3 HEALING

Wholistic Assessment of Disease and Discontent

When it comes to healing, the word wholistic is generally understood to refer to the connections between a person’s body, mind, emotions, and spirit and how each contributes to human health.²¹ This framing, however, requires some expansion when considering the ecologizing perspective, since human health cannot be separated from community, environmental, and planetary health. This link goes both ways: humans are affected by the health of the air, water, and soil around them and the plants and animals they ingest; likewise, the air, water, soil, flora, and fauna are affected by the health of humans, that is, by the individual and cultural health of human bodies, emotions, ideas, ontologies, epistemologies, and cultural norms. Just as our environment cannot be healed by attending to only one river, one species, or one mining site at a time, so too our mental and physical well-being cannot be fully addressed by focusing on one mental health diagnosis, cognitive “disorder,” or social issue at a time. Indeed, cancer and river pollution may be linked, as might schizophrenia and air quality as well as systemic racism and diabetes.

From an ecologizing perspective, healing means shifting focus from individual humans to our relationships with each other and all-our-relations and also to the cultural practices, assumptions, and beliefs impacting these relationships. This healing is embedded in personal and cultural ways of being and knowing and in daily habits. While rivers, grasslands, whales, and others need healing, the source of global environmental destruction is not located in them. The source of most ecological ill health—and much contemporary human illness—is located in contemporary, techno-industrial human culture and the way it is absorbed and enacted by individuals and societies upon all bodies. That is why, in this chapter, when we talk about healing, we mostly focus on what needs to heal in humans—more specifically, in particular human cultures—in order to right the relationships between humans and coral reefs, old-growth forests, endangered frogs, and so on. Further to this, we recognize that reefs and forests tend to self-heal when they avoid particular kinds of human attention.²² Our aim is not to begin with human healing and then move to environmental healing, but rather to recognize the two as indelibly linked.

These kinds of healings can be difficult because they require actively swimming against the tide of mainstream culture. For some, that journey means an unsettling exploration into unchartered social, emotional, cognitive, and ecological territory. For others, this journey feels like a returning—regaining the right to “come home” to one’s traditional culture, family culture, or childhood understanding of the world. Regardless of one’s personal path, it’s helpful to recognize the systemic barriers to such healing and the ways we may have internalized them. By pushing against these barriers—these values, assumptions, and practices of mainstream culture—we create enough distance to see broader connections. In so doing, we might begin to heal the beliefs and values that put our own beings and the other beings of the earth at so much risk.

The standard medical model looks at a person’s ailments in isolation.²³ Seen from an ecologizing perspective, however, a person’s ailments—just like the ailments of the Western Pine, the Chicago River, and those resulting from the COVID virus—must be understood within the broader context of relationships and environmental contexts. With rates of anxiety and other mood disorders rapidly rising across much of the world,²⁴ tremendous effort has been spent examining potential flaws in human biochemistry. In contrast, remarkably little effort has been spent considering the ways dramatic environmental changes—such as pesticide accumulations,²⁵ a thinning stratosphere,²⁶ a 30 percent increase in ocean acidification,²⁷ and never-before-experienced levels of cellular and electromagnetic radiation²⁸—might impact human biochemistry. And almost no one is asking what it might be about the culture itself that is causing such a rise in suffering.²⁹

Some might point a finger at environmental movements and suggest that the stress of hearing about these ecological crises raises stress hormones and contributes to unwellness. But that claim assumes humans are not connected to the world around them and have no mechanisms for detecting stress in our environments. It also returns us to the troubling happiness narrative and an assumption that “not knowing” is somehow natural and psychologically sound. Human physiology is a delicate thing. It is hard to believe that massive planetary changes would not influence human well-being. Imagining that humans are utterly immune might seem “logical” from a stoutly individualistic worldview. But as we have seen, humans are not detached self-supporting entities, and the notion that we are must be completely rejected. From our inherited and ingested microbes to our ability to care and create relationships to our dependence upon water, nutrients, and sunlight, our bodies are the very manifestations of interconnections and interdependencies.

Seen from this perspective, perhaps anxiety and depression are not mental illnesses rooted in individual biochemistry as we’ve been led to believe. By taking a broad view of mental health, other analysts have already concluded that the biochemical model for treating these disorders (1) is unsupported by the research,³⁰ (2) is largely not working,³¹ and (3) makes little sense from a sociocultural perspective.³² Perhaps anxiety and depression can be better understood as an alarm system rooted in relationship. Perhaps it’s a built-in mechanism, part of our evolutionary design, intended to pull our species back from the brink of a shared disaster. What if the burgeoning crisis merely evidences a fracture in the profound primacy of our relationships—a flashing emergency light intended to remind us of how intimately connected we are to Mackerel, Ocean, and the tens of millions of other humans around the globe currently taking mood medication?

When we recognize the world as a deeply connected, entangled mesh of relationships, massive rates of mood disorders begin to resemble a symptom of a problem rather than the problem itself. That problem may well be disconnection, disruption, and shared trauma. A symptom, of course, is not a malfunction of the body, designed to bring random suffering. Rather, it is a warning of illness, a message that deeper healing is needed. Perhaps the message is that the cultural stance of isolated beings is dangerously unsustainable. The invitation presented is a shift back to relationship—to heal what is within the relationship, not within the isolated self. Set within the context of standard psychology and medical care, however, these messages most often go unheard. The “successful” patient is the one who realigns with the acceptable status quo and learns to tune out and deny the rest. Meanwhile, mood medication consumption increased 3,001 percent from 1991 to 2018 in the United States alone.³³ And only now are medical establishments beginning to consider the potentially far-reaching effects for humans, animals, and plants of mood medication runoff in our soils and waterways.³⁴

Americans don’t deal well with grief, as Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, the director of the Trauma Stewardship Institute in the United States, recently pointed out: “We don’t talk about loss. By and large, it’s all about consumption to help numb you out.”³⁵ The earth is in a collective state of grief right now, as habitats are being destroyed and unprecedented numbers of species are becoming extinct. Is it too much of a stretch to imagine that some of the earth’s humans can sense this aching loss, this feeling that something is “not quite right” or profoundly “off” about the health of the planet?

