The Web We Are Woven From

Kinship, Wetiko, and the Ecology of Young Women and Men

"In the Potawatomi language, a bay is a verb. To be a bay. How could we understand the world differently if we named it so?"

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

"The wétiko psychosis, and the problems it creates, have inspired many resistance and reform movements... The wétiko disease is, in essence, the sickness of exploitation; it is a sickness of the consuming of other creatures' lives and possessions."

"In the Potawatomi language, a bay is a verb. To be a bay. How could we understand the world differently if we named it so?"

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

"The wétiko psychosis, and the problems it creates, have inspired many resistance and reform movements... The wétiko disease is, in essence, the sickness of exploitation; it is a sickness of the consuming of other creatures' lives and possessions."

— Jack Forbes

INTRODUCTION

What the Mycelium Knows

SECTION ONE

The Grammar of Kinship — What Indigenous Cosmologies Know That We Have Forgotten

The First Amputation: Language and the Loss of Animacy

SECTION TWO

Wetiko and the Cannibalism of the Self — An Indigenous Diagnosis of the Modern (Male) Crisis

Wetiko as Social Ontogenic AmputationThe Adult Wound: From Amputation to Addiction

SECTION THREE

The Adolescent Brain as Ecological Instrument

SECTION FOUR

The Severed Threshold — What Happens When Initiation FailsEcofeminism and the Severed Threshold

SECTION FIVE

The Land as Elder — Ecological Intelligence and the More-Than-Human Initiation

SECTION SIX

Mitakuye Oyasin — The Politics of All My Relations

SECTION SEVEN

Re-Membering — Toward an Ecology of Initiation in the 21st Century

FOOTNOTES — BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Introduction: What the Mycelium Knows

I am standing with a  500 year old cedar friend (older than the colony that named this nation) who guards the entrance to a Vashon Island forest. I call Her “Omphalos,” Greek for “naval.” She really is the Naval of this forest. Above the ground, Omphahos is showing the wounds of age. Resting on the forest floor is the remnant of Her full giagantic girth. Upward a couple of feet begins a moderately sized trunk for whom Omphalos gave nourishment. But about 1o feet up, that trunk has broken into a ring of jagged, weathered spikes, each about 7 feet tall, some of them have fire scorch marks; and finally, tall brush rooted in the base, encircles this old growth monument. But guess what, beneath the duff, the needle thatch and rain packed soil, Omphalos is  still the center of a living network.  Miles of filament, -- hyphae, the fungal threads forming mycorrhizal networks extend through the dark, connecting root to root, tree to tree, species to species in an exchange of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, water, and information. To be a tree in this forest is not to stand alone but to be a node in a conversation that has been ongoing since before the first White humans disembarked. This is what the mycelium knows: that being is relational, that individuality is not isolation, that the self is constituted by its connections rather than prior to them.

I have been walking this island’s shore for years now, in all weathers, at all hours, watching the herons patrol the tideline with the patience of elders, watching the eagles work the updrafts with a joy that is personal. I have sat with my back against a cedar whose circumference my arms cannot begin to bracket and felt the friendship. The cedar is a person. I am its neighbor. The network that ran beneath us connected us both. English grammar turns my forest neighbors into objects, -- “its” rather than “you,” “She” or “who.” My tree friends don’t have vocal chords to scream but if they hear me talk about them as an object, they send vibes with barbs in them – an appropriate defence; being regarded as an object could be the next step toward being classified as lumber.

The grammar is a problem — the grammar, and the child learning it, and what is taken from the child in the learning. A soul wound is ccreated; I call it an ontogenic amputation – a serious name for a serious wound: the systematic, culturally produced severing of a developing human being's innate relational consciousness from the living world. This is  a cognitive event, a linguistic event, a neurobiological event, and ultimately — when aggregated across generations and civilizations — a catastrophe! The network is severed. The child grows up disconnected from the conversation that gave life meaning for the entire duration of our species' existence on this planet. And in the place where the network was, something else grows: the fungus of a different kind, the one that consumes rather than shares, the one the Cree and Ojibwe called Wetiko, the cannibal spirit, the mind that can conceive of taking without giving, of - existing without belonging, of consuming the world as if it owed nothing back.¹

One central purpose of this book is to trace the catastrophic consequences that arise when human self‑understanding detaches from its rootedness in the Earth — consequences that include the intensification of racism and the spread of wetiko throughout history. Emphasizing how foundational is this severance of awareness from entanglement with the Earth, I call it ontogenic amputation! This chapter describes how Earth‑awareness becomes severed and follows that rupture across three cascading scales, like a river that begins in the mountains of individual experience, widens through the valleys of adult psychology, and finally empties into the turbulent sea of civilization.

At the first scale, ontogenic amputation is a linguistic and developmental process: the induction of the child into a grammar and cosmology that structures the living world as a collection of objects rather than a community of subjects. At the second scale, this childhood severing becomes an adult wound — expressing itself as addiction, dominance, ecological dissociation, emotional constriction, and what Gabor Maté   calls the desperate attempt to fill with substances and sensation, the hollow where belonging with the more-than-human world once lived. At the third scale, we encounter the civilizational form of this amputation: wetiko as a structural condition, encoded in law, economy, gender, and the management of land, such that the consuming impulse is no longer a deviation from the norm but the norm itself, the air we breathe, the water we swim in, invisible because it is ubiquitous.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, the Potawatomi botanist and writer whose work has  articulated the cosmological stakes of our grammatical choices, describes the beginning. Every infant arrives in this world, with the perception of animacy intact: the baby reaches toward the face, the hand, the cat, the leaf, the light with equal democratic curiosity, making no sharp distinction between the living and the non-living, between the personal and the impersonal, between subject and object. This is not naive anthropomorphism; it is the original epistemology, the one our species developed over hundreds of thousands of years of deep entanglement with the more-than-human world.² The grammar comes later — and when it comes, it comes as instruction, not invitation. The world becomes it. The tree is it. The river is it. The bear is it. In Potawatomi, none of these are it; they are — like a bay, like a berry, like a grandmother — living, active, verbally inflected presences, beings with grammatical standing, with the right to be addressed as well as described. The English grammar the child is learning is not merely a tool for communication; it is a cosmology, and it performs its cosmological work at the level where cosmologies do their deepest damage: before the child is old enough to question it.

