as the center, but as a knot in the web.

Because separation, besides being wrong and impossible in an interconnected world, is a violent loss of the world. It is the learned inability to feel that the body and mind were never alone, that every emotion has an atmosphere, kinship, history, matter, and place. Every emotion is a relational event.

Most important in all this is that when only interiority is recognized as the sole truth, we lose not only psychological context but also ecological literacy—modernity has created a psyche that is simultaneously hyper-reflective and ecologically illiterate. A psyche that can name emotional micro-states but has lost the ability to read wind, humidity, seasons, silence, kinship, or to assume a territorial presence. Often, the modern subject no longer knows how to inhabit, only to interpret itself to the point of exhaustion, like a caged and endangered animal. The body no longer knows how to read the signs of the world that pass through it—the dryness, the unseasonable heat, the silence of the birds, the diffuse anxiety in the face of the news, the sadness at the sight of a felled tree, the anger at pollution, the mourning for an altered landscape. All of this is quickly recoded as “my problem,” “my sensitivity,” “my anxiety,” “my excess.”

The ecological emotions that could reconnect us to the territory, to the damage, and to collective responsibility become invisible, pathologized, or privatized. Out of ignorance of our imprisonment, we maintain the algorithm of separation.

The perceptual mutilation of modernity produces this double violence: the separation from the world that feels with us, and the obstacle to recognizing that the ecological polycrisis is not just “out there”—in reports, in fires, or in floods—but already pulses in the nervous system as a sign of wounded belonging.

Subscribe now

Share

References:

• Ahenakew, Cash, Sharon Stein, Vanessa Andreotti, Ninawa Inu Huni Kui, Lisa Taylor, Stacey Prince, Jaya Ramesh, Chelsea Williams, Rene Suša, Rose Vukovic, and Claudia Diaz-Diaz. “Decolonizing Mental Health in the Polycrisis: Pathways Toward Neuro-Decolonization.” American Psychologist 80, no. 8 (2025): 1297–1312. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001540.

• Bednarek, Steffi, ed. Climate, Psychology, and Change: Reimagining Psychotherapy in an Era of Global Disruption and Climate Anxiety. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2024.

• Blume, Arthur W. A New Psychology Based on Community, Equality, and Care of the Earth: An Indigenous American Perspective. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2020.

• Comas-Díaz, Lillian, Hector Y. Adames, and Nayeli Y. Chavez-Dueñas, eds. Decolonial Psychology: Toward Anticolonial Theories, Research, Training, and Practice. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000376-000.

• Kahn, Peter H., Jr., and Patricia H. Hasbach, eds. Ecopsychology: Science, Totems, and the Technological Species. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

• Machado de Oliveira, Vanessa. Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity, and Collapse with Accountability and Compassion. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2026.

• Whyte, Kyle Powys. “Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” English Language Notes 55, nos. 1–2 (2017): 153–162.

• Four Arrows (Wahinkpe Topa) and Darcia Narvaez. Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2022.

• Anderson, Judith, Tree Staunton, Jenny O’Gorman, and Caroline Hickman, eds. Being a Therapist in a Time of Climate Breakdown. Abingdon: Routledge, 2024.

• Bhatia, Sunil, Jesica Siham Fernández, and Christopher C. Sonn, eds. Decolonial Psychology: Academic and Activist Perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge, 2026. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003492214.

There are countless studies and articles on the challenges of communicating difficult or complex realities. But here I want to suggest that perhaps the plight lies not only in better communicating ecopsychology, the polycrisis or wicked-problems, or openness to other cosmologies. Even if we find clearer words, more accessible metaphors, or a more effective pedagogy, the challenges persist. For these are very fragile and emotionally charged areas.

I am speaking of an apparent and deeply felt misunderstanding that does not stem from a lack of information, but from the threat that this information poses to the identity structure that sustains us (us=the global north, low strugle, western thinking, kind of humans).

In the context of ecopsychology, when we say that the psyche has never been merely human, that individual suffering is also ecological, historical, relational, and political, we are not simply adding context or layers. The most fundamental structures are called into question, and what may emerge is a tectonic shift in the very modern fantasy of separation. And this fantasy is not superficial but an entire collective structure, where many of us have learned to recognize ourselves as individuals, rational, autonomous, neutral, objective subjects, separate from the world we consume and observe.

Communicating that the psyche is also ecological strikes at a civilizational defense mechanism, because it is not about trying to communicate difficult content. But it touches a deeper layer where modern identity protects itself from losing its footing: “I am separate,” “I see reality as it is,” “my culture is neutral,” “ecology is the environment out there,” “psychology is the human inside.” When this structure is disrupted, the response may come as bewilderment, confusion, intellectualization, accusations of abstraction, or feeling exhausted or overwhelmed.

Not because the content is necessarily too abstract—after all, we are returning to the living body-place—but because it threatens to make visible what was comfortably and normopathically invisible.

Therefore, openness to other cosmologies is not light, inspiring, or “a matter of intercultural communication” or even inclusive language. The point is that it can trigger an existential crisis, pushing us to lose the world in which we considered ourselves the center, the measure, and the exception. Forcing us to confront the fact that what we called “human” was sustained by exclusions—whether of the Earth, of bodies, or of other beings; of peoples considered “less rational”; of local knowledge; or of the histories that modernity classified as belief, myth, or backwardness.

The point is that the polycrisis of super-wicked problems does not merely challenge our political or economic models. But it tramples on the identity produced by those models and institutions. We are not facing a failure of literacy, but a profound ontological wound. The modern subject is invited to recognize that they have never been outside the living web, that they have never thought without a body or a place, and that they have never been independent. Their freedom, as they imagined it, may have been built upon a violent relational amputation.

After all, the difficulty may not lie solely in the so called content. There may be parts of us that hear “ecology” and immediately think of trees, recycling, or the natural world outside, or even something too vague, or even a philosophical delusion. Or when we hear “other ontologies and cosmologies,” we feel we have entered a territory that is too abstract, distant, and remote.

Yes, it may seem confusing or vague, for we have been taught to perceive ecology as something outside our intimate lives… after all, we have learned that our suffering is ours alone. And upon hearing “the human has never been merely human”, the mind resents it: “but then where do I fit in?” These reactions are not a mistake, but a symptom. Timidly, we begin to recognize that psychology has never been outside of ecology—how could it be? We don’t even need to believe any of this; we just need to notice what happens when other possibilities are presented—what arises first? Resistance? Relief? Irritation? Exhaustion? Confusion? Fear that my “self” will dissolve into the world’s pain?

The problem isn’t that we feel overwhelmed, but the culture that has left us exiled and without the strength to feel and participate in interdependence.

This is because modernity doesn’t live only in the ideas we defend. It also lives in the questions we manage to ask, in the limits of what seems realistic to us, in the things we feel are obvious, ridiculous, dense, or impossible. So, when everything seems overwhelming and hazy, perhaps it’s not just because there are too many concepts. Perhaps it’s because we’re touching a naturalized structure that taught us to separate human and nature, body and world, individual and system, psychology and ecology, reason and belonging.

The question may begin to transform: “What part of me needs the modern vision to remain the only real one?”

After all, denial is also an ecology

In some contexts, like the one I dwell in, we do not first encounter eco-anxiety, eco-grief, or ecological pain. We encounter earlier layers: those of apathy and denial—intellectual or visceral—that human life is ecologically implicated. This denial is not merely ignorance, but a cultural adaptation. It protects the modern subject from an enormous loss of the fantasy of separation, which, when it falls, triggers a turbulent cognitive and sensory apocalypse that seems to tear us apart into sharp pieces. In truth, it is here that we recover more whole parts of who we have always been.

Curiously, when ecopsychology seems “abstract,” perhaps we are facing a reversal, where the most concrete and material—body, place, air, home, food, territory, noise, heat, work, water, belonging—has become difficult to feel as psychological, real, or visceral.

And the most abstract—the isolated, neutral, universal individual, separated from the world—has become what we call “real.” Undoing this inversion holds enormous potential for unlearning.

Here in Ecopsychology, we do not say that your individual experience is not real, invalid, or inferior, but we ask what relationships made it possible. Because ecopsychology does not remove the individual from the center to abandon them… it removes them from isolation to return them to the world. Because the individual does not disappear when they gain context, they gain body and place. Belonging to the web of life.

Subscribe now

Share

References:

• Andreotti, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2021.

• Batalha, Sofia. “Hiper-individualismo ou Individualismo Colectivo.” 5 de dezembro de 2025.

• Bednarek, Steffi, ed. Climate, Psychology, and Change: Reimagining Psychotherapy in an Era of Global Disruption and Climate Anxiety. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2024.

• Comas-Díaz, Lillian, Hector Y. Adames, and Nayeli Y. Chavez-Dueñas, eds. Decolonial Psychology: Toward Anticolonial Theories, Research, Training, and Practice. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2024.