In other health matters, although it’s not yet known where COVID originated, one theory posits that human encroachment on animal habitats has brought diseased animals into greater contact with humans.³⁶ And higher pollution rates, we now know, are linked to more severe outcomes for humans who contract the disease.³⁷ Meanwhile, whole books have been devoted to explaining robust and complex links between cancer and the environment.³⁸ In the documentary The Wisdom of Trauma renowned medical doctor Gabor Maté sums this discussion up: “In the United States, the richest society in history, fully half of the citizens have a chronic disorder, such as high blood pressure or diabetes. Anxiety amongst young people is growing rapidly. Asthma and autoimmune diseases are on the rise, as are addictions. Depression is rising. Youth suicide is rising. All is not well.”³⁹ It seems the deterioration of the planet’s health is running in tandem with human mental health. Ultimately, it may not be possible to have true human well-being without ecological well-being, and both are entwined with seemingly disparate issues, such as Indigenous reconciliation, racial justice, gender rights, and many others.

Your well-being and that of the world’s children is important. When we are mentally unwell and physically ill—or, worse, are rushing from crisis to crisis—we lack the capacity to make the kinds of deep cultural changes needed at this time. When in survival mode, we are low on the mental, emotional, and physical resources needed to cope with complexities. The same may be true for those of us traumatized by standard schooling, systemic racism, or a host of other traumas linked to contemporary North American culture. Yet, due to an individualistic focus, the solutions offered by contemporary mainstream culture are too narrow in scope to truly engage with this substantive work.

Mainstream neoliberal culture separates us from the natural world and in so doing contributes to ill health. This alienation then leads to further destruction of the planet and deepening health challenges—and finally to the problematic, self-fulfilling move to blame these challenges on the isolated individual. Too great a burden is placed on individuals, who are expected to fix themselves, even when the culture itself is making them ill. As Maté articulates, “The very essence of the society we live in, then—organized around disconnection, individualism, and compromised authenticity—breeds trauma, and thus engenders ill health.”⁴⁰

We’ve been talking here about the subtle but pervasive ways that mainstream culture undermines emotional, cognitive, and physical well-being. Across the globe, however, droughts, floods, storms, heat waves, and wildfires are having a brutal, direct impact on human lives. An alliance of the American Psychological Association and Eco-America reports that, as homes, lives, livelihoods, and communities are lost due to climate change, “increases in trauma and shock, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), compound stress, anxiety, substance abuse, and depression” are occurring.⁴¹ Impacted communities experience elevated rates of violence and mental health emergencies, along with “loss of social identity and cohesion, hostility, violence, and interpersonal and intergroup aggression.” The alliance notes that women, children, the poor, the disabled, the elderly, Indigenous communities, and some communities of color are particularly at risk. Most importantly, they assert that “climate solutions are available now, are widespread, and support psychological health.”

Rather than gripping tightly to outdated ideologies, we would do well to look at what actually contributes to improved well-being—for us and for our fellow humans and more-than-human kin. If we come together to lean in and learn from all-our-relations, we may begin to understand our illnesses as having meaning that goes beyond ourselves. We are sick because the earth is unwell. And the earth’s illnesses are, in part, a product of alienation, extending beyond just the physical to include the mental, emotional, and relational. Working from a sense of innate belonging, we can turn to the earth to heal through relationships—through living with, touching, breathing in, and protecting the wild places that live around, touch, breathe with, and protect us.

The Gift of Healing

When Anton, a neurodivergent boy, first arrived at the Maple Ridge Environmental School in grade 1, he had difficulty interacting with other children in socially appropriate ways. Consequently, he lived on the fringes of the group until, as resource teacher Jodi MacQuarrie put it, “he made inroads with one student.”⁴² At the environmental school, just like at his previous school, Anton’s nervous system would often become either over- or understimulated by noise. Back at his conventional school, these nervous-system interferences were probably calmed with white-noise headsets, balls, fiddle toys, and a sensory room. At the ecologizing school, Anton has found other ways to cope with these challenges. He quickly gravitated to sticks and pinecones as fiddle toys. And the less-structured approach at the environmental school allows him to find places, micro-niches, that help him to self-regulate without interventions and in interesting ways. An open field or an ordered woodcut becomes a haven from overstimulation, and a riparian zone or ecotonal area filled with diversity becomes the location for counteracting understimulation. The freedom to move his body as needed allows these interactions with the space and place to occur in rich ways.

Anton’s relationships with other children improved when he began to successfully manage his sensory load. Doing so required increasing self-awareness and complex negotiation of natural spaces. Through being attuned to self and by experimenting with locale, all of Anton’s relationships improved. The diverse terrain and beings that Anton encountered in various locations healed through relationship to place. How different this was from the standard sensory room that neurodivergent students like Anton often experience. Anton came to know the trees, bushes, and birds that frequented these diverse spaces. Essentially, he learned to locate himself in the landscapes that were emotionally, mentally, and physically supportive of him. On top of this, as he developed this care for and interest in the place and its myriad denizens, he began to develop skills needed to be a good bird watcher (for Anton it was all about birds). Careful “fox steps” (slow movements), “owl eyes” (scanning vision), and “deer ears” (attentive listening)⁴³ became important skills for Anton, which also became helpful and transferrable skills in other settings. “The library is a good place to use our fox steps, Anton,” teacher might remind.

Western science has only recently turned toward the idea that being in nature may confer cognitive, emotional, and physical benefits. Research in this field is relatively new, extremely promising, and likely to develop significantly over the next decade or so. It seems that every year new studies uncover yet another reason to celebrate walking in forests, swimming in natural bodies of water, and interacting with soil. In insidious and invisible ways, modern humanmade spaces sometimes undermine health, relationships, and the profound connection between them, but the benefits of natural spaces may be rendered similarly invisible due to cultural biases. While it is obvious that encounters with falling trees, cougars, and other natural dangers remind us of the need for responsible and informed outdoor experiences, the inherent boons of experiencing wilder green spaces have been largely overlooked by Western science until recently.