This is the first ontogenic amputation. There will be others — neurological, initiatory, gendered, civilizational. But this one is first, and it is foundational, because it is encoded in the structure of language before the child has any other conceptual framework against which to measure it. By the time the child is old enough to think critically about the grammar of English, the cosmology is already installed, already running, already producing its fruit: a world of objects, a self that stands apart from nature, a universe that is background rather than community, resource rather than relation.

What grows in the network's absence, what colonizes the developmental space where kinship-consciousness once lived, is the subject of the pages that follow. It grows quietly, at first. It looks, for a long time, like civilization.

Section One: The Grammar of Kinship — What Indigenous Cosmologies Know that We Have Forgotten

On the nature of language as ontological formation, and the Indigenous philosophical traditions that name what English grammar erases.

The dominant Western tradition, from Aristotle through Descartes and into the contemporary cognitive sciences, has largely treated language as a tool — a vehicle for the transmission of thoughts that exist, in some essential form, prior to and independent of their linguistic expression. On this view, to learn a language is to acquire a set of symbols for things that are already given; the world comes first, the words follow, and the grammar is largely arbitrary, a convention like the traffic laws that tells us which side of the road to drive on without fundamentally altering the nature of the road. This assumption is so deeply embedded in Western intellectual culture that it has the feeling of obviousness, of something that goes without saying.

Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir proposed, in the mid-twentieth century, that the language one speaks shapes the categories of thought available to one's mind — that grammar is not merely a vehicle but a cognitive architecture, that to speak different languages is, in some measurable and significant sense, to perceive different worlds.³ The Whorf-Sapir hypothesis was long dismissed as an exotic curiosity, a kind of linguistic relativism too radical for serious scientific consideration. Recent cognitive science has been kinder to it; the evidence that language shapes not just the expression but the actual structure of perception, memory, and conceptual categorization is now substantial enough that the hypothesis is treated, in modified form, as a serious research program rather than a speculative provocation. But Kimmerer's argument goes further than Whorf, in a direction that is more important. She demonstrates that grammar encodes ontology —the basic metaphysical categories by which the world is sorted into what matters and what does not, who is a subject and who is an object, what deserves moral consideration and what is merely background.

In Potawatomi, the distinction that English makes between animate and inanimate does not track the biological line between living and non-living. A rock is animate. A river is animate. A mountain is animate. The word that Kimmerer translates as "to be a bay" — Wiikwegamaa — does not merely describe a feature of geography; it names a being, a  presence that is doing something in the world, someone that matters, someone that can be greeted and thanked and heard.⁴ This is not poetic metaphor dressed up in grammatical clothing. It is a distinct and fully articulated ontological position, one that has been developed and refined over thousands of years of intimate habitation of specific landscapes, and it stands in the most fundamental possible opposition to the cosmological posture that English grammar, in its daily and apparently innocent operations, constantly reinstates.

Spatial Souls and the Relational Real: Vine Deloria Jr.

Vine Deloria Jr., the Standing Rock Sioux scholar whose God Is Red (1973), describes the difference between Indigenous and Western ontologies,  at the level of the basic structuring metaphors by which each tradition organizes reality. Western civilization is fundamentally historical: it organizes experience along a linear temporal axis, from Creation forward through a sequence of unique and unrepeatable events toward a terminus, an omega point, a promised end. This linear temporality carries within it a posture toward the natural world that is essentially exploitative: if the world is a stage upon which the historical drama of human salvation or progress is enacted, then the world's non-human inhabitants are props, the landscape is backdrop, and the value of any given relationship to place is instrumental, relative to the advancement of the narrative.⁵

Indigenous North American traditions, by contrast, are fundamentally spatial — organized around the experience of being in relationship with specific, named, irreplaceable places, each of which has its own character, its own history in the deeper sense of the word (which includes the history of its non-human inhabitants), its own demands on the human beings who dwell within it. A culture that is spatially organized does not move through the landscape toward a destination; it is of the landscape, constituted by its relations with particular waters and soils and weathers and species in a way that makes relocation not merely inconvenient but de-constituting. To take an Indigenous people from land is not merely to deprive them of property; it is to perform upon them a civilizational ontogenic amputation, severing the relational web that constitutes identity, memory, spiritual practice, and the basic grammar by which the world is understood to cohere.

Perspectivism and the Community of Persons: Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

The Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, offers a complementary account of what is at stake in the grammatical choices that Kimmerer illuminates.⁶ In the perspectivism that Viveiros de Castro identifies across a wide range of Amazonian traditions, the world is not divided, as in the Western tradition, into a category of persons (humans) and a category of things or animals (non-persons). Instead, all beings — jaguars, rivers, plants, ancestral spirits, human beings — share a common subjective position: each perceives itself as a "person," as an "I" with a perspective, a culture, a social world, and a corresponding set of objects and others that it perceives as its world. The difference between species is not a difference in interiority or personhood but a difference in body —  a difference in the specific mode of engagement with a shared relational field. What the jaguar sees as manioc beer, a human being sees as blood; but both the jaguar and the human being are subjects, persons with standing, participants in a community of perspectives that is the universe.