• Dodds, Joseph. Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos: Complexity Theory, Deleuze|Guattari and Psychoanalysis for a Climate in Crisis. London: Routledge, 2011.

• Johnson, Michelle Cassandra. Finding Refuge: Heart Work for Healing Collective Grief. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 2021.

• Johnson, Rae. Embodied Activism: Engaging the Body to Cultivate Liberation, Justice, and Authentic Connection. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2023.

• Narvaez, Darcia. Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture, and Wisdom. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014.

• Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

• Staunton, Tree, Jenny O’Gorman, Judith Anderson, and Caroline Hickman, eds. Being a Therapist in a Time of Climate Breakdown. London: Routledge, 2024.

• Topa, Wahinkpe (Four Arrows), and Darcia Narvaez. Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2022.

• Vergès, Françoise. A Decolonial Feminism. Translated by Ashley J. Bohrer. London: Pluto Press, 2021.

• Watkins, Mary, and Helene Shulman. Toward Psychologies of Liberation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

She’s been around

singing forgotten songs

her hips soaked in ancient waters

her pulse in flow with the ancestors

her lips drinking from her dripping hands

her feet anchored in mucky silt and mineral memories

~

She’s been making herself present

body-in-water

head-in-cloud

story-in-pond

softly weeping

fiercely blessing

and being blessed

~

She is right here

praying

whispering in your bones

chanting in your dreams

waist below the water

bleeding

shedding

molting

~

She nudges you

In a forgotten, silent language

enchants you back to life

despite all the terrors

“drink the water”

~

I can feel my hips under the cool water

the gritty rocks underneath my feet

the pull of the flow and life all around

still here

I can feel the breeze and the sun warming my head

“drink the water”

~

old songs dissolved

ancient stories liquified

forgotten protocols

silenced tongues

suspended

…

return

Subscribe now

Download the PDF here

{Beware, lengthy essay ahead, researched and written from November 2025 to March 2026}

Here, on the bend facing the Atlantic to the west, I walk down the hill along the narrow dirt path to go to the supermarket. In the darkening evening, the dewdrops on the wild clovers by the dirt road attract me. While my knee hurts, I awkwardly bend to look at the tiny and delicate water worlds, ready to drip or evaporate. The glow of their minute watery bodies reminds me of ancient tales of ephemeral sparkles that appear in feral places, enchanting and capturing those who pass by. You could be doomed or turned prosperous, but all riches would be extinguished instantly, leaving you with a damp coal in your hand. I also remember local solstice rituals, where plants are consecrated by every dewdrop on their green leaves, and villagers roll or jump over lush herbs in a fertile, symbiotic intimacy with the land.

The glow refuses to be archived, despite something in me wanting to pocket it. I can just stay with a knee on the ground, witnessing this fragile worlding. Glimpses of mythic organic glows will accompany us through the living meanders of Eco-Mythic Praxis^[1], just before we arrive at the blinding artificial lights of the supermarket. Folktales of enchanted brightness still carry the paradox of the empire that seeks to fixate and accumulate all things shiny, capturing and domesticating sparkle into power. I’m complicit in the shimmer-harvesting, still trying to fully fixate it to understand; the dew glow incriminates me. But we also sense the contrasting wisdom of ephemeral withdrawal, returning brilliance to place, time, and uncertainty. To reclaim the possibilities of the animated vibrancy of one’s Eco-Mythic Praxis, we will wander through the paved roads of the hegemonic grammar of empire, witnessing the cracks widening through paraontological portals. These are more murky cracks than portals, for they rupture perception, inducing the vertigo of uncertainty, like the rotten smells that fill my senses when I kneel.

The craft of this essay follows the ethics of research-prayer,^[2] along with the narrator’s responsibility. As a white person and beneficiary of a colonial legacy, my body is not neutral, carrying stories that have domesticated worlds, erased presences, and universalized a way of storytelling that separates and moralizes. Eco-Mythic Praxis, especially in contexts that continuously reproduce oppression, dispossession, and silencing of indigenous practices and ancestral knowledge, requires accountability. It requires acknowledging and confessing failure, when I don’t fully listen, when I won’t kneel but still romanticize idyllic relationality.

The narrow dirt trail to the supermarket is an interval calling for a bearing that unravels and dissolves, an inquiry that does not collect data but restores dignity. A prayer that does not seek revelation but digests inherited wounds. Here, on this narrow slope, to fabulate and narrate is not a performance but to sit on the edge of difference without colonizing it. This is a lonely and unintelligible place to be, for it risks credibility and threatens social participation. Breaking down the legacy of colonial European tales, listening to the symptoms of a modernity still demanding to be universal^[3]. My own complicity trembles, and the slope feels steeper, for I’m still seduced by the illusion of stability of the supermarket lights.

Allowing one to fabulate and retell only what, in the humus of this decomposing pile, still hums as ritual and relationship. Like the glow of evening dew on the winding path to the supermarket. A shimmer that also blinds, lures, and exposes modern bias—it is not safe, we will tumble many times.

We walk with and try to listen to myth, symbol, and archetype as vibrant ecological verbs, under the constraints of colonial modernity. Not as universal abstractions, modern “tools,” or private psychological trophies, but as a rupture in this darkening, shimmering slope. Reclaiming, from modernity’s glare, the fierce yet gentle, organic glistening as living, body-place-bound yarns of relational intelligence.

Empire Grammar and the Eco-Mythic

We continue along this steep dirt path with a simple but destabilizing recognition: the crisis we inhabit is not only ecological but also narrative and ontological, a collapse of what can be sensed, said, imagined, and therefore lived. The blinding imperial grammar does not merely colonize territories; it colonizes story ecologies, producing tales without ground, linear time as fate, the isolated hero as the sole unit of agency, land reduced to scenery, and symbolic language captured into racial structures, dogma, innocence, or universalism. My knee in the dirt reminds me that, even as I resist linear time, I feel its syntax shaping my own sentences.

Let’s interrupt this glare with eco-mythic persistence, a practice of storytelling as relational ecology, where myth is metabolic infrastructure, symbol is kin encounter, and archetype is situated pattern-in-motion. All wounded by history but always animated by place^[4]. Taken together, these threads argue that eco-mythic storytelling is not an aesthetic to escape but an eco-political repair of imagination, in a slow, situated, non-dogmatic praxis that composts imperial inheritance and reopens the possibility of cohabitation in a living Earth.

We should also note how modernity’s hunger for light engulfed and silenced the ancient mythic glimmers. The grammar of empire is indeed a luminous extraction machine. Not only does it capture all sparkles, but it also transforms their brilliance into a civilizational obsession; these lights cease to illuminate, becoming a sign of hierarchies and conquests, trying to outshine all that is different. This type of language, linear, cumulative, and deterritorialized, while narrating the hero’s rise, also manufactures desire for fixating binaries. The problem is not luminosity per se but fixation and ownership. The enchanted glimmer ceases to be an invitation to mystic relationality and becomes a trophy of the self. Even the tales whispered among the roots can be bent by this decontextualized glare, in which light is distilled into value, and the symbolic is appropriated as a universal asset. The empire not only steals but also reconfigures the signs of the sacred as evidence of its right to possess.

To relate to this Praxis, we will sit with friction and discomfort together, within the closed imperial grammar and the eco-mythic. Let’s walk the winding, narrow trail to the supermarket, tending to the shimmers, glows, and mythical lights. I can foresee the mythic shimmer colliding with the barcode glow under fluorescent lights hum.

The first Wandering Lights to cross our path are illuminated by contemporary neuroscience. Tales of wandering lights often appear associated with moments of danger, omens of death, or magical devices. Ecological brain models dismantle the empire’s favorite fiction: the modular, isolated self that thinks “in a vacuum,” separate from body, environment, and relations^[5], instead describing the brain as entangled and dynamically assembled. These mythic Wandering Lights mark the threshold between worlds, warning us that the empire’s closed grammar^[6] depends on a false ontology of separateness, the severed lone rational subject, the world as an inert object, and control as intelligence^[7]. The brain is ecological, not modular, but imperial grammar urges us to be hypervigilant and in control.