Where mainstream culture struggles to resolve burgeoning anxiety and other mental health disorders, nature exposure offers some perhaps surprising protections and remedies. Researchers studied almost a million Danish residents and discovered a link between the amount of green space children were exposed to and the likelihood of them developing a psychiatric disorder. Specifically, children who grew up around fewer forests, fields, and parks were 55 percent more likely to develop schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, an eating disorder, and other psychiatric disorders by the teen years or young adulthood.⁴⁴ The study controlled for socioeconomic factors, family history of mental illness, and even urbanization. Elsewhere, ecopsychologists have been exploring the mental health advantages of open-water swimming and horticulture therapy.⁴⁵ Looking at studies from countries across the globe, Masashi Soga and colleagues concluded that regular gardening results in “a wide range of health outcomes, such as reductions in depression, anxiety, and body mass index, as well as increases in life satisfaction, quality of life, and sense of community.”⁴⁶ The environmental scientist Ming Kuo concludes: “The range of specific health outcomes tied to nature is startling, including depression and anxiety disorder, diabetes mellitus, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), various infectious diseases, cancer, healing from surgery, obesity, birth outcomes, cardiovascular disease, musculoskeletal complaints, migraines, respiratory disease, and others.… Finally, neighborhood greenness has been consistently tied to life expectancy and all-cause mortality.”⁴⁷ Even with limited research, we’re already seeing that nature exposure can benefit aspects of human cognition, behavior, physiology, and psychology in wide-reaching ways.

Kuo and others have tried to identify precisely how human health benefits from nature exposure.⁴⁸ Numerous theories have been posited. One suggests that the benefits of nature exposure are linked to human psychology. People tend to relax when they see the color green or hear the sound of ocean waves or trickling water. Kuo notes that health benefits could be a result of “deep relaxation, attention restoration, impulse control” along with better air quality, physical activity, social ties, and sleep.⁴⁹ On the other hand, perhaps the benefits are less about human psychology and more about the way the body processes sensory and somatic experiences. Fractals are geometric patterns of diminishing sizes commonly found in nature, such as the spiral of a snail shell or the narrowing of a fern frond. Providing both comfort and stimulation to humans, the mathematical design of fractals “evokes active interest” and “allow[s] for inward attention and restoration,” according to Caroline Hägerhäll and her team of researchers.⁵⁰ They also discovered that natural soundscapes, such as birdsong and ocean waves, induced a feeling of tranquility and may contribute to “stress recovery,” while humanmade soundscapes of the same volume and quality were consistently perceived as more aggravating.⁵¹

It seems, though, that many of the health benefits of nature tend toward physiological pathways rather than sensory or psychological ones. Negative air ions, found in high concentrations near waterfalls and in forests, appear to reduce depression and improve cognitive function while offering a host of other potential benefits that are still being studied.⁵² Inhaling phytoncides (microscopic organic compounds that drift off plant matter) increases natural killer cells, which help the immune system fight infections and cancer.⁵³ Exposure to dirt, particularly from wild soils as opposed to urban or monocropped soils, appears to increase beneficial gut microbes, which reduces the risk of food allergies, asthma, and other inflammatory diseases.⁵⁴ Winfried Blum and colleagues suggest that, in light of the increase in diseases associated with the human intestinal microbiome, “it may be useful to adopt a different perspective and to consider the human intestinal microbiome as well as the soil/root microbiome as ‘superorganisms’ which, by close contact, replenish each other with inoculants, genes and growth-sustaining molecules.”⁵⁵ Kuo concludes that the nature-health dynamic can likely be best summed up by suggesting that nature simply “enhance[s] immune function.”⁵⁶ This is just a brief overview of what constitutes a rapidly growing body of evidence about previously unknown (at least in the West) health impacts of living in and being regularly exposed to our natural habitats as a species.

Beyond the question of how nature benefits health is yet another question: Why does nature benefit human health? If our more-than-human neighbors predominantly experience humans as a blight upon the earth (more about this belief later), wouldn’t they have collectively evolved to ward us off? Individual species of flora and fauna have done this or do this in moments as necessary. Poison Oak and its cousins leave an itchy and blistering “do not touch” message on human skin but are harmless to dogs, birds, and most other animals.⁵⁷ Yet even here, the situation is much more complex than it initially appears. Indigenous Americans used the cooked poison oak plant medicinally to treat dysentery and diarrhea, while the dried and powdered plant was used effectively to heal wounds.⁵⁸ In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan traces the mutuality of the relationship of humans and several plants—Apple, Tulip, Marijuana, Potato—suggesting, quite compellingly, that these beings are equally involved in the back and forth “manipulation” of humans for their own benefit.⁵⁹

Ultimately, answering the why does nature help us question takes us into the realm of worldviews. Sheridan and Longboat remind us that, from a Haudenosaunee perspective, all imaginative solutions and creative ideas are gifted from our more-than-human relations and that this gifting is a fundamental design to life on earth.⁶⁰ In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, the plant ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer explains: “We make a grave error if we try to separate individual well-being from the health of the whole. The gift of abundance from pecans is also a gift to themselves. By sating squirrels and people, the trees are ensuring their own survival.”⁶¹ Kimmerer explains a worldview wherein “random acts of kindness” from the land are freely available to the humble and open-eyed.⁶² In the gift worldview, abundance, connection, respect, responsibility, and gratitude are key, while reciprocity is the central feature.⁶³ The gift worldview contradicts many aspects of human life that neoliberal capitalism pedals as fact: that nothing worthwhile is freely given, that everything can be purchased, that the world is fundamentally a place of competition, and that scarcity is the driving truth of our existence. In fact, many humans have been so conditioned by this “logic” that even when freely offered a gift—a compliment, a basket of strawberries, a paid day off work—their automatic response is either to refuse—Oh, no, I’m not deserving. I haven’t earned it—or to be suspicious of the giver’s motive—What are the strings attached? What do you want from me?