The implications of this for an understanding of ontogenic amputation are direct. If the world is a community of subjects — a vast multitude of centers of experience — then to raise a child in a grammar and cosmology that  reduces all non-human beings to the status of objects,  performs  upon that child's developing psyche an act of radical impoverishment, comparable in its cognitive and emotional consequences to raising a child in a social world from which all other human beings have been removed. The developmental psychologist's understanding of the social brain — the brain that grows, that forms, that achieves its full cognitive potential only in and through relationship with other minds — needs to be extended, Viveiros de Castro's work implies, to encompass the more-than-human minds with which human beings have been co-evolving for the entire duration of our species' existence.

The Gynocentric Cosmos: Paula Gunn Allen

Paula Gunn Allen, the Laguna Pueblo/Sioux writer and scholar whose The Sacred Hoop (1986) is a foundational text of both Indigenous studies and ecofeminism, adds a dimension that neither Kimmerer nor Viveiros de Castro foregrounds so explicitly: the gendered character of the relational cosmology that Western culture has displaced.⁷ Many Native North American traditions, Allen asserts, are organized around the figure of a feminine creative principle — not "feminine" in the sense of weakness or passivity, but in the sense of fecundity, relationality, cyclical renewal, and the priority of the communal over the individual. The Spider Grandmother who weaves the world from her own substance, the Corn Mother who feeds her people from her body, the Buffalo Woman who mediates between human and non-human communities — these are not merely mythological characters but ontological orientations: they name a way of being in the world in which the self is understood as woven from and responsible to a web of relations that includes the non-human, the ancestral, and the as-yet-unborn.

The displacement of these cosmologies by the patriarchal, anthropocentric cosmology of Western civilization is, Allen asserts, not merely a cultural change but an ontogenic violence — a severing of the relational matrix within which human development, especially the development of children and young women, had for millennia been embedded. To grow up without the Spider Grandmother, without the Corn Mother, without the grammatical and cosmological resources of traditions that understood the self as constituted by its relations with the living world, is to grow up already wounded, already diminished, already performing the labor of self-constitution in a universe stripped of its most essential resources.

The First Amputation: Language and the Loss of Animacy

With these  linguistic observaations in hand — Kimmerer's grammar of animacy, Deloria's spatial ontology, Viveiros de Castro's perspectivism, Allen's gynocentric cosmology — I can better desccribe  what I mean by the first ontogenic amputation, the one that precedes and makes possible all the others: the induction of the child into the language and cosmology of objectification.

Theodore Roszak, the historian and ecopsychologist whose The Voice of the Earth (1992) presented the concept of the ecological unconscious, asserted that the deepest layer of the human psyche is not the Freudian id, not the Jungian collective unconscious, but something more ancient and more ecological: a stratum of experience laid down over the evolutionary millennia of our species' cohabitation with the living world, a layer in which the boundaries between self and world, between the human and the more-than-human, are not yet fixed, not yet managed by the ego's defensive architectures.⁸ The infant, Roszak suggested, lives primarily at this stratum; the boundary between self and world, between inside and outside, between the subjective and the objective, is permeable, fluid, alive with the kinds of exchange that the adult Western mind has trained itself to suppress or dismiss. The child's animism — the tendency to perceive the world as populated by presences, to address the wind, to make friends with trees, to feel the grief of the dying autumn as a personal loss — is not a developmental error to be corrected but a developmental achievement to be honored: the preservation of access to the ecological unconscious, the maintenance of the channel of communication between the individual psyche and the living world.

David Abram, the philosopher and ecologist whose The Spell of the Sensuous (1996) offers  a phenomenological  account of how alphabetic literacy has altered the human relationship to the animate landscape, extends Roszak's argument in a direction that is particularly illuminating.⁹ Abram's central claim is that oral, indigenous cultures maintain their sense of connection to the animate landscape because their symbolic systems — their stories, their rituals, their linguistic conventions — remain oriented toward the sensory, the embodied, the particular. Oral language is embedded in landscape: the stories are about this mountain, this river, these animals, and the telling of them is inseparable from the presence of the landscape that grounds them. Alphabetic literacy, by contrast, performs a great withdrawal of attention: it redirects the human mind from the animate landscape to the page, from the particular sensory encounter to the abstract symbol, and this withdrawal is not merely cognitive but ontological — it is the gradual substitution of a textual world for a living one, a world of words-about-things for a world of things-themselves, a world of representation for a world of presence.

The child learning to read is being inducted into a new perceptual world that systematically rewards abstraction over embodiment, generality over particularity, the timeless proposition over the time-bound encounter. And she is learning this in the same years in which she is also learning from the grammar of English that the world outside her skin is composed of objects — things that are properly referred to as it, that have no standing as subjects, that can be named and categorized and used without any obligation of acknowledgment, reciprocity, or relation.

The linguistic ontogenic amputation and the literary ontogenic amputation reinforce one another in a developmental pincer movement. The child who learns English as her first language is already being formed by a grammar of objectification; the child who then learns to read and write in that language is having the objectification deepened, extended, and made the medium of her most prized intellectual activities. By the time the formal education system has finished its work, the child has been comprehensively inducted into a cosmology that she did not choose, cannot easily examine from the outside, and that has structured her most basic perceptual categories in ways that will require extraordinary effort — perhaps the effort of an entire lifetime — to denaturalize and renegotiate.   The network has been severed. She will spend the rest of her life in a world of objects, reaching, without knowing quite what she is reaching for, toward a kinship that has been grammatically, cosmologically, developmentally foreclosed.