On special hours and days, we also encounter Shining Beings^[8], guardians of the earth and stewards of ancient cycles^[9], not as essence, but as peoples forced into defense by invasion. In local folktales, there are the golden serpents and snakes with gleaming scales that guard springs or rocks. These glowing bodies point us towards intergenerational legacies of rigorous and brilliant Indigenous Storytelling^{[10] [11]}. This situated yarning reveals the imperial grammar’s deepest violence: the production of disconnection^[12]. Severing knowledge from bodies and place, identity from ecology, and story from governance^[13]. Indigenous narratives operate as relational methods and lived land-law^[14]. Stories are not “representations” but bodies-in-practice that sustain kinship, accountability, and collective regeneration^[15]. These Shining Beings know that land is not a neutral setting but another character, imprinted with events, holding memory, and offering instruction^[16]. The storyteller is not a solo author but a node in a wider ecology of ancestors, spirits, animals, and weather^[17]. These are storytelling legacies that still fight to survive extractive dispossession, imperial oppression, and hostile bigotry every day. Eco-mythic listening is indebted to these non-colonial ways of narrating with and through the land.^[18] At the core of Eco-Mythic Praxis is the refusal of appropriation, for it remains derivative, indebted, accountable, and incomplete without these living traditions.

Eurocentric modern bodies quiver to unfurl a restorying in imperial lands, nurturing spaces where the imposed “single story” loses its monopoly, and wisdom is not handed down as dogma but sought through silence, opacity, and direct participation.^[19] Shining Land Bodies. Here, time bends helicoidally, making the past an active force in the present, for Indigenous protocols do not simply critique the imperial grammar; they oppose it with paraontological practices of belonging, reciprocity, and mythic sovereign relationality.^[20]

We also find the Glows that obey the time of the earth, never that of humans, shining only at certain times in the mythical calendar, resonating with Transcorporeality^[21] and Immanence^[22]. But empire is not a philosophical error but rather a structure we inhabit; after all my knee is in soil that may contain pesticides and plastic particles from the supermarket. Transcorporeality and Immanent philosophies expose the empire’s grammar as an ontological, gruesome crime scene. With disappeared rivers, bodies in migration routes, and collapsed mountains. A system that invented “Nature” as an external category, dispossessing and discarding, making territory and bodies into extractable materials. Transcorporeality insists that bodies are porous environments, sites where toxins, histories, climates, and economies circulate, shattering the fantasy of a clean, uncontaminated, independent self. Bodies absorbing toxins in sacrifice zones that cannot afford the fantasy of purity. Immanence reorients the sacred away from sky-abstraction and back into soil, decomposition, fertility, and the pulsing continuity that empire calls “chaos” only because it cannot dominate it. But the soil is also poisoned, and decomposition smells of rot and methane. Here, Eco-Mythic Praxis becomes foraging and ecological rooting, treating the world as “who,” as a metabolic practice of cohabitation^[23]. This demands consequential change of posture, asking for consent, refusing extraction, and interrupting idealized convenience.

Finally, we find a half-buried bright Golden Comb, a broken pact that Folklore Philosophy exposes, pulling the scalp of certainty. How imperial grammar not only colonizes land but also occupies what counts as “thought.” The Golden Comb brings intimacy, for it untangles close to the skin, pulling and snagging, and it may hurt.

When academic philosophy polices legitimacy through exclusivity, genius myths, and Eurocentric canons, folktales become dismissed as ornament, childishness^[24], or mere entertainment; yet this dismissal is itself a political technology of enclosure, narrowing imagination to what the empire can validate. Seen differently, folktales are a communal living archive of philosophical work conducted across generations: a collaborative investigation in which “no one owns the stories,”^[25] and meaning remains nomadic, seasonal, contingent, and collectively metabolized. While some folktales carry empire in their braids, Eco-myths are not a return to tradition but a continuous confrontation of epistemic hegemony. A tentative recovery of the folktale as “dangerous knowledge,”^[26] capable of startling us out of inherited norms. Modernity dismissed storytelling as unserious, so this is an invitation to submit with ecological accountability, refusal of appropriation, and political solidarity.

Download the PDF here

Eco-Mythic Praxis as Paraontological

Unglared by modernity and rooted in mythical watery shimmers, Eco-Mythic Praxis moves as something like paraontology because it rejects the closed ontology of colonial modernity, its fantasy of separation, progress, the severed individual, and the “world” as an available stage. This unstable and wandering practice chooses to inhabit the cracks where life persists without asking permission from the dominant categories of being. This praxis does not seek to “include” what has been expelled in an already constructed ontological home^[27]. The intention is to descend into the humus, where existence organizes itself, in the in-between, in that which cannot be captured by neoliberal metrics of achievement, productivity, or redemption. After all, these enchanted waters glimmer on the surface but are also deep, dark, and opaque. Sometimes refusing to shine at all.

The mythical glow of tales that guided us along this path does not belong to the grammar of empire either, dismantling it from within. Unlike imperial light, which becomes fixed and hoarded, the luminance in tales is also impossible to possess, unsuitable for transport, and contrary to human sovereignty. It shines and then fades, appearing in a specific place at a split moment. This glow does not promise progress but reveals a relationship with time, territory, and the non-human. When tempted outside this mythic ecology, it disappears, retaliates, and disintegrates. Here, light is not a metaphor for clarity, morality, or enlightenment, but a journey of listening, presence, and belonging. It is a tangled process in which enchantment pulses in cyclical ecological rhythms rather than in linear achievements. The shimmering in tales does not confirm the empire, despite power demands to conquer it. Instead, mythical lights sabotage modernity with an ancestral embrace of shapeshifting place.

Eco-mythical re-fabulation is a tentative gesture of fugitivity, not to escape the real, but to free our constrained participation from the imperial grammar that impoverishes it. Allowing myth, symbol, archetype, and territory to act once again as inherently territorial and relational intelligences, weaving a collective agency where the “I” decenters, remaining accountable, and the question becomes “How do I care, sing, and risk kinship in damaged conditions?”

Praxis Rhythm for Eco-Mythical Fabulation

Refusal as the Door, Noticing the Shimmer of What Insists.

Remembering that research-prayer does not amass linear facts, the journey is to keep the territory vibrant in gestures of consented attention.

Eco-Mythic Praxis is not a redemption arc but a sensory rooting into the visible and invisible weaves of a living Earth, walking along the fracture the way one walks with fire, mud, and endings. Slowly, and with humility, undoing modern imagination traps: the world as inert scenery and the self as hero-manager of meaning. These “modern structures” also include human superiority/control, racialized coloniality, patriarchy that degrades feminine dignity, loss of seasonal/ecological literacy, and an abstract God in the sky/desecration of place. This is soil-work, turning what decays into nutrients for different worlds.

Crossing the threshold, we also gently notice what keeps insisting, even after it was denied legitimacy. The dimming and half-buried mythical shimmers. Silenced stories, unacknowledged grief, a place that captured you, living images recoiling like the wind, a river that summons you in dreams. Sparkles of relational re-membrance. Crossing the resistance door, you refuse to reproduce colonial, patriarchal, anthropocentric defaults as if they were “just tradition.” Instead of solving, ask:

• Who is allowed to move? Who is caged?

• Where does agency tremble instead of triumph?

• Whose longing has been pathologized into sin, silence, or stereotype?

• What bodies have become metaphors before they could be kin?

• What part of the land is only touched to be taken?

• Who has paid the price for the myth I love most?

• Where in my own body have I become empire’s echo?

Refabulating Story as Critter

After shedding parts of modern skins, a new-ancient beast arises. It molts and bites. Refabulation is not “a creative writing exercise” but a political refusal of narrative domestication by capitalist/colonial sense-making. A shapeshifting of perception, posture, and relational capacity. The story becomes a dangerous sanctuary for other ways of being. Implicated and not heroic.

Instead of triumphant achievements, the story becomes a container of relations, not a weapon of conquest. For that to happen, we need to disable the colonial single meaning and “I” as the compulsory center of reality. The protagonist becomes plural, while identity dissolves into landscape and humus. Transformation is collective, and the tale carries luminous seeds, shiny residues, bright kinship, and not glaring final trophies.

Like all critters, stories unfold over time. If colonial time is a straight road called progress, eco-mythic time is tidal, past and future squeezing into the present as living, flowing forces. Molting. This matters politically because linear time produces amnesia, inevitability, and obedience. Spiral time returns alternatives as ancestral memory, territorial pedagogies, unfinished grief, and still-possible futures. It slows down publication, rejects the urgency culture, allows unfinished work, and returns to a place seasonally.

Close without Closure

Eco-mythic praxis refuses the “takeaway culture.” Although in practice, takeaway culture has been institutionalized. So this praxis includes navigating the consequences of the assumed and demanded clarity of students, editors, and audiences. This brings social and professional risks, as you have to relinquish the idealized intelligibility or linearity of the process, such as the interruption of convenience, the disturbance of reputation, and the complications of publication. Eco-mythic praxis is not symbolic, for it requires material shifts: redistributing resources when invoking Indigenous knowledge; refusing productivity timelines that erase ecological time; returning to the same place until it begins to speak back; declining platforms that demand simplification; and composting beloved narratives that reproduce harm.

Refrain from summarizing, but ask:

• Did it cultivate humility rather than mastery?

• Did it mend relational attention to place?

The goal is not “knowledge gained” but imagination regenerated.