If we begin to see the world as a place of abundance, the yearning and urgency to participate in consumerism wane. Wildflowers offer rich stashes of Pollen to Butterfly. Maple offers diverse climbing experiences for children. Fresh water, clean air, firewood, basket-making materials, Blackberry, Thimbleberry, Fiddlehead, Stinging Nettle, Salmon, and Clam are a few of the gifts offered in our generous region of the world. All these gifts are operating in relation, in complex circles and cycles of reciprocity. Salmon offers self to Bear, Bear leaves parts of Salmon as gifts to Cedar (see the nitrogen cycle), Cedar provides shade and holds soil that keeps water cool and clear, which is the perfect home for wee Salmon.

Kimmerer clarifies, “In the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships.”⁶⁴ Gifts entail responsibilities to respect the spaces and lives of these species, to respect them with gratitude, humility, and an eye toward our shared future. While not all ecosystems are the same, generosity and reciprocity are primary qualities of the majority of Earth’s terrain. Kimmerer invites us to consider the “honorable harvest,” where we respect nature’s gifts, ask before taking, take only what’s needed, and share the bounty.⁶⁵ When humans see the world as a place of complex supportive interactions, natural abundance, and gifts—rather than a place where they must “compete ferociously, even pitilessly, to maintain or improve [their] position”⁶⁶—they tend to turn toward more generous, reciprocal, cooperative, and relational ways of being in the world. They accept nature’s gift of healing.

Linear Time and the “White Man’s Apocalypse”

Climate change and other anthropogenically caused environmental challenges are tragically impacting ecosystems and individual species, but are they causing increasing crisis, unrest, and health challenges in human lives? Your answer to that question depends, in part, on who you are. Over the past several centuries, white people (particularly men) and the wealthy have tended to live stable, prosperous lives where “progress” and comfort are linked to income. Many people in these groups have been shocked and galvanized as news of climate change has become a daily, no longer ignorable event. Activists working from this standpoint might call on fellow humans to mobilize and attend to the urgency—before all hell breaks loose.

However, many African Americans note that all hell broke loose a long way back. “Armageddon been-in-effect”⁶⁷ for hundreds of years, as the hip-hop group Public Enemy put it. African American individuals and communities have faced and continue to face uncertain, disrupted, environmentally degraded,⁶⁸ and dangerous conditions on a daily basis. Segregation, the “war on drugs,”⁶⁹ racialized incarceration, deaths at the hands of police officers, doubled rates of COVID-19 deaths,⁷⁰ and stress caused by systemic and chronic racism, which tends to wear down the body and reduces life spans,⁷¹ are all affecting health and well-being. Additionally, African Americans tend to have to live in more environmentally problematic areas. These realities—often overlooked by white activists—caused one recent Afrocentrism conference attendee to comment that this climate change disaster is just “the white man’s apocalypse” and that “the world has always been coming to an end for Black people.”⁷²

Similarly, genocide, repeated plagues, residential school systems, loss of land, and outlawed and suppressed cultures have prevented a sense of stability, security, health, and well-being for nations of Indigenous peoples. The turmoil of today’s heightened natural disasters and COVID-19 epidemic are set within a wider context of disruptions. Stan Rushworth reports:

Between 1848 and the late 1870s, there was a 90 percent population reduction of California Indians. That’s what I would call a disruptive time for Indigenous people.… So, to me, these disruptive times are more of the same. When you have sixty million buffalo killed in sixty years, forty million killed in one twelve-year period, in order to starve the Plains people into submission in the 1800s, that’s the same kind of thing. So, to the destruction people now are saying is “the end of life as we know it,” I say, “well, talk to … an Indigenous person if you want to know what that’s like.”⁷³

The phrase “the end of life as we know it” contains different shades of meaning depending on who is hearing it.

It’s tempting to point out that for the more-than-humans of the earth, the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been. Although Bison, American Chestnut, Ohio River, Atlantic Cod populations, and a great many others have suffered ecocide, the scale of what’s to come is unprecedented. The earth is in the sixth mass extinction.⁷⁴ Almost all our more-than-human brothers and sisters are at risk. Consequently, one might feel quite justified in shouting—for the sake of the earth: We must stop the ecocide now! There’s no more time to waste!

Yet, according to some, it’s precisely this attitude that has caused so much harm. As Rushworth responds, “There has never been time to waste.” He believes that a major part of the problem lies with notions of linear time and with the fixation that now is independent of both past and future. When we conceive of time as a line aiming into an infinite future—where the present moment is a singular dot and the past extends “way back there”—we tend to see the past as irretrievable and the future as untouched. We are then accountable to neither.

Linearity is associated with ecologically problematic notions of efficiency and progress. And its focus tends to land on a small window of now, which leads to values that prioritize quick fixes over complex thinking, short-term gains over long-term impacts, and infrastructure development over preservation of wild spaces. Linear notions of time also make little room for the accounting of generational errors or suffering, for studying the cultural path that has led to looming ecological collapse, and for untangling the complexity of errors that link the two together. It also can lead us into solutions and responses that exacerbate the problems because the responses are arising within the same framework that caused the problems in the first place. Humans know what is best. Science will pull us through. We now know enough to make the right decisions around conservation, stewardship, and the natural world. For example, as Naomi Klein points out, many of the proposed eco-technicist solutions to climate change (for example, putting iron filings into the oceans and billions of mirrors into the atmosphere) are only likely to create further unanticipated problems.⁷⁵ Think of invasive species. Think of DDT as a pesticide. We usually think our interventions and manipulations of the environment are a good idea at the time.