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Section Two: Wetiko and the Cannibalism of the Self — An Indigenous Diagnosis of the Modern Male Crisis

On the name for what grows in the network's absence, and the political economy of a civilization that was raised in the grammar of objectification.

Jack Forbes, the Powhatan-Lenape scholar and activist whose Columbus and Other Cannibals (1978; revised 2008) gave the contemporary world its most unsparing analysis of the Wetiko tradition, was careful to distinguish the concept from individual psychopathology. Wetiko, in the Cree and Ojibwe traditions that Forbes drew upon, names a spirit of contagion — a disease of the soul that spreads through cultures and civilizations as readily as it moves through individuals, manifesting in any system organized around the principle of consumption without reciprocity, of taking without giving back, of treating living beings as resources to be exploited rather than relations to be honored.¹⁰ Forbes' central claim — the one that earned his book its marginal status in mainstream academic discourse even as it made it essential reading for a generation of radical thinkers — was that the European colonization of the Americas was not merely a political and economic event but a Wetiko event: a collision between a civilization in the grip of the cannibal spirit and a collection of cultures that, for all their internal differences and conflicts, were organized around the principle of reciprocal relation with the living world.

Paul Levy, the Jungian analyst and author of Dispelling Wetiko (2013) and Wetiko (2021), has extended Forbes' analysis into the territory of depth psychology, reading Wetiko through the Jungian lens of the collective shadow — that aggregate of disowned, refused, and projected psychic material that civilizations generate in proportion to the rigidity of the moral and ontological categories by which they define themselves.¹¹ The civilization that defines itself by the hard boundary between subject and object, between the human and the non-human, between the rational agent and the passive resource, generates a shadow in the shape of that boundary: a vast accumulation of refused relation, of denied kinship, of foreclosed reciprocity that does not disappear because it is refused but instead returns, with the peculiar force of the repressed, as compulsive consumption, as the insatiable hunger of the disconnected, as the drive to devour the very world that one can no longer experience as home.

Wetiko as Social Ontogenic Amputation

Wetiko is the civilizational form of collective ontogenic amputation — the political economy, the legal structure, the cultural common sense of a society that has been raised, generation by generation, in the grammar of objectification, and that has consequently lost the capacity to perceive the living world as anything other than a collection of resources available for human use. This is not a failure of individuals; it is a structural condition, and its structural character is what makes it so difficult to diagnose and so nearly impossible to escape by individual effort alone. The child who is amputated by the grammar of English grows up to design the economy that performs the amputation on the next generation; the adult who cannot perceive the forest as kin designs the legal system that classifies the forest as property; the civilization that cannot mourn the extinction of a species because it never learned to experience other species as relatives is the civilization that drives species to extinction with the calm efficiency of a bookkeeper closing accounts.

Val Plumwood, the Australian ecofeminist philosopher whose Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993)  analyses  the conceptual architecture of Western domination, identified five features of what she called the logic of colonization — the logical structure by which Western culture has organized its relations with everything it has defined as "Other": women, Indigenous peoples, animals, and the natural world.¹² These five features — radical exclusion, homogenization, denial of relation, instrumentalism, and backgrounding — are the logical grammar of a civilization that has systematized ontogenic amputation, that has built the severing of relation into its  fundamental conceptual operations.

Radical exclusion is the establishment of an absolute boundary between the category of the fully real, the fully valued, the fully present (paradigmatically: the rational Western male subject) and the category of the excluded, the devalued, the backgrounded (everything else). This boundary is policed by the constant assertion of the incommensurable difference between the two sides — the human and the animal, the rational and the emotional, the civilized and the primitive, the mind and the body — a difference so absolute that no continuity, no overlap, no relation of mutual constitution can be acknowledged without threatening the entire structure.¹³ Homogenization erases the internal diversity of the excluded category, treating all women as essentially the same, all Indigenous peoples as essentially the same, all "nature" as essentially the same — a featureless background against which the drama of the subject's self-realization is enacted. Denial of relation refuses to acknowledge the dependence of the dominant term on the subordinate: the civilization that feeds on the labor of women denies its dependence on that labor; the economy that feeds on the exploitation of ecosystems denies its dependence on those ecosystems; the self that is constituted by its relations with the more-than-human world denies those relations and claims to be self-originating, self-sustaining, independent. Instrumentalism reduces the excluded category to its utility for the dominant subject: the forest is timber, the woman is a domestic resource, the animal is protein. Backgrounding treats the excluded category as environment rather than agent — as the stage upon which the real drama is enacted rather than as a participant in that drama.

These five features together constitute, in Plumwood's analysis, the conceptual architecture of social Wetiko: the systematic intellectual machinery by which a civilization organized around the principle of ontogenic amputation reproduces itself generation by generation, institution by institution, grammar by grammar. They are not additions to the basic logic of objectification; they are its refinements, its elaborations, its operationalizations in the domains of law, economy, gender, and the management of the living world.

Karen Warren's ecofeminist analysis of what she called the logic of domination — the structural argument that moves from descriptions of difference to prescriptions of hierarchy — adds a further dimension that Plumwood's account, focused primarily on the dualistic structure of Western metaphysics, does not fully develop.¹⁴ Warren showed

 that the domination of women and the domination of nature are not merely historically concurrent or rhetorically parallel but are structurally connected: they are both instances of the same logical move, the same inferential operation that takes a perceived difference (between male and female, between human and non-human) and transforms it into a hierarchy (the superior has the right to subordinate the inferior) and then into a prescription (the subordination of the inferior is not merely permitted but rational, natural, and just). This logic of domination, Warren argued, is itself a civilizational expression of the ontogenic amputation: it is what happens when the grammar of objectification is formalized into an ethical and political system, when the child's amputated perception of the living world as a collection of objects becomes the  adult society's official account of what other beings are for.