Why this Practice is Politically Crucial

Because colonialism is not only the occupation of land, it is the occupation of the possible. It narrows imagination to property and extraction logic, human centrality, purity regimes, linear progress, and a single authorized reality. If colonialism occupies the possible, then this essay itself is written within an occupied imagination. Eco-mythic fabulation^[28] interrupts, unsettles, and contests this occupation by learning to respond to agencies that exceed us in land, animal, ancestor, cycles, and weather; refusing the modern seizure of everything as a personal symbol, like in commodified spirituality; unraveling imperial story-architecture into story-ecology; practicing collective, situated, living ways of knowing-with-and-through, like the shimmer of dewdrops on the way to the supermarket. It is an activism of perception, affect, and myth that perforates denial through humble care, reopening the imagination that modernity made brittle. For perception might alter participation. But this reimagining has consequences; it stains hands, rearranges relations, exposes your complicity publicly, and refuses to let you exit unchanged.

Eco-Myth widens animacy not by declaring everything alive but by changing how we speak, from ownership to relation, object to encounter, “it” to “who.” To widen animacy is not to romanticize vitality, but to accept consequence. If land is a “who,” extraction becomes violation, if story is alive, citation becomes relationship. We do not tell eco-mythical tales to escape reality; we fabulate them so reality can return, feral, through us—refusing to be orchestrated. With dew on my feet, I can see the supermarket lights flicker. Nothing is solved.

Download the PDF here

References

• Braga, Teófilo. Contos Tradicionais do Povo Português. 3.ª ed. 2 vols. Lisboa: Dom Quixote, 1987.

• Cardigos, Isabel. Catalogue of Portuguese Folktales. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2006.

• Pedroso, Consiglieri. Portuguese Folk-Tales. Translated by Henriqueta Monteiro. London: Elliot Stock, 1882.

• Vaz da Silva, Francisco. Archeology of Intangible Heritage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.

• Vaz da Silva, Francisco. “Extraordinary Children, Werewolves, and Witches in Portuguese Folk Tradition.” Em Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions, editado por Gábor Klaniczay e Éva Pócs, 262–264. Budapest: CEU Press, 2008.

• Vaz da Silva, Francisco. Metamorphosis: The Dynamics of Symbolism in European Fairy Tales. International Folkloristics 1. New York: Peter Lang, 2002.

• Favela, Luis H. The Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment. Nova Iorque: Routledge, 2024.

• Pessoa, Luiz. The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2022.

• Žukauskaitė, Audronė. Organism-Oriented Ontology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023.

• Dahal, Hikmat, e Balaram Bhatta. “Folktales: A Moral Message from the Past to the Future Generation.” Nepal Journal of Multidisciplinary Research (NJMR) 4, n.º 1 (março de 2021): 31–43. https://doi.org/10.3126/njmr.v4i1.36618.

• Magini, Riccardo. “Folk and Fairy Tales as Philosophy through Fantasy: an interpretation of memory, imagination, and culture.” Sofia Philosophical Review XVI, n.º 2 (2022): 92–114.

• Meimaridi, Maggie. “Come Seek Us Where Our Voices Sound: Encountering the Mermaid in Harry Potter.” Em The Philosophical Power of Fairy Tales from Around the World: An Ocean of Stories, editado por Wendy C. Turgeon, 55–70. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2024.

• Tulenko, Abigail. “Folklore is philosophy: Both folktales and formal philosophy unsettle us into thinking anew about our cherished values and views of the world.” Aeon, 26 de fevereiro de 2024. https://aeon.co/essays/folktales-like-philosophy-startle-us-into-rethinking-our-values.

• Turgeon, Wendy C., ed. The Philosophical Power of Fairy Tales from Around the World: An Ocean of Stories. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-60373-0.

• Archibald, Jo-ann. Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008.

• Cajete, Gregory A. “Children, Myth and Storytelling: An Indigenous Perspective.” Global Studies of Childhood 7, no. 2 (2017): 113–30.

• Chan, Adrienne S. “Storytelling, Culture, and Indigenous Methodology.” In Discourses, Dialogue and Diversity in Biographical Research: An Ecology of Life and Learning, edited by Alan Bainbridge, Laura Formenti e Linden West, 170–85. Leiden: Brill, 2021.

• Corntassel, Jeff, Chaw-win-is e T’lakwadzi. “Indigenous Storytelling, Truth-telling, and Community Approaches to Reconciliation.” ESC: English Studies in Canada 35, no. 1 (2009): 137–59.

• Cragoe, Nicholas G. “Narrating Indigenous Boundaries: Postcolonial and Decolonial Storytelling in Northern Minnesota.” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 23, no. 2 (2017): 182–202.

• Datta, Ranjan. “Traditional Storytelling: An Effective Indigenous Research Methodology and Its Implications for Environmental Research.” AlterNative 14, no. 1 (2017): 1–10.

• Emberley, Julia V. The Testimonial Uncanny: Indigenous Storytelling, Knowledge, and Reparative Practices. Albany: SUNY Press, 2014.

• Fincham, Gail. “Towards a New Environmentalism: Indigeneity, Ethics and Ecology in Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller and Two Recent Ecocritical Studies.” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 32, no. 1 (2020): 63–73.

• Geia, Lynore K., Barbara Hayes e Kim Usher. “Yarning/Aboriginal Storytelling: Towards an Understanding of an Indigenous Perspective and Its Implications for Research Practice.” Contemporary Nurse 46, no. 1 (2013): 13–17.

• Riascos, Jaime. “Ancient and Indigenous Stories: Their Ethics and Power Reflected in Latin American Storytelling Movements.” Marvels & Tales 21, no. 2 (2007): 253–67.

• Rosile, Grace Ann. “So, What Does it Mean? Mysterious Practices of Indigenous Storytellers.” Tribal Wisdom for Business Ethics. Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2016.

• Maynard, Robyn, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Rehearsals for Living. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022.

• Manning, Erin. For a Pragmatics of the Useless. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020;

• Moten, Fred. Stolen Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.

I thank and for engaging, reviewing, and asking me the right questions for this essay.

[1] Eco-Myth is a slow and unraveling storytelling pedagogy, anchored in refusal and an ethics of relation, unsettling ​​the desire to adopt or control.

[2] Sofia Batalha, “Research Prayer,” Substack, Oct 19, 2023, https://sofiabatalha.substack.com/p/research-prayer

[3] Eco-myth is not an attempt to summarize myth but to diffract and shatter the Eurocentric idealism and demand of the universal by situating it in various tongues of biological bodies and ecological niches. I usually tell students that words and concepts are vast living territories. So, while the term acknowledges its lineage in Greek and Western thought, where mythos denotes spoken symbolic narrative, we refuse the colonial impulse to make such narratives global defaults. We are meandering on a steep dirt path after all. In a personal communication, Fabrice Dubosc reminded me that many relational ontologies, such as Aboriginal Australian songlines, Yanomami xapiri cosmopolitics, Taoist cosmology, and the apophatic mysticism found across traditions, enact Earth-rooted meaning-making that cannot be reduced to the metaphorical, symbolic, or representational logic embedded in the Western idea of “myth.” In this sense, eco-myth is not a continuation of the universal definition of myth under a colonial Eurocentric lens, but a metabolic rupture. It is a fugitive concept that gestures toward Earth-attuned storytelling practices, inaccessible from fixed archetypes and always exceeding modern translation.

[4] “Do not ask how to survive the collapse. There is not one, but many, layered like old bones in the soil, each breaking on a different rhythm. Live cyclically, not because the world is whole, but because it is fractured.” To engage eco-mythically is to stand amid ruins and still return to wounded places, and fragmented narratives. It is to make meaning with the broken, not despite it. Return here is not nostalgia nor repair. It is a vow to re-enter the living field of grief and growth, again and again, as a practice of kinship in the face of collapse’s plurality. The myth, in this frame, is not an escape from disaster but a rhythm for breathing through it. Sofia Batalha, “Oracle for Living Cyclically in a Collapsing World,” Substack, January 23, 2026, https://sofiabatalha.substack.com/p/oracle-for-living-cyclically-in-a.

[5] Luis H. Favela, in his book The Ecological Brain, quotes György Buzsáki to emphasize that “the brain is just a brain. It has no function without the body and the environmental niche it occupies.” This perspective refutes the idea of a modular self that thinks “in a vacuum.” Luiz Pessoa, in The Entangled Brain, reinforces that the brain is not a modular system, challenging the “divide and conquer“ strategy that attempted to isolate functions into separate parts. Luis H. Favela, The Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment (New York: Routledge, 2024).

[6] Empire’s closed grammar does not mean that nothing relational grows within it. Contemporary neuroscience, for instance, increasingly demonstrates the brain’s distributed, relational, and plastic character; yet much of this research is funded, institutionalized, and operationalized within imperial infrastructures. The paradox is that empire can reveal interdependence while still upholding separateness as its foundational myth. The issue, then, is not truth versus falsehood, but which story becomes central.