Many Indigenous traditions view time in much less linear ways. In other words, what happened long ago may be close at hand and critical to the current moment and the future. The genocide of millions of Indigenous peoples is intricately woven with ongoing ecocide. Rushworth explains: “If everything is connected across time and space, then your sense of responsibility is to the entirety of time and space. If you see that everything you do through every day expands through all time and space, then there is no room for lack of responsibility.”⁷⁶ Linearity, however, posits mainstream North American culture in a perpetual present, leaning toward the future. From that perspective, “history” becomes a “topic” to be studied and put away, like a textbook slipped back into a desk, rather than a literal living breathing reality of the present and the future. Bayo Akomolafe suggests that mainstream conceptions of time are degrading along with the environment and more ancient understandings are being revitalized and renewed:

In fact, the Anthropocene does something queer and perverse to spacetime—upsetting its presumed linearity and unidirectionality, making the past contemporaneous with the present, and resituating the “future” with the present and the past in the thick “now.” Time folds and melds in the Anthropocene the way taffy folds in on itself in the levers of a machine. My people, the Yoruba people, speak of circular time, slushy time, or time that collapses on itself. There are no arrows of time that fly forwards in Yoruba indigenous imagination; none of the incessant tick-tocking that has fuelled progress, that has become the soundtrack of our busy, delimited lives.⁷⁷

Fueled by false beliefs in progress, North American settlers drained marshes, paved meadows, felled forests, and overused the planet to build schools and create a workforce to carry on the project of progress into an infinite and bright future.

Ecologizing education seeks to slow down this relentless forward momentum. When children study tree rings and geology, they begin to see that time is experienced in a variety of ways by our more-than-human relations and is far more complex than a line. Although we may not know for sure how our more-than-human relations operate, it seems that many plants and animals orient their lives around seasons, which are by definition cyclical, not linear. A river too may appear linear at first glance. But at any given point, it embodies the past—in the form of sediment, plant debris, salmon smolts, and the mineral memory of snow and ice. Carrying this recent and distant past, the river crashes on in a fleeting but perpetual present, as it rushes toward the future only to return to the headwaters as fresh rain in a month or a year’s time. The future and past are made present again. In this way, a river’s embodiment of time is innately entangled with past-present-future in a paradoxical knot of fluidity.

Nonlinear conceptions of time allow for deeper personal, community, and ecological healing. Some African American artists and scholars have turned to the philosophical and artistic movement of Afrofuturism (and retro-Afrofuturism) to locate hope, justice, and identity in the past-present-future. They see Afrofuturist novels, theatre productions, and music as opportunities to “critically review and repurpose lost avenues and buried horizons, as they reassess, reinvent and re-turn the past so as to unearth and infiltrate new futures into the present.”⁷⁸ We sense that this hopeful move, toward recognizing one’s rich roots, toward what some Canadian scholars are calling “resurgence,” is a clear part of the path to cultural change and healing.

Afrofuturism’s approach to time, as Tobias Van Veen explains, is aligned with sankofa, a Twi language word from Ghana, meaning “go back and get it.”⁷⁹ The Black Student Union at the University of Illinois explains sankofa this way: “ ‘Sankofa’ teaches us that we must go back to our roots in order to move forward. That is, we should reach back and gather the best of what our past has to teach us, so that we can achieve our full potential as we move forward. Whatever we have lost, forgotten, forgone, or been stripped of can be reclaimed, revived, preserved, and perpetuated.”⁸⁰ We highlight Afrofuturism, sankofa, as more spacious orientations to time to encourage individuals and communities to creatively respond to the questions of time and healing in ways that are personally, culturally, locally significant to them and to the places they inhabit.

An ecological approach to healing comes from honest recognition of uncomfortable emotions and a more wholistic understanding of time and our interconnectedness. We cannot heal alone. We need to heal together, with each other and with our more-than-human relations. Rushworth⁸¹ believes that all of us—regardless of our cultural background—contain within us the memory of how to live well with the earth. It is time to “go back and get” what we lost, what we left behind or forgot, so more-than-humans and humans might heal together.

Healing the Wounds of Privilege and Power

Just as divergent emotions—say, joy and grief—may spring from the same source, so too might seemingly unconnected social issues. Indeed, many social issues are linked with ecologizing work. For example, eco-feminists have drawn attention to the parallels between men’s treatment of nature and of women, suggesting that both nature and women are oppressed by the power dynamics inherent in patriarchal societies. The bodies of both have been subjected to violence, control, and domination. Val Plumwood maintains that the “backgrounding” and “instrumentalisation” of women and nature result from cultures being overly reliant on emotionally detached rationality.⁸² Gilligan and Snider clarify that men also suffer under these systems because they are pressured to sever deep emotional attachments in order to conform to narrow parameters of socially accepted behavior.⁸³ They continue: “The sacrifice of love is the thumbprint of patriarchy. It clears the way for establishing and maintaining hierarchy. Patriarchy is an order of living that privileges some men over other men (straight over gay, rich over poor, white over black, fathers over sons, this religion over that religion, this caste over the others) and all men over women.”⁸⁴ And all humans over nature.

While it’s true that some men reap the benefits of patriarchy’s narrowed expectations and power hierarchies, most men experience a mix of harms and privileges. Under patriarchal systems, many men, along with women and children and LGBTQ2+ individuals, can become disconnected from their emotions, pushed socially into voicelessness and inauthenticity in order to superficially belong. Because of this, they may not understand why or even that they feel frustration, rage, or pain. As a result, these men may take actions and make decisions that cause them and others harm without understanding their own motivations. These inner conflicts are often evidenced during the teen years. A teen boy may permanently sever his relationship to Creek and Maple with whom he spent his childhood in order to “fit in” and not seem like a “sissy” at school.⁸⁵ At these ecologizing schools, the teen boys who are afraid of their attachments to the more-than-humans around them and to each other may find themselves killing ants and trees or using homophobic slurs in order to “perform” maleness in a patriarchal, heteronormative, anti-environmental world.