Vandana Shiva, the Indian physicist and environmental activist whose concept of the monoculture of the mind extends the analysis from gender to the global political economy of knowledge, shows how the civilizational Wetiko operates not only through the domination of bodies but through the domination of epistemologies: the reduction of the world's extraordinary diversity of ways of knowing, of being, of relating to the living world, to a single framework — the Western scientific-economic monoculture — that recognizes as real, as valuable, and as worthy of protection only what it can measure, quantify, commodify, and deploy in the service of capital accumulation.¹⁵ The monoculture of the mind is the cognitive expression of social Wetiko; it is what Plumwood's homogenization looks like when applied not to landscapes but to knowledge systems, when the extraordinary grammatical and ontological diversity of the world's languages and cosmologies is reduced to the single cosmology of English, of objectification, of the grammar that turns bays into nouns and forests into board-feet.

The Adult Wound: From Amputation to Addiction

The child who has undergone the first ontogenic amputation — the linguistic, cosmological severing from the living world — grows up into an adult who carries a wound that she or he may not be able to name, may not even be aware of, but that shapes every subsequent encounter with the world. Gabor Maté, the Hungarian-Canadian physician and trauma specialist whose In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (2008) and The Myth of Normal (2022, with Daniel Maté) offer the most clinically detailed and humanely philosophical accounts of the relationship between developmental trauma and addictive behavior, provides the framework through which the adult biography of ontogenic amputation can be read.¹⁶

Maté's central claim, developed across decades of clinical work with severely addicted patients and refined through his encounter with the neuroscience of attachment and stress, is that addiction is not primarily a pharmacological phenomenon or a moral failure but a response to pain: the pain of disconnection, of early emotional wounding, of developmental needs that were not met in the critical windows of development when the growing nervous system most requires attunement, safety, and the felt presence of a loving other. The hungry ghost of the Buddhist image that gives his first book its title — the being with an enormous mouth and a tiny throat, forever consuming and forever starving — is not a metaphor for greed but a portrait of developmental wound: the wound of the being who was not sufficiently welcomed into the web of relation, who learned early that the world was not safe, not responsive, not trustworthy, and who has spent every subsequent year attempting to fill, with whatever substances or behaviors are available, the hollow where belonging was supposed to live.

Maté's framework, developed primarily in relation to human developmental trauma (early childhood neglect, emotional unavailability of parents, adverse childhood experiences), becomes, when extended into the ecological domain, an account of the adult consequences of ontogenic amputation at the civilizational scale.¹⁷ The adult who was raised in the grammar of objectification, who was inducted in earliest childhood into a cosmology that denied kinship with the living world, who grew up in a culture that systematically discouraged the forms of ecological connection and more-than-human relationship that our species developed over hundreds of thousands of years of co-evolution with the living world — this adult is, in Maté's terms, a traumatized being. Not because she or he experienced any single identifiable adverse event, but because the entire developmental context was organized around a deficit: the deficit of the living world as kin, the deficit of the more-than-human community as a source of belonging, the deficit of a grammar and cosmology that could name and honor the infant's original animist perception rather than methodically correcting it out of existence.

The addiction that follows from this deficit is not merely pharmacological. It is the addiction to consumption itself — the consumption of goods, of images, of experiences, of information, of status, of power — the desperate, insatiable, structurally guaranteed failure to fill with objects the space that was made for relations. This is the adult wound, and it is the wound that bell hooks named when she wrote in The Will to Change (2004) about the emotional constriction of men in a patriarchal culture: the stunting of the capacity for intimacy, for vulnerability, for the acknowledgment of need and dependence, that patriarchal socialization performs on every male child as surely as the grammar of English performs the ontogenic amputation.¹⁸ The two processes — the linguistic amputation and the patriarchal emotional constriction — are not merely parallel; they are aspects of the same civilizational wound, inflicted by the same basic logic of domination, producing in their combined operation the adult male who cannot feel the forest as kin, cannot feel his own grief at the world's unraveling, cannot feel the hunger he is attempting to satisfy with consumption, because feeling itself has been amputated along with the network of relations that would have given feeling its object.

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Section Three: The Adolescent Brain as Ecological Instrument

On the neurological window of adolescence, and why the failure to pass through it in the company of the living world is the deepening of the original amputation.

Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford neuroendocrinologist whose Behave (2017) is a readable synthesis of the biology of human behavior,  writes about adolescence with a combination of scientific findings and awe. The adolescent brain, he explains, is not merely an immature version of the adult brain; it is a brain in a qualitatively distinct developmental phase, characterized by a specificly timed sequence of neurological changes that create a window of extraordinary openness — to risk, to novelty, to peer influence, to the transformative encounter with the other — that is unlike anything that occurs before or after in the human developmental trajectory.¹⁹ The prefrontal cortex, which governs long-term planning, impulse regulation, and the assessment of consequences, is the last region of the brain to complete its myelination, a process that extends well into the mid-twenties; during adolescence, the limbic system — the seat of emotion, social connection, and reward-sensitivity — is running hot, while the prefrontal brakes are still being installed.