[7] Audronė Žukauskaitė, in Organism-Oriented Ontology, criticizes ontologies based on identity and substance (the isolated self), proposing instead an ontology based on processuality, multiplicity, and potentiality. She suggests that the organic being is a “folded multiplicity composed of heterogeneous parts,” which resists the fixity of a single, sovereign identity. Audronė Žukauskaitė, Organism-Oriented Ontology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

[8] “Shining Beings” intends to move toward respect, while it risks reproducing a classic distortion. Indigenous peoples have long been mythologized as ecological guardians, spiritual archetypes, or vessels of ancestral purity. Such imagery, even when admiring, tends to flatten complexity. Indigenous communities are not symbols of planetary innocence. They are internally diverse, politically entangled, urban and rural, embedded within modern infrastructures, negotiating survival amid disintegration and continuity. To cast these communities as luminous stewards without naming this symbolic exile may exalt them while denying and erasing their ordinary, contested, and practical humanity. The danger is reduction, for metaphor must not overshadow material reality.

[9] Gregory A. Cajete describes how children in Indigenous communities are seen as having a “direct connection to special spirits in nature” and are considered “bearers of light.” Gregory A. Cajete, “Children, Myth and Storytelling: An Indigenous Perspective,” Global Studies of Childhood 7, no. 2 (2017): 114. See also the role of spirits as witnesses in Julia V. Emberley, The Testimonial Uncanny: Indigenous Storytelling, Knowledge, and Reparative Practices (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 28.

[10] In this mythical brilliance, genealogies of resistance of blackness are included, which Maynard and Simpson describe as a “life-affirming crescendo,” rooted in generations of intellectual and political labor. In Part 3 of the book Rehearsals for Living, Maynard characterizes uprisings as moments when “collective light is blown into a new world” through a “radical Black tradition” that prioritizes mutual care and liberation. This luminosity of blackness is not an abstraction but an energy that resides in bodies, kept alive by ancestors to challenge the “cult of death” of white supremacy and the “monumentalizations of violence.” Thus, stories of struggle and cultures of Black resistance and legacy function as portals to “alternative futures,” where the act of storytelling becomes, like the encounter with the Shining Ones, a practice of “continuous rebirth” and healing from colonial dispossession. Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rehearsals for Living (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022), Part 3.

[11] The act of storytelling is defined as the “first foundation of indigenous education.” Cajete, “Children, Myth and Storytelling,” 114. Jaime Riascos corroborates that these movements transmit “ethical values from different cultures through the power of language.” Jaime Riascos, “Ancient and Indigenous Stories: Their Ethics and Power Reflected in Latin American Storytelling Movements,” Marvels & Tales 21, no. 2 (2007): 253.

[12] The “imperial grammar” and its violence of disconnection are discussed in terms of “representational violence” that separates human relations from the land. Emberley, The Testimonial Uncanny, 8. Jeff Corntassel et al. explain how colonial policies removed people from their “homelands and families” to force assimilation. Jeff Corntassel, Chaw-win-is, and T’lakwadzi, “Indigenous Storytelling, Truth-telling, and Community Approaches to Reconciliation,” ESC: English Studies in Canada 35, no. 1 (2009): 138.

[13] On the separation between knowledge, body, and place, see Emberley, The Testimonial Uncanny, 3–4. Adrienne S. Chan discusses how colonialism stripped Indigenous peoples of their culture and disconnected them from their ecologies. Adrienne S. Chan, “Storytelling, Culture, and Indigenous Methodology,” in Discourses, Dialogue and Diversity in Biographical Research, ed. Alan Bainbridge, Laura Formenti, and Linden West (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 172.

[14] Indigenous narratives as “lived land laws” are exemplified by the haa-huu-pah, which are “lived values that form the basis for Indigenous governance and regeneration.” Corntassel, Chaw-win-is, and T’lakwadzi, “Indigenous Storytelling,” 138.

[15] On the role of stories in sustaining kinship and collective regeneration, see Ranjan Datta, “Traditional Storytelling: An Effective Indigenous Research Methodology and Its Implications for Environmental Research,” AlterNative 14, no. 1 (2017): 3. See also Chan, “Storytelling, Culture, and Indigenous Methodology,” 174.

[16] Grace Ann Rosile states that, in indigenous ontology, “the place becomes almost another character in the stories” and is “imbued with the spirit of the events that occurred there.” Grace Ann Rosile, “So, What Does it Mean? Mysterious Practices of Indigenous Storytellers,” in Tribal Wisdom for Business Ethics (Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2016), 90-91.

[17] The idea of the storyteller as a “node” in an ecology of sacred energies is explored in Gail Fincham, “Towards a New Environmentalism: Indigeneity, Ethics and Ecology in Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller and Two Recent Ecocritical Studies,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 32, no. 1 (2020): 70.

[18] Lynore K. Geia et al. discuss the struggle to validate these voices in academia and respect for non-colonial forms of storytelling. Lynore K. Geia, Barbara Hayes, and Kim Usher, “Yarning/Aboriginal Storytelling: Towards an Understanding of an Indigenous Perspective and Its Implications for Research Practice,” Contemporary Nurse 46, no. 1 (2013): 14.

[19] The term “restorying” to create spaces where the colonizer’s “single story” loses its monopoly is fundamental in Corntassel, Chaw-win-is, and T’lakwadzi, “Indigenous Storytelling,” 138-139.

[20] “Helicoidal” time and practices of reciprocity and sovereignty that oppose imperial grammar are described in Fincham, “Towards a New Environmentalism,” 71, and in Nicholas G. Cragoe, “Narrating Indigenous Boundaries: Postcolonial and Decolonial Storytelling in Northern Minnesota,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 23, no. 2 (2017): 191, 194.

[21] Stacy Alaimo defines transcorporeality as the “space-time where human corporeality, in all its material carnality, is inseparable from ‘nature’ or ‘environment,’” conceiving bodies as porous sites and places of transit where substances, toxins, histories, and climates circulate, collapsing the fantasy of an autonomous and isolated “self.” Stacy Alaimo, “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature,” in Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 238; Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2.

[22] Radical immanence, grounded in Spinoza’s monism and Whitehead’s process philosophy, proposes a single “plane of existence” where reality is constituted by “intra-active becomings” and internal relations, rejecting vertical transcendence to affirm that matter is intrinsically vibrant, agential, and inseparable from spirit or idea. Karen Bray, Heather Eaton, and Whitney Bauman, eds., Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking (New York: Fordham University Press, 2023), 5, 144; Catherine Keller, “Amorous Entanglements: The Matter of Christian Panentheism,” in Earthly Things, 104; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 2.

[23] Expanding on this practice of cohabitation, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson discusses, in Part 3 of Rehearsals for Living, based on Fred Moten’s concept of “homelessness.” Paraphrasing Moten, Simpson argues that the home should not be considered an enclosure or guarded private property but rather as a space of radical hospitality, constantly “offered“ and shared. From this perspective, home is a network of relationality where squirrels, insects, bears, spirits, plants, and meteorological phenomena are not invaders but constituent members of the household. For the author, paraphrasing Moten, being homeless means rejecting the logic of colonial possession in order to inhabit a territory of profound sharing and reciprocity with all beings. Maynard and Simpson, Rehearsals for Living, Part 3.

[24] Tulenko, “Folklore is philosophy”; Hikmat Dahal and Balaram Bhatta, “Folktales: A Moral Message from the Past to the Future Generation,” Nepal Journal of Multidisciplinary Research 4, no. 1 (2021): 42. The sources note that short stories are often relegated to the children’s sphere or seen merely as “cute,” but not as ‘art’ or rigorous “philosophy.”

[25] The premise that “no one owns these stories” (attributed to folklorist Steve Sanfield) highlights the inherently communal and collaborative nature of folklore, opposing the “myth of individual genius” and “atomistic ownership” of traditional academic philosophy. As a living archive, the tale functions as a collective investigation that persists through the centuries, where the narrative remains fluid and “green,” adapting to each new telling without hardening into abstract dogmas. See Abigail Tulenko, “Folklore is philosophy: Both folktales and formal philosophy unsettle us into thinking anew about our cherished values and views of the world,” Aeon, February 26, 2024. Although I would like to add that today corporations copyright myths, nation-states nationalize folklore, tourism industries commodify tradition, and settlers appropriate Indigenous stories. So ownership is contested, although the deeper logic of folktales resists this enclosure.

[26] I borrow this term “dangerous knowledge” to refer to the subversive potential of eco-mythical storytelling to act as an ‘exorcism’ of epistemic hegemonies, challenging the exclusivity of academic philosophy and the “grammar of empire” by using startle to destabilize inherited norms and validate marginalized knowledge. See Tulenko, “Folklore is philosophy.” But it also carries personal risk, such as loss of institutional credibility, being called unserious, or epistemic isolation.