Healing, in the ecologizing sense, means having the willingness to see the unhelpful ways we have internalized the structures of society. In reality, this can mean—for all of us, at some point—confronting both pain and guilt. In the section that follows, we examine a parallel situation: first the human story and then the more-than-human. In so doing, we follow the eco-feminist parallel between the female body and the body of the earth. In both cases, suffering has occurred and is largely hidden from view. By following the first to some depth, we find shared cause with the other. By extension, we can see that the resolution to one may also offer insights into working toward resolving the other. We don’t highlight these tragedies to mire readers in discomfort. Rather, we understand that by acknowledging trauma and bravely examining the forces that compel it, we are better able to address it, protect against it, and heal from it. By seeing the complexity of threads knotting together culturally destructive ways, we are better able to untangle the whole mass. In seeking healing—or even a cure—it is helpful first to correctly identify the problem(s). Accurate diagnoses require a willingness to see the problem despite potential discomfort. In the healing process, discomfort is often the signal that something is shifting, changing, and even improving.

Students and teachers do not arrive to educational spaces as blank slates. Both may carry trauma. Sadly, within a span of several months, three promising, up-and-coming educators and one student separately confided in us that they are currently coping with the emotional fallout of a sexual assault. Like a sinister stone tossed in still water, sexual assault events ripple out across time and across communities, disrupting the individual’s capacity to lead, learn, or connect. Since few individuals—quite understandably—feel safe publicly disclosing their experiences, these individual traumas are typically weighted with the burden of secrecy as well. By bearing witness to them here, we hope to overcome the silencing and assist in the healing.

Unbeknownst to each other and everyone else in the class, both the preteen student and her instructor struggle with invisible barriers as they try to focus on the lesson at hand. However, their wounds are slow to heal because the underlying cultural tendencies that caused their assaults haven’t changed, so the threat of assault has not ended. It will not end until these toxic cultural patterns are redressed. In all but one of these cases, the perpetrator has neither been charged nor confronted due to the victim’s sense of shame and the he-said-she-said nature of judicial trials. What hope is there for widespread healing and recovery amid that reality? Even if—despite the odds—these individuals are able to recover, other traumatized individuals will soon take their place because the root causes of these atrocities have not been addressed.

Likewise, the root causes of ongoing environmental degradation have not been addressed. Through tremendous effort, one community saves a river from toxic chemicals dumped by a local factory. Meanwhile, a similar factory has set up shop within the sacred landscapes of an Indigenous community. Eagle flourishes again, thanks to habitat restoration projects, while Salmon perishes in shallow, overheated rivers during a record-breaking heat wave. The teacher-in-training, who is now too frightened to walk alone, watches from her apartment window as the yellowed leaves of Birch fall two weeks too early. These troubles are not accidentally brushing up against each other; they share many roots: cultural norms that reward and prioritize destructive power, selfish individualism, and alienation.

Let’s pursue the parallel situation further. Back to the human story for a minute. One of the assaults that took place in our recent circle exemplifies something that is distressingly common. In this case, both the victim and the perpetrator of the assault are known and loved by the community. People of any gender can be victims of assault, but in this instance, the victim is a teenage female. Even many months after the incident, the trauma she has experienced impacts her daily life. She disassociates regularly, is often queasy about being touched, now operates from a position of distrust and suspicion of men, and so on. The assailant is a teen male. He is not evil, inherently selfish, or even particularly unusual for a modern, Western man. In many moments, he acts kindly, putting others’ needs ahead of his own.

The question arises: Why did the assault occur in the first place? That is, why did this particular person feel entitled to act as he did in that moment despite knowing (as he later admitted) that sexual intercourse was not wanted by the female? Broadly speaking, sexual assaults have long been explained as a desire for power and domination,⁸⁶ as motivated by the cultural objectification of women,⁸⁷ or as a “mating strategy” for highly selfish men.⁸⁸

But in this particular case, the perpetrator himself has difficulty coming up with an answer to the question. He suggests that, in the moment, he wasn’t thinking clearly and just didn’t want to stop. He suggests that in the critical moment he just prioritized his own desires. This response evidences the psychic split in the relational self, where knowing (that the female didn’t want sex) and not knowing (choosing not to see her distress) coexist. Here, the selfish male urge is prioritized, even culturally sanctioned, and the relational urge is repressed. Although he feels terrible, in private with other male friends he seeks to underplay his impact, to not know the pain he has caused, to minimize his responsibility by saying that other guys have committed “far worse” assaults. If he is like most perpetrators of assault, he has also significantly underestimated and didn’t care enough to notice the impact his actions would have on the victim of his assault. While he may or may not have immediately registered some of the harm he caused, much of it, for cultural and psychological reasons, remained “invisible” to him. This invisibility too is a by-product of an individualistic orientation.

Educational spaces also may carry “invisible” or at least overlooked scars. The school building may sit where Beaver used to dam up Streams, where Waxwing used to rest and refuel during long migrations, where the local Indigenous population, prior to being forcibly pushed out by settler populations, engaged in age-old traditions of sustenance, ceremony, and social interaction. Just as the human perpetrator of sexual assault may not witness the vast fallout from his actions, descendants of colonizers and newer settlers are often in a state of “not knowing” the ongoing impact of these wrongs. This kind of “not knowing” is baked into the settler culture through educational omissions, systemic racism, human elitism, and an emphasis on individualistic values. And the excuses that sustain this detached knowing are present as well. In the meantime, the songbird population has plummeted. The local Indigenous population likely continues to experience the fallout of inherited trauma, loss of place-specific language and history, and a sense that their community’s identity has been fractured by broken ties to their traditional lands.

In fact, once a person begins looking around at our North American lifestyle, it’s easy to see the harms enacted upon our more-than-human neighbors. Cell phones, toxin-sprayed mattresses, fast fashion, exhaust-spewing oversized vehicles, and all those office supplies shipped from across the ocean are a few of the things we use daily that harm plants, animals, soil, water, air, and each other. The mind can easily boggle tallying up all the damage and confronting the ways that we, personally, are directly implicated in that damage. For some ecologically minded people, these realizations trickle in slowly over the course of years, eliciting a steady stream of emotional and lifestyle adjustments. For others, they crash through all at once, causing an existential crisis. Indeed, these realizations are often what lead people to pick up a book like this in the first place. Certainly, we have walked through our own canyons of guilt and despair, emotions that—along with love and gratitude for the natural world—have motivated this book and the work it seeks to further.