This is not a design flaw. The adolescent brain's heightened sensitivity to social influence, its willingness to take risks that the adult brain would calculate as prohibitive, its deep responsiveness to the emotional and relational environment — these are the features of a brain that is specifically designed to be formed by the community into which the adolescent is being initiated. The question is not whether the adolescent brain will be profoundly shaped by the encounters of this developmental phase; it will be, inevitably and irrevocably, through the process of neural pruning — the massive, experience-dependent elimination of synaptic connections that occurs throughout adolescence, consolidating the neural architecture that will carry the adult into the rest of her or his life. The question is what those encounters will be, and what the neural architecture that results will be shaped to perceive, to value, and to seek.

Paul Shepard, the ecologist whose Nature and Madness (1982) saw in the adolescent neurological window a precise developmental logic — a sequence of necessary encounters with non-human others that the human psyche requires in order to complete what he called the ontogenesis of the self: the developmental process by which the individual achieves the mature form of personhood that the species' evolutionary history has prepared it for.²⁰ Shepard's findings show that this developmental sequence requires, at specific and critical moments, the presence of non-human beings — animals, plants, landscapes, weathers, the non-human world in all its irreducible otherness — as the medium through which the adolescent psyche is formed, tested, and finally constituted as a mature self. Without this encounter, the human being undergoes what Shepherd called an ontogenetic crippling: a permanent developmental arrest which the psyche retains into adult life. The characteristics of earlier developmental stages — the narcissism, the magical thinking, the inability to tolerate frustration or delay, the tendency to treat the non-human world as an extension of the self's desires become, when carried into adulthood, the psychological infrastructure of ecological destruction.

Shepard's concept of ontogenetic crippling is the developmental-ecological name for what I have been calling ontogenic amputation. The two concepts are not identical — Shepard's emphasis is on the failure of the developmental sequence, while my emphasis is on the active cultural production of the severing — but they name the same phenomenon from different angles: the child who is not initiated into kinship with the living world is the child who grows into the adult who cannot mourn the dying world, who cannot feel the loss of what was taken, who fills the hollow with consumption because the developmental architecture for a different relationship was never completed.²¹

Gabor Maté's understanding of adolescence as a second critical window for developmental healing or harm maps onto this picture. The neural pruning of adolescence is not only a cognitive event; it is also an emotional and relational event, a period during which the nervous system's capacity for attachment, for empathy, for the felt experience of belonging, is either reinforced and deepened by genuine encounters with genuine others, or further constricted by the continuation of the disconnected, mediated, screen-saturated environments that now constitute the primary developmental context of most young people in industrial civilization. The adolescent brain is, in Maté's formulation, a system looking for its missing parts — seeking, with the urgency that the limbic system characteristically brings to the search for attachment, the encounters that will complete what early childhood left unfinished.

Dacher Keltner, the social psychologist whose research on the emotion of awe has opened new theoretical territory at the intersection of cognitive science, social psychology, and ecological experience, provides an important piece of the picture.²² Keltner's research has shown that the experience of awe — the emotion elicited by encounters with vastness, complexity, and beauty that exceed the capacity of existing mental frameworks to assimilate — reliably produces reductions in self-focused cognition, increases in prosocial behavior, and enhanced feelings of belonging to something larger than the individual self. Encounters with the natural world are among the most potent triggers of awe; the adolescent standing at the edge of the forest, or in the path of the storm, or in the presence of an animal living its life with a completeness and a freedom that the adolescent cannot quite name but can acutely feel — this adolescent is having an experience that the brain is designed to be transformed by. The experience of awe in the presence of the living world is, in neurological terms, the experience of the network re-establishing contact: the felt sense of belonging to something larger, older, and more complex than the individual self.

Yuria Celidwen, the Nahua scholar of contemplative practice and human flourishing argues that the practices of Indigenous contemplative traditions are developmental technologies: carefully evolved systems for guiding young people through the critical neurological window of adolescence in ways that consolidate, rather than sever, their connection to the living world and to the relational matrix of their community.²³ The fasting, the vigil, the guided encounter with the non-human world that characterize many Indigenous initiatory traditions are calibrated interventions in the adolescent developmental process: they take advantage of the brain's heightened openness and plasticity during this phase to install, at the neurological level, the relational orientations that will carry the young person into adult life with the capacity for genuine ecological kinship intact.

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Section Four: The Severed Threshold — What Happens When Initiation Fails

On the consequences of the failed crossing, and the gendered forms of the wound that initiation's absence produces.

Every traditional culture of which we have adequate record has understood the passage from childhood to adulthood as requiring a threshold — a structured, community-held, often terrifying encounter with limit, with otherness, with the forces of the living world that exceed the child's capacity to manage or control. The threshold is not a metaphor; it is a developmental necessity. The child who does not cross it does not become an adult in the fullest sense; the child who crosses it without adequate preparation and support may be destroyed by the crossing. The traditional initiatory complex — the ordeal, the seclusion, the encounter with the sacred and the non-human, the community reception of the returning initiate into a new social identity and new social responsibilities — is the cultural technology by which the developmental window of adolescence has been held and structured across the vast majority of human cultural history.

Industrial civilization has dismantled this technology without replacing it. The result is what we see around us: a culture populated by what Shepard would call ontogenetically crippled adults, by what Maté would call developmentally traumatized individuals, by what Levy would call Wetiko-infected personalities — people who never crossed the threshold, who are still, at thirty, forty, fifty, engaged in the developmental negotiations that should have been completed at fifteen, who seek in substances and power,  consumption and domination or wealth the transformation that the initiatory threshold was designed to provide.²⁴ The adolescent who was never truly initiated is the adult who is still trying to be initiated — who still seeks, with the urgency of unmet developmental need, the encounter with something larger than herself, something that will call her into her full size, something that will tell her, with the authority of the living world, who she is. In the absence of genuine initiation, this seeking takes whatever forms are available: the gang initiation, the military, the ordeal of addiction, the compulsive  risk-taking of the young man who has no elder to tell him that the courage the living world requires is something other than the courage to destroy.