[27] Eco-mythic praxis cannot claim the genealogy of Black paraontology, only learn from its refusal. Even calling this paraontological risks solidifying what should remain fugitive. The paraontology formulated by Fred Moten, based on his reading of Nahum Chandler, is a processual “anoriginal displacement of ontology.” In which blackness (or being that escapes the norm) is not an absence of being, but a way of life that is organized before and beyond the ontological categories imposed by colonial modernity. This concept describes a “paraontological distinction“ between categorized people and the fugitive force of their being, which refuses to be reduced to a property or an object of exchange. Erin Manning expands this view by characterizing the paraontological mode of existence as “minor,” a practice that neither registers nor submits to the ‘neurotypical’ or “white” normopathic hegemonic subjectivity. Thus, paraontological praxis inhabits the “lesser sociality” and “humus” of the incalculable, moving through a “fugitivity” that transforms deprivation into relational abundance and insurgent fabulation. Manning, Erin. For a Pragmatics of the Useless. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020; Moten, Fred. Stolen Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.

[28] Sofia Batalha, “Eco-Mythic Tales,” Substack, accessed February 8, 2026, https://sofiabatalha.substack.com/t/eco-mythic-tales.

The question seems innocent, even legitimate, but it harbors an age-old trap. The constant attempt to save a final territory of human exception. To preserve a small enclave where psychology can continue to operate as if the individual were a closed system, separated from the world, from water, from food, from rhythms, from technologies, from language, from institutions, from ancestors, from violence, and from the places that constitute them….

The question asks whether ecopsychology “works” for truly human-only problems, as if human life could ever have existed outside of ecology.

This is a symptom, the modern ordeal of opening the door to entanglement, in accepting that what we call “human” has never been merely human. Anxiety, shame, depression, guilt, desire, dissociation, loneliness, the feeling of inadequacy, the obsession with control, even the idea of “self-knowledge,” emerge in living fields—family, social, political, economic, technological, and inevitably ecological. The modern individual has been trained to imagine themselves as the center and origin of their own experience, but this autonomy is a neurocolonized fiction, a way of cutting the threads and then calling “interiority” the amputated tangle. Modern psychology tends to place the individual at the center, while contemporary self-care positions the self as separate from the community and neglects relational responsibility.

Ecopsychology does not avert its gaze from the individual; to do so is to impoverish it… but also acknowledges living contexts.

It does not claim that human suffering “is only ecological,” nor does it dissolve singular experience into an abstract totality. On the contrary, it restores the valuable context, body, place, and world to what modernity has isolated as a private symptom. The question “what about exclusively human problems?” may be a way of preserving the normopathic edifice that separates psyche and planet, trauma and territory, body and history, suffering and structure—it is a symptom-question of our real difficulty and lack of reference points for imagining beyond the individual.

It is also a defense against the loss of modern spell, this world where humans consider themselves exceptional, objective, separate, and always more important than the web that sustains them.

But working therapeutically does not have to mean closing the door to the non-human to protect a person’s intimacy. It can precisely mean listening to how this intimacy was shaped by relationships that exceed the human without erasing it. There are deeply human problems, yes. But there are no human problems without soil, air, language, economy, memory, other species, climate and cycles, home or world…

What ecopsychology offers is not an escape from the human… it is the possibility of finally hearing it in its entirety.

References:

• Ahenakew, Cash, Sharon Stein, Vanessa Andreotti, Ninawa Inu Huni Kui, Lisa Taylor, Stacey Prince, Jaya Ramesh, Chelsea Williams, Rene Suša, Rose Vukovic, and Claudia Diaz-Diaz. “Decolonizing Mental Health in the Polycrisis: Pathways Toward Neuro-Decolonization.” American Psychologist 80, no. 8 (2025): 1297–1312. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001540.

• Bednarek, Steffi, ed. Climate, Psychology, and Change: Reimagining Psychotherapy in an Era of Global Disruption and Climate Anxiety. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2024.

• Comas-Díaz, Lillian, Hector Y. Adames, and Nayeli Y. Chavez-Dueñas, eds. Decolonial Psychology: Toward Anticolonial Theories, Research, Training, and Practice. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2024.

• Dodds, Joseph. Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos: Complexity Theory, Deleuze|Guattari and Psychoanalysis for a Climate in Crisis. London: Routledge, 2011.

• Fisher, Andy. Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life. 2nd ed. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013.

• Jordan, Martin. Nature and Therapy: Understanding Counselling and Psychotherapy in Outdoor Spaces. London: Routledge, 2015.

• Kahn, Peter H., Jr., and Patricia H. Hasbach, eds. Ecopsychology: Science, Totems, and the Technological Species. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

• Roszak, Theodore. The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

• Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

• Staunton, Tree, Jenny O’Gorman, Judith Anderson, and Caroline Hickman, eds. Being a Therapist in a Time of Climate Breakdown. London: Routledge, 2024.

• Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows), and Darcia Narvaez. Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2022.

• Watkins, Mary, and Helene Shulman. Toward Psychologies of Liberation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Cleaning the House of Old Metaphors

I was wandering around here, cleaning out the house of musty metaphors—the kind that accumulate blind spots in tangled balls of fur gathering in the corners. As I swept away the dusty metaphors, something glinted in the corner of the room. There it lay, forgotten, the metaphor of the mirror. Stubborn to be swept away, clinging to the corner as if it were part of the floor. “The other is a mirror of you”, it sings softly. I fetched a cloth soaked in vinegar to see if I could pry it loose.

I scrub hard, for this metaphor seeps deep and collapses real otherness. I wash, so that the other may exist as a subject, a territory, a history, an opacity, and an agency of their own. I stubbornly scrub the corner so that “the other” ceases to be imprisoned in psychological projection. Amid brooms, rags, water, and vinegar, I scratch my head with tired hands… after all, this is profoundly modern… everything returns to the individual, to “my process,” to “my reflection,” to “my growth.” The metaphor of the mirror remains clinging to the corner, obstinate, while it continues to enchant those who listen to it: “shut yourself off; silence what is different; always confirm your identity; psychologize everything into linear causalities… transform everything into self-reference.”

But with every chip that breaks off, a mini-landscape is revealed. So vivid and dense. I keep rubbing, and here in the corner of the room, a field opens up, a reverberation, an ecology of impact. Wow, the mirror has shattered into fragments and the song has changed: “What impacts do we have on one another in the relational fields that exceed us?”

This place behind the mirror opens up to much greater complexity and responsibility. Here, the other is not my mirror; the other is simply another. It circulates, leaves its mark, reverberates in co-regulation and deregulation. Here there are wounds that pass from body to body, but also joy that circulates, systems that shape encounters, and so many, so many stories that precede relationships.

Here in the corner of the room, behind the metaphor of the mirror piled in the corner, there is a living river: “We are not mirrors of one another, but waters that touch.” A river in flow and movement, reminding us that when something falls into the water, there is no pure reflection. There are waves, currents, turbulence, dissipation, and the memory of movement.

In this mini-landscape there are also the mycelium threads, fragile and potent, that sing: “We are not mirrors, we are a sensitive web.” They vibrate in the network and not everything returns as a reflection. But almost everything produces consequences that traverse bodies, times, and relationships in a non-linear way.

In many voices, the mini-landscape, which I gradually unveil as I rub the metaphor in the corner of the room, also sings: “We are each other’s habitats.” This changes almost everything, for in a habitat I can both nourish and poison; generate ground or erosion; make the field more breathable or more vigilant. A living habitat that forces you to shift the question from “what does this say about me?” to: “What is being co-created between us?”

The mini-landscape that reveals itself is full of echoes, which are not identity and preserve differences. Propagation with transformation: “The other is not my mirror, and between us there are echoes.” The echo changes along the way, blending with the territory, for it depends on matter. It arrives differently, both amplifying and disappearing. And this is far more ecological and less narcissistic.

As we clear the corner of the room, the stubborn metaphor of the mirror reveals itself as a living landscape that transforms it into a metaphor of impact and reverberation. Here we recognize interdependence and preserve difference; we nurture diversity—even in conflicts, disagreements, and divergences. We acknowledge opacity and ecological responsibility, for we now know that we always operate within systems and contexts. We enter the living process, for the question was never “who am I,” but “how do I participate in life.”

I now sweep away the remnants of the fractured mirror metaphor. Fragments that continue to ask “what does the other reflect in me?” But the mini-landscape that has revealed itself, full of life, water, mycelium, and echoes, has already changed the question:

“What kind of trace do we leave on one another?”

“What relational climate do we create?”

“What reverberations do we nurture?”

