Reimagining our Embodiment as Part of Life

If we are to find a way to live sustainably on the earth, and to regenerate our damaged planet, we need more than new policies and strategies, important though they may be. We need to reimagine our relationship to the earth, and to begin to live a new story in which we are dwellers on the earth, among many other forms of life, not external agents imposing ourselves upon it and exploiting it. This is a matter of feeling and embodiment as much as of rational thought. How do we go about reimaging our embodiment, feeling ourselves as part of all life the earth? I discuss a number of authors, including the deep ecologists and ecofeminists of the 1970s and 1980s, the Buddhist-inspired environmental activist Joanna Macy, and on to the writings of Bruno Latour, Pablo Servigne and others, who have explored these themes, and what we might do to encourage such a change. I also discuss the importance of indigenous people’s activism, and of a wider knowledge of how indigenous peoples have related to earth and to its non-human life.