The Gendered Wounds

The wound expresses itself differently in men and women, though its root is the same. In men, the absence of initiatory structure and the deepening of the ontogenic amputation through adolescence produces what bell hooks called the epidemic of emotional illiteracy: the systematic incapacity for vulnerability, for the acknowledgment of need and grief and fear, that patriarchal socialization installs in young men, with the efficiency of a factory process and the violence of a suppression.²⁵ The young man who has been amputated from the living world, who has been taught that strength means imperviousness and that feeling means weakness, is the young man who will seek, in dominance hierarchies, in the performance of contempt, in the consumption of other beings and their environments, the sense of substance that genuine initiation — initiation that includes encounter with the grief of the world, with the limits of the self, with the demands of genuine relation — would have provided differently. He is, a Wetiko in formation: a being who is consuming the world because he cannot be in relation with it, who is taking because he was never taught to receive, who is destroying because he was never held by the something he is now destroying.

Ecofeminism and the Severed Threshold

The wound in women takes a different form, though it flows from the same source. Susan Griffin, the poet and philosopher whose Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978) is an  audacious text in the ecofeminist tradition, documenting  the structural parallel between the domination of women and the domination of the natural world — the way that the logic of colonization Plumwood identifies as the conceptual architecture of Western civilization is applied with equal thoroughness to female bodies and to landscapes, that the grammar of objectification that turns bays into nouns and forests into board-feet is the same grammar that turns women into property, into bodies to be managed, into resources to be exploited for the reproduction of the dominant culture.²⁶

Griffin's book is organized as a double helix, braiding the history of Western science's treatment of nature with the history of Western culture's treatment of women, showing how the same language, the same conceptual moves, the same instrumental logic is applied in both domains. This is a structural homology: the severing of women from their own wildness, their own instinctual interiority, their own ecological embeddedness, is the same severing that the grammar of objectification performs on the living world. The ontogenic amputation in women takes the form of the amputation of wildness itself — the progressive cultural training that teaches the girl to manage, suppress, and finally deny the parts of herself that are rooted in the body, in the seasons, in the cycles of the living world, in the kinship-consciousness that Kimmerer's grammar of animacy would honor.

Starhawk, the eco-witch and political theorist whose Dreaming the Dark (1982) traces the suppression of pre-Christian, earth-centered spirituality through the lens of feminist political analysis, locates the ontogenic amputation of women's wildness in the specific historical process by which the sacred feminine was dismembered: not merely marginalized or devalued but actively and violently suppressed, its practitioners persecuted, its symbols inverted into figures of evil, its practices of reciprocal relation with the living world criminalized as witchcraft.²⁷ The burning of the witches was not merely a historical atrocity; it was a civilizational event, the moment at which the cultural prohibition against women's ecological knowledge and relational power was enforced with sufficient violence to install it in the collective body as trauma, as the learned reflex of self-suppression that feminist psychologists have documented across the generations since.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, the Jungian analyst and cantadora whose Women Who Run With the Wolves (1992) is the most widely read account of what she calls the wild woman archetype — the instinctual self, the feral, creative, death-accepting, ecologically embedded interiority that is the birthright of every woman — names the loss of this archetype as a form of ontogenic amputation specific to women's development in patriarchal culture.²⁸ The wild woman is amputated not all at once but gradually, through the accumulated weight of cultural messages, social rewards and punishments, family dynamics, and institutional structures that teach the girl, across the whole of her developmental trajectory, that her wildness is dangerous, unacceptable, excessive — that her hunger, her anger, her grief, her joy, her connection to the cycles of the living world are problems to be managed rather than powers to be honored. By the time she reaches adulthood, the amputation is so complete, and so thoroughly normalized, that she may not even remember what was taken — may not be able to name the hollow as a hollow, may interpret the grief of the disconnected as a personal failure rather than a civilizational crime.

The severed threshold, in women's experience, is not the failure to cross into dangerous territory but the prohibition against knowing that dangerous territory exists — the cultural

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insistence that the proper female life is a life of managed surfaces, of controlled interiors, of kinship limited to the human and the domestic, of connection to the living world mediated always by the male gaze, the economic structure, the social role. The failed initiation in women's development is the failure to be welcomed into the full depth of one's own wild interiority, and the consequence — as Estés documents  — is a grief so deep and so old that it has been passed down through generations of mothers and daughters as the basic emotional climate of ordinary female life, the background radiation of a world from which something essential has been taken.

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Section Five: The Land as Elder — Ecological Intelligence and the More-Than-Human Initiation

On what the living world offers when we are capable of receiving it, and the few who maintain the channel open.

In the old-growth forest of the Cascade foothills, there are trees that have been standing for five hundred years. They have survived the eruptions and the ice-ages and the clear-cuts and the warming. They have hosted generations of species, become nurse logs for the seedlings of their own successors, participated in chemical conversations — through the mycorrhizal network, through the allelopathic compounds they release into soil and air — with every other organism in their community for centuries. They are elders: repositories of knowledge, in the form of the biological and ecological relationships encoded in their tissues and their networks, that no human being and no human institution has been in existence long enough to accumulate.