“Are we increasing life or consuming the world?”

Not least because impact does not mean total guilt, much less absolute control. We speak of situated responsibility, which humbly acknowledges that so often intention differs from effect, that context, power, trauma, and history matter, and that our gestures continue to have consequences.

Perhaps it is more difficult, but it is definitely more honest.

Now that I’ve unveiled this little landscape in the corner of the room, I ask how I can co-create it, how I’ll manage to sustain more relational, ecological, and mature spaces?

Being Individual Does Not Mean Being Separate

One of the deepest paradoxes of modern hyper-individualism is the almost visceral fear that the collective will erase singularity. This fear presents itself as a defense of freedom, autonomy, and personal authenticity, but it stems from an imagination impoverished by institutional, colonial, and psychocentric modernity, which has taught the individual to imagine themselves as separate, neutral, objective, and self-founded.

The modern subject fears being dissolved by the common because, often, they only know collectives organized by obedience, homogenization, productivity, or the morality of consensus. But this image is not universal. It is a localized cultural memory. Of course, the challenge is to acknowledge that modernity tends to project itself as the norm for humanity. But this reveals, above all, a lack of imagination and an inability to listen to other ways of being an individual within a sense of belonging. What appears as independence is, in truth, a neurocolonized form of invisible dependence.

Because no individual (yes, even the modern one) has ever been independent, but has always been co-produced by institutions, markets, schools, families, therapeutic languages, self-image technologies, and forces that shape them while telling them they made themselves.

Modern colonial ignorance and deep amnesia regarding the diversity of indigenous and community cultures make it difficult to imagine that the collective need not devour the individual. In many relational worlds, the common is not an undifferentiated mass that demands the sacrifice of singularity, but a living field that offers place, ritual, history, responsibility, and grounding so that each being may actualize themselves in ecological and contextual belonging (and no, none of this extinguishes or erases conflicts, frictions, or crises; in fact, expecting this to be the case is detached romanticism that erases the complexity of things).

In these contexts, singularity is not erased but rooted; it becomes denser, more responsible, and more capable of responding to the body-place that sustains it. What hyper-individualism reads as a threat to identity — bond, obligation, reciprocity, ancestry, belonging — may be precisely the grounding that prevents the individual from becoming an empty, anxious abstraction, always incomplete, always performing value.

The paradox is that the modern subject fears losing themselves in the collective, yet is already deeply and inevitably entangled in a collective they do not recognize as such — an institutional, extractive, and normopathic collective that manufactures them as a consumer, a competitor, and an infinite project of self-optimization.

Perhaps we can reframe the question from “does the collective erase the individual” to: “what kind of collective is bringing us into being, what bonds make us more whole, and what worlds do we need to unlearn so that singularity may once again have a body, a place, and kinship?”

Eco-Fascism Will NEVER Be Ecological

I want to address something that bothers me...as I always do, in fact. This time, I’m bringing up the long, Eurocentric tradition of eco-fascism—a tradition that’s somewhat invisible but very much alive.

Eco-fascism historically emerges from the fusion of ethnic nationalism, the romanticization of “pure nature,” and authoritarian population control policies, with clear antecedents in the Blut und Boden (“Blood and Soil”) movement of Nazi Germany, where land, race, and national identity were treated as an organic unity to be protected from “contamination.”

Eco-fascism is far more present and far more alive than it may seem at first glance. Fascism wants to wear the Earth’s skin, but without entering its metabolism. It wants roots without mycelium, forest without decomposition, community without difference, belonging without reciprocity, boundaries without justice, survival without mourning, order without listening… And for this very reason, it is never ecological… because ecology begins where the fantasy of purity unravels.

To detect how alive it is within us, here are some examples of phrases and stances that seem “ecological,” but carry eco-fascist logic (you might even identify with them because they’re so normalized):

• “The planet would be better off without so many people.” — It sounds like an ecological concern, but it often shifts attention away from colonial, capitalist, and massively extractivist structures toward the existence of certain human bodies, especially those who are impoverished, racialized, or from the Global South.

• “We have to protect our resources from immigrants.” — The ecological crisis becomes a justification for militarized borders and ecological nationalism, where water, land, or climate security are viewed as the exclusive property of a single people rather than as a shared ecological heritage.

• “Nature works by natural selection; the strongest survive.” — It uses a distorted reading of ecology to naturalize hierarchy, constant competition, social abandonment, and violence, erasing cooperation, mutualism, and interdependence, which are equally central to living systems.

• “Indigenous peoples knew how to live in harmony because they were pure and close to nature.” — Although it seems complimentary, it can freeze indigenous peoples into an essentialist and anti-historical fantasy, turning them into ecological symbols rather than living, complex, diverse, and contemporary peoples.

• “We need order and discipline to save the planet.” — At first glance, this seems pragmatic, but it can pave the way for technocratic, authoritarian, and sacrificial solutions that ignore justice, plurality, and collective participation.

The common thread is that when ecology ceases to be a shared relationship and responsibility and becomes purity, control, human triage, or violent management of scarcity, it begins to slide toward ecofascist imaginaries.

*

Well then… ecofascism is “eco” only in terms of aesthetics, fear, or resource management, but it is fascist in its ontology. It uses the language of the Earth, survival, belonging, and purity, but it cannot tolerate what ecology truly demands—things like interdependence, mixing, reciprocity, vulnerability, limits, plurality, and responsibility.

The article Weaponizing Nature, Naturalizing Violence articulates this clearly: the idea that certain right-wing movements have shifted from denying the climate crisis to instrumentalizing it—not to “save the Earth,” but to save it “for specific people” and against the supposed “polluting” force of racialized people. In other words, nature is turned into a frontier, a weapon, and a technology of exclusion.

The profound difference is that ecology thinks in terms of relationship, while fascism thinks in terms of purification and exclusion.

Real ecology knows that living systems are composed of complex, impure interdependencies, symbioses, decomposition, diversity, disturbance, mutuality, and conflicts. Fascism, on the contrary, desires a clean, unified, homogeneous, obedient social body, immune to the other. Where ecology finds fertile contamination in networks and reciprocal boundaries, fascism sees hierarchical infection and contagion and dreams of domination.

Through the lens of neurocolonization, this becomes even clearer. Ahenakew, Stein, Andreotti, and co-authors describe separability as an imposed alienation that sacrifices our embodiment within the living metabolism of the Earth. This separability cuts humans off from nature, from one another, from themselves, and from their responsibilities, creating hierarchies among species, cultures, and individuals. In contrast, the paradigm of entanglement recognizes the inseparable interconnection with the broader web of life. Fascism is an extreme intensification of separability, of this perverse “us” against “them,” pure body against infected body, one’s own territory against surplus life.

For this very reason, ecofascism is not a radical ecology, but an ecology captured by the fascist wound of separation. At times, it even acknowledges ecological collapse, but responds with the grammar of domination—through triage, sacrifice, expulsion, reproductive control, militarization of borders, and privatization of water, land, food, and mobility.

The ecological crisis ceases to be a crisis of shattered relationships and becomes the excuse for deciding who deserves to live.

Fascism has a necropolitical relationship with life by loving an abstract, mythical, monumental, maternal, or national Nature, but it hates concrete life when it is migrant, racialized, impoverished, queer, disabled, mixed-race, excessive, unpredictable, or untamable. It loves the forest as a symbol of the homeland, but not necessarily as a living assembly of fungi, animals, decomposers, bacteria, waters, fires, seeds, and peoples. It loves the “Earth” as identity-defining property, but not as a relative that decenters the human.

Blume helps draw a contrast with other perspectives, particularly Indigenous ones. He notes that these cosmologies place Creation at the center of existence. Relationships with Creation are at the heart of health and well-being, and these relationships do not imply hierarchy, but rather belonging. Blume is explicit in stating that hierarchies create imbalance in an interdependent system: there is no psychological health in using or harming others for one’s own gain, and respecting Creation implies respecting all entities as sacred and interconnected. This is the opposite of fascist logic:

• Fascism may consider itself naturalistic, but not ecological. It may invoke soil, blood, forest, animality, natural order, fertility, tradition, and roots. But it does so to fix identities and legitimize hierarchies.

• It may be environmentalist, but not ecological. It may advocate conservation, austerity, rurality, anti-consumerism, or population limits. But if it does so without justice, without colonial memory, without reparations, and without reciprocity, it transforms ecology into a violent administration of scarcity.

• It may speak of interdependence, but it cannot bear it. Because true interdependence dismantles the sovereign center, compels accountability for impact, demands coexistence with difference, imposes limits on power, and reveals that no one is saved alone.

• It may love the Earth as a mother, but it does not listen to her as a subject. The Earth becomes a backdrop, property, a mythical origin, or a female body to be protected/controlled—not a relative, an agent, a living community, or a field of reciprocal obligations.