We live in a society where environmental harms are ongoing, pervasive, and nearly impossible to extricate oneself from. In fact, those who try often find themselves so far removed from society, they can no longer effect change within it. Because anti-ecological values underscore almost all aspects of North American culture, for most of us a gap persists between our ecological values and our actual ecological impacts. Even when we sense the gap, we can resist acknowledging it for complex psychological reasons, some of which we have pointed toward already. In part, we may simply have difficulty imagining another way to be in the world. (Part of the project of Maple Ridge was to offer an ongoing opportunity to imagine and experience a different way of teaching and learning and even being human.)

Further, though, as Gilligan and Snider clarify, “we can unconsciously absorb and reify a framework that we consciously and actively oppose.”⁸⁹ To some extent, this may be a matter of not seeing the forest for the trees. Just as the young perpetrator of sexual assault may have great difficulty identifying and separating himself from the culture that objectifies women, fractures relationships, valorizes power, and encourages selfish individualism—North Americans may have difficulty identifying and extricating themselves from the culture that objectifies nature, fractures relationships with nature, valorizes power over nature, and encourages selfish anthropocentrism.

What can we do, then, to first recognize and then shift unresolved trauma and turn toward reconnection? In answering this question, some may find that, here too they have absorbed a framework misaligned with their ultimate goals and values. According to North American justice systems (and many religions), perpetrators should be punished, and the shame and threat of further punishment will supposedly prevent wrong actions from being repeated. As a primary mode of justice, this way of thinking sits firmly on the belief that the world is ultimately made up of separate entities who bump up against each other in conflict or relationship. Firstly, this system of justice focuses on individuals rather than on their contexts (it’s not incidental that a great many maximum-security prisoners are also survivors of horrific childhoods and patently dysfunctional educational systems). By zeroing in on the individual, our justice system tends to treat the symptoms of dysfunction—the individual crime and criminal—rather than the cause—the familial, community, and cultural contexts. Secondly, while an ecosystem functions as a larger, shifting, dynamic balance of forces, the culture of punitive justice imagines that large swaths of the social ecosystem can simply be disconnected from the rest with no further impact.

Let’s return to the story of assault for further exploration. What would the young male perpetrator of assault need to do to truly reconcile with the young woman he harmed and the community he impacted? In this instance, he has already taken the first steps in restorative justice and healing: he apologized, accepted blame, and told the wider community the truth to alleviate the burden of secrecy on the victim. Since issues of masculine power and privilege are so pervasive in our society, he needs help to identify that psychological patterning both in the wider culture and in himself. Here, he might examine deep-seated beliefs about the roles and rights of women and men, how those beliefs contradict his conscious values, and the excuses he makes to himself that allow him to act outside his professed values.

Bringing to light psychological patterning can be helpful in addressing ecological harms too. Shifting oneself away from the broader societal machinery of anti-ecologicalism is extremely difficult and an ongoing process, but the first step involves identifying the underlying beliefs and values of anti-ecologicalism and the way they condition our own thinking and actions. We may need deep and consistent immersion and engagement with the more-than-human world, but we also need criticality, to enable us to identify belief patterns previously obscured by status quo ways of being. We need to ask ourselves some difficult questions: How might an admission of truth begin an ecological reconciliation process? What specific harms have we caused? Who in the more-than-human realm has been harmed, directly or indirectly? How has the burden of secrecy been felt? In examining the reasons that we personally act outside our ecological values, perhaps we may find an echo of the sexual assaulter’s justifications. We may find ourselves thinking: The rights of the more-than-human were not as important to me in those moments. Everybody is doing these things. In fact, the actions of many others are far more heinous than mine. Besides, I really wanted to do x, y, and z. And I’ve been slow to or don’t want to truly recognize the impact I’ve had.

Perhaps too the dominant North American culture undermines environmental efforts not only by prioritizing opposing values (anthropocentrism, hyper-individualism, dominance over nature) but also by inadvertently instilling a sense of angst. Gabor Maté writes, “To be normal in this society is to conform to requirements that are profoundly abnormal in regard to human nature itself, contrary to it and thus harmful to human beings.”⁹⁰ Frustration, powerlessness, and the grief of profound disconnection may, in part, motivate sexual assault, self-sabotaging ecocidal behavior, and a host of other toxic tendencies. For example, this particular young male perpetrator of assault may have been acting out of a deep-seated, unconscious or conscious sense of anger and inadequacy resulting from the emotional and psychic injuries of living in a culture of hyper-separation, competition, and trivial materialistic rewards.

Colonialization, racism, misogyny, and the destruction of nature’s ecosystems are born out of a false sense of entitlement and superiority. Indeed, they are born out of a fallacious sense of the individual as better than and isolated from others. Economic collapse instigated by fraudulent bankers and toxic wastes left by mining companies stem from deep-seated beliefs about whose “needs” trump whose. The destruction of family units in the wake of domestic abuse and the razing of rainforests result from savage and shortsighted abuses of power.

There are many reasons to resist the personal process of reconciliation. It hurts. It’s uncomfortable. It’s incredibly complex. In many ways, it’s uncharted territory. And once we begin to recognize one wrong—the active marginalization, oppression, and abuse through clearcuts and a concretized urbanscape, for example—we bear witness to other atrocities—the forced expulsion, violent abuse, and cultural conformity experienced by the Coast Salish Peoples. Rushworth frames this moment of healing helpfully: “Facing errors is part of the way of being human. We have all these emotions for a reason—guilt is one of them. These emotions are tools. Indigenous sustainability comes from remembering where we’ve made huge mistakes, so we don’t make them again. Indigenous stories tell what mistakes have been made, so we can remember.”⁹¹ While the pain and grief are real, we can face them with courage and humility. And despite the messages of the cultural positivity mandate, difficult emotions can prompt deeply transformative work. The reconciliation process is not prescriptive. The decisions made about what concrete actions will be taken and which will be ceased depend on factors individual to all the beings involved. There are at least as many positive, enduring ways to relate to the earth as negative ones. Whichever path of reconciliation we might take, the goal is the same: healing, more relationship and connection, expanded humility and sense of gratitude, and a renewed and changed understanding of what it means to be a human.