The idea of the Pluriverse reminds us that community can be hijacked by xenophobia, patriarchy, or parochialism, and therefore needs to be thought of critically, as a living, inclusive, and relational process, not as a closed essence. The Pluriverse is defined as “a world where many worlds fit,” in opposition to Eurocentric universality and the false solutions that repeat the logic of the One. Fascism is precisely a machine of monoculture and anti-Pluriverse, for it tolerates only one world, one people, one order, one history, and one legitimate body.

In truth, eco-fascism is an attempt to respond to ecological collapse without abandoning—much less acknowledging—the ontology that produced it: separability, supremacy, scarcity, property, purity, and subjugation. Therefore, it is not an ecology of life, but a management of death with green vocabulary.

Here is a brief comparative framework:

• Eco-fascism — Nature as homeland; Identity-based purity; Border and exclusion; Militarized scarcity; Homogeneous social body; Naturalized hierarchy; Survival of “our own”; Sacrificial death of others.

• Living Ecology — Earth as kin; Interdependent diversity; Relationship and responsibility; Shared limits and justice; Plural and situated community; Mutuality and reciprocity; Continuity of the web of life; Repair of broken relationships.

There are fascisms that paint themselves green, but life does not grow in purity. It grows in humus, in mixture, in difficult kinship, in the difference and contrast that compels maturity.

An ecology that must expel, purify, or sacrifice in order to exist has ceased to be ecology: it has become organized fear against life.

References:

• Ahmann, Chloe, Mona Bhan, Alexandra Coțofană, Radhika Govindrajan, Julia Leser, Zeynep Oguz, Yuka Suzuki, and Noah Theriault. “Weaponizing Nature, Naturalizing Violence: Anthropologies of Ecofascism.” American Anthropologist (2025): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.70043.

• Ahenakew, Cash, Sharon Stein, Vanessa Andreotti, Ninawa Inu Huni Kui, Lisa Taylor, Stacey Prince, Jaya Ramesh, Chelsea Williams, Rene Suša, Rose Vukovic, and Claudia Diaz-Diaz. “Decolonizing Mental Health in the Polycrisis: Pathways Toward Neuro-Decolonization.” American Psychologist 80, no. 8 (2025): 1297–1312. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001540.

• Blume, Arthur W. A New Psychology Based on Community, Equality, and Care of the Earth: An Indigenous American Perspective. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2020.

• Kothari, Ashish, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria, and Alberto Acosta, eds. Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2019.

• Four Arrows, and Darcia Narvaez. Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2022.

• Machado de Oliveira, Vanessa. Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity, and Collapse with Accountability and Compassion. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2025.

• Batalha, Sofia. Preparation and In-Depth Study Session 5 EcoPsi EDT: Indigenous Psychologies. Internal teaching material from the Introduction to Ecopsychology Course, 2026.

» (Un)Learning Eco-Mythic Trails

» Eco-Therapeutic Counseling—Conversations through the Art of Listening and Silence

Human history has never been merely human. Even when narrated as a struggle for resources, territorial expansion, or a power struggle, it has always been inherently ecological, even when reduced to the logic of conflict and scarcity. The so-called “struggle for resources” is already a relationship with territory, climate, soil fertility, water availability, within cycles of abundance and collapse. Even the most instrumental view of history remains an entanglement between human bodies and specific landscapes. In fact, economics might just be ecology translated into graphs and conflict.

There is another aspect, less visible and more intimate: culture and place have never been separate. Every language is born from the earth, and every cosmology is shaped by a biome. Agricultural rhythms, mythologies, architecture, social organization—everything emerges in response to the conditions of a specific habitat. The desert produces forms of attention different from those of the forest. The mountain produces a different relationship with distance, risk, and verticality. The coast teaches cycles, tides, and crossing. Culture is not an abstraction but a condition of internalized ecology.

Modernity was, possibly, the moment when we (the institutionalized, urban, and tech-industrial set of humans) began to tell history as if it were merely human, as if locations were neutral. What we call “history” is always the dance between terrestrial metabolism and human imagination.

There is no subject outside the biome that sustains it. There are only different ways, more or less conscious, but always localized, of participating (or consuming) in it.

Dissolving the artificial separation between ecology, history, and culture.

Once that separation dissolves, myth can no longer be treated as a merely symbolic narrative. It becomes ecological memory embodied through culture. For this to happen, we need to expose how, even the supposedly “rational” domains of modernity, remain ecological at their core, only abstracted toward consumeristic extraction, obsessive mathematized quantification, and political negotiation. Indeed, one of the central violences of modernity is not simply extraction but abstraction. This happens relentlessly when land is reduced to “resource,” rivers to “infrastructure,” forests to “timber,” bodies to “labor,” seasons to “productivity cycles,” and myth to “belief systems.” The ecological relation never disappeared, but it was severed, institutionalized, and managed.

I refuse this institutionalized flattening, while not romanticizing ecological entanglement, for there is a trap of imagining ecology as harmony. But ecology also contains violence, predation, asymmetry, collapse, and adaptation. Let’s keep in mind that even war, scarcity, empire, and territorial conflict are ecological relations—consequences of drought, soil exhaustion, water access, migration pressure, climate instability, or agricultural collapse.

All this to say that eco-mythology cannot merely unfold as “nature spirituality.” It must also remember and confront extractive mythologies, imperial ecologies, colonial landscapes, engineered scarcity, and ecologies of domination. Again, like I say elsewhere, mythology is always intersectional, made from cosmology entangled with labor and food systems, architecture and infrastructure, kinship and migration patterns, technologies of survival, gendered bodies of work, ritual seasons, and political governance. Like I’ve said many times in my classes: “A fishing culture mythologizes differently from a mountain pastoral culture because attention itself is ecologically shaped.” This is not a metaphor, but material, sensorial, and temporal contextual relations. Yet so potent and so subtle all at once.

Culture is not an abstraction but a form of internalized ecology. Culture is not merely symbolic production, but embedded ecological relations. The infamous myth that history unfolds on passive ground may be one of modernity’s deepest delusions. For the ground was never passive. It sings, and holds, and eats. It screams and dreams, and remembers. It always remembers while it digests all bodies.

Let’s hold the paradox that empire, capitalism, and colonialism are ecological. That borders are ecological reorganizations. Industrialization is ecological metabolism accelerated wayyyyyyy beyond regenerative thresholds. Even the fantasy of transcendence from ecology is itself an ecological phenomenon. And once we realize this, myth changes and shapeshifts. It stops being stories about reality and becomes ways societies metabolize their ecological embeddedness. Some myths deepen reciprocity and sustain coexistence, while others justify extraction, normalize domination, and erase dependence altogether.

Which means myths are not secondary cultural artifacts, but ecological compasses of orientation.

Let’s dismantle another modern illusion, such as the separation between interior and exterior worlds. Let’s assume that living landscapes shape cognition, not only economically or politically, but sensorially, perceptually, emotionally, and temporally. Myth emerges not only from “ideas” but also from embodied sensorial kinship and participation with a habitat.

Desert adjusts silence.
Forest reorganizes proximity.
Sea accommodates uncertainty.
Mountain responds to scale.

This is where eco-mythological yield becomes incredibly rich—myth as ecological phenomenology. Not merely stories abstractly told in places or “of” places, but stories generated through sustained bodily participation in specific worlds. Places that tell stories through bodies, including human bodies.

Eco-mythology proposes a metabolic, ecological, and situated subject, always assembled by multi-relationalities. Again, we are never outside biomes. This directly opposes the modern liberal subject—autonomous, self-contained, universal, placeless. This all means that there is no universal mythology, let alone a neutral, pure, or absolute one. Only situated mythic polylogues with particular ways of cosmic and earthly entanglement. A local myth remains accountable to rivers, droughts, ancestors, seasons, and specific ecologies, while an imperial myth detaches itself from place to universalize—modern imperial myths need abstraction because empire relies on mass portability and reproducibility. This detachment produces a dangerous haze, incorporated in the illusion of neutrality, objectivity, universality, and placeless grounds.

But underneath it all, the ecological relation remains.

It always remains.

Disavowed, but alive.

So let’s return history itself back into the biosphere, not “human history” plus ecology.
But history as ecology thinking and reorganizing itself through human bodies, myths, infrastructures, conflicts, and imaginations.

Subscribe now

Share

Join us — “Beyond the Paradox Course”

Gathering a learning community from around the world, this course will help you to embrace the deeper roots of the ecological crisis and explore pathways of healing, from the philosophical and mythological dimensions down to practical tools and actions.

📍 Live on Zoom
🗓 June 9 – July 2
🕔 Tuesdays & Thursdays | 5–7 PM GMT

As an experiment in post-capitalist learning, the course is offered without a paywall. Contribute according to your capacity. No one turned away for lack of funds.