At the same time, it’s important to remember that this is not an exercise in self-flagellation. The goal is not to sit around marinating in self-blame. Doing so merely enacts other psychoses. When Harney and Moten talk about the need to dismantle white power structures in The Undercommons, they write that “no one will really be able to embrace the mission of tearing ‘this shit down’ until they realize that the structures they oppose are not only bad for some of us, they are bad for all of us.”⁹² When we apply this thinking to the ecologizing project, we can assess all the ways that competitive, consumerist, anthropocentric culture harms all humans.

Expanding Possibility by Reducing Self-Suppression

The process of deep healing means being open to new possibility. But how can we be open when some of us have been taught since early childhood to suppress and censor ourselves and our knowing? How can we heal while at the same time busily suppressing that which we are not supposed to know? In this case, we can actively break down barriers by first acknowledging them.

One of these barriers to deep relationship may involve opting for shallower relationships and damaging interactions in a desire to fit in with societal norms. We may feel guilty about knowing what is supposed to be unknown and may suffer for feeling what many don’t feel or have suppressed. For example, one young adult, a recent survivor of standard education, reports that he felt “guilt and embarrassment” and “worry” about picking up on the private emotional worlds of his teachers. He recalls, “It was like accidentally reading someone’s diary. I felt part of the reason I know these things is because I’m different from other kids—and that’s a bad thing.”⁹³ Importantly, actively shutting down ways of knowing and feeling requires energy that could have been used elsewhere. It requires emotional distancing that can become a permanent state. Here is a boy who might choose to play with rough and unkind boys instead of lingering by the tree where he feels a sense of mutual caring and affinity. Here is the student who pretends not to know what the tree tells him about its root system, because the teacher doesn’t seem to know, and it doesn’t seem right to be differently knowledgeable than an adult. Here is the student who dreamed the night before that Woodland Salamander was calling to him, but the teacher wants to explore something else.

The fear of being emotionally overwhelmed is another barrier we might be called upon to acknowledge. One ecologically concerned researcher recently opined, “I don’t want to feel that much grief.” In fact, for some particularly sensitive and relationally attuned children, a deliberate emotional-psychic shutting down is a fact of school as familiar as pencil and paper. And while walking around as a living sponge absorbing everything is likely unhelpful for anyone (except, maybe, sponges), so too is deliberate and chronic self-censorship. Many children have learned the hard way that living with deeply engaged relationships within conventional education ironically leads to loneliness and isolation in the human realm in our current culture.

On the other hand, deep relationships with more-than-humans are meaningful bonds. They can offer children and adults greater clarity about the organization of the world. These relationships offer guidance and protection at multiple levels—from sensing that the tree drawing needs more branches, to sensing the presence of Bear. Protectiveness goes the other way too because the boy who “listens” as the tree describes the breadth of its roots will work to protect those roots from harm. These deep relationships also allow children to belong, to be truly seen—their whole personhood acknowledged—and to be emplaced; likewise, the more-than-humans are truly seen—their whole beingness acknowledged. As Rasunah Marden notes, “ ‘firsthand knowledge,’ or experience, reveals that the essence of particular natures, or spirit, within all created beings can eventually be discovered and personally understood.”⁹⁴

These are intercultural relationships—where one party brings a human culture and the other party, a more-than-human culture. Diversity in these relationships, just like human cultural diversity in an ordinary classroom, leads to greater creativity and expands our possibilities regarding how we might be in the world.⁹⁵ These relationships can be a curative for loneliness and offer a sense of joined forces, even belonging, for the oppressed. Additionally, the kinds of intuitive knowledges made available by sharing within the context of these deep relational bonds are wide-ranging and can be transferred more quickly and more accurately since they aren’t reliant on clumsy and limited human language.

Ultimately, ecological healing is about returning to the relational and recognizing the inherent gifts and obligations within relationships. As we make room to know differently, including listening to the relational self and listening—or re-listening—to all-our-relations, we may come to accept that more relational, shared knowing is not only possible but likely when we recognize and prioritize our deep connections—the betweenness—rather than seeing only individuals and objects precariously connected through thin and easily broken lines.

Ecological healing also means recognizing that the current culture unjustly awards power and privileges to some, leaving a disproportionate burden of linked social and environmental problems to others. Although the guilt, grief, and anger can be overwhelming at times, we can find ways to support each other through the journey, increasing equality and sidestepping the cultural snares of performed happiness and hyper-individualism. By healing the split psyche and returning to our whole selves, we can renew and celebrate fractured alliances with the more-than-human world.

When we fall ill, in mind or body, we might begin by asking: How might this illness evidence my link to the natural world and the conditions my more-than-human relations are suffering? When we identify illness in our more-than-human relations, we might begin by asking: How might my own actions have contributed to this and what actions are called for now? We can also mirror the wisdom of ecosystems by recognizing diversity in our own species as a sign of health.

All of these inquiries involve deep epistemological, ontological, axiological, cosmological, and psychological work. And it is to these five “ologies” that we turn our attention next. For some, ecological healing is inherently spiritual, a partaking in ancient renewals of hope, gratitude, and responsibility. And for all, this healing is also fundamentally a physical journey, as we step more often and more respectfully into wild places and spaces to sink our extremities into the sand, to stare up at the stars, to touch the ragged bark of our neighbors, to smell the Oregon Grape blooming in December, to immerse and encounter, and to feel gratitude for the love and abundance offered to us.