David Abram, in The Spell of the Sensuous, writes that the animate landscape is not merely a backdrop to human experience but an active intelligence — a distributed, multi-species, perceptual system that the human nervous system co-evolved alongside and in relation with, and that continues to offer, to any human being capable of slowing down sufficiently to receive it, a quality of orientation, of intelligence, of wisdom that is of a completely different order from what the human mind can generate in isolation from its ecological context.²⁹ This is not mysticism, though it is not incompatible with mysticism; it is an account of the distributed cognition that ecologists and cognitive scientists have begun, in recent decades, to document  — the intelligence of ecosystems, the information-processing capacity of mycorrhizal networks, the navigational sophistication of animal migration, the long-term memory of landscapes for disturbance and recovery. The land, Abram states, is not merely beautiful; it is intelligent. And the human being who cannot receive this intelligence — who has been so thoroughly amputated from the living world by the grammar of objectification and the developmental failures of industrial civilization — is navigating without the most important instrument the species was given.

Theodore Roszak's concept of the ecological unconscious — developed in The Voice of the Earth (1992) and elaborated in the  ecopsychology anthology he edited with Mary Gomes and Allen Kanner (1995) — offers a systematic account of what is available to the human psyche when the channel of communication with the living world is kept open, and what is lost when it is not.³⁰ The ecological unconscious is the deepest stratum of the human psyche, the stratum that is constituted by the evolutionary record of our species' entanglement with the living world, the stratum at which the boundary between the individual and the ecological is not yet firm, at which the suffering of the world is experienced as personal pain, at which the health of the biosphere and the health of the individual psyche are constitutively related, each dependent on the other for its fullest realization.

Joanna Macy, the Buddhist scholar and environmental activist whose Coming Back to Life (2014, with Molly Young Brown) and Active Hope (2012, with Chris Johnstone) have given tens of thousands of people the  framework and the practical methodology for re-engaging with the grief and beauty of the living world, describes an experience that many of her workshop participants report as the most profound of their lives: the moment at which the felt sense of belonging to the living world, suppressed by decades of amputating culture, suddenly returns — not as an idea but as a perception, not as an intellectual position but as a direct experience of kinship, of being woven into a web of relations that has always been there, that was always waiting, that was severed not by nature but by a grammar and a civilization and a developmental failure that can, with sufficient intention and community support, be healed.³¹

Jerome Bernstein, the Jungian analyst whose Living in the Borderland (2005) documents his clinical work with a population he calls "borderland personalities" — people who maintain, in adulthood and often at considerable psychological cost, a primary identification with the natural world, who feel the pain of ecological destruction as a direct psychic wound, who experience the grief of species loss as personal bereavement — states that these individuals are not pathological outliers but ecological sentinels: people whose constitutions have not permitted the full completion of the ontogenic amputation, who carry in their psyches the memory of a way of being in the world that the dominant culture has suppressed, and who pay for this retention with the particular suffering of the person who can feel what the culture has agreed not to feel.³²

Bernstein's borderland personalities are the living evidence of what is possible — the embodied demonstration that the network connection is not permanently severed, that the ecological unconscious is not extinguished but suppressed, that the kinship-consciousness, the grammar of objectification amputated in early childhood, can under certain conditions and through certain practices, be recovered — partially, imperfectly, painfully, but genuinely. They are not anomalies to be explained away; they are the norm that the culture has refused to recognize as norm, the developmental possibility that has been systematically foreclosed by an educational, linguistic, and economic system that cannot afford to acknowledge what it has taken.

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Section Six: Mitakuye Oyasin — The Politics of All My Relations

On the Lakota principle as political ontology, and the ecofeminist elaboration of the relational self.

Mitakuye Oyasin: all my relations. This Lakota phrase, personally spoken when entering a Sweat Lodge or closing a prayer is a reminder that spiritual practice is not for personal gain, rather on behalf of others, all of one’s relatives.  Mitakuye Oyasin  is an ontological orientation, a political position, and a practical obligation. It is a description of the actual structure of reality — that the human being is constituted by its relations with all other beings: the four-legged, the winged, the crawling, the rooted, the swimming, the ancestral, the as-yet-unborn.

 Plumwood's concept of the relational self — developed in Environmental Culture (2002) as an explicit philosophical counter to both the atomistic individualism of Western liberalism and the self-dissolving holism of some deep ecology traditions — offers a philosophical articulation of what Mitakuye Oyasin points toward.³³ The relational self is not the isolated Cartesian subject, the punctual ego that stands over against the world of objects and represents them to itself; nor is it the dissolved self of some mystical traditions, the individual who disappears into the One, who achieves liberation precisely by losing all distinguishable identity. The relational self is constituted by its relations but not reducible to them: it is the pattern of relationships, the specific and irreplaceable configuration of connections that makes this person this person and no other, while simultaneously insisting that the person is nothing, has no content, no history, no meaning, apart from those connections. This is a self that can mourn the extinction of a species because the species was genuinely part of what it was; a self that can feel the health of the watershed in its own body because the watershed is genuinely part of what it is; a self that is, in the most literal and non-metaphorical sense, woven from the web of its relations with the living world.

The reversal of the ontogenic amputation — the developmental, therapeutic, and political work of restoring the connections that were severed — requires, at the political level, the kind of analysis that Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva offer in their foundational Ecofeminism (1993): the recognition that the domination of women and the domination of nature are not two separate problems requiring two separate political programs but two faces of the same civilizational project, expressions of the same logic of domination that can only be effectively challenged by a politics that addresses both simultaneously. Mies and Shiva argued, against both mainstream feminism (which sought equality within the existing economic system) and mainstream environmentalism (which sought to protect nature while leaving the gender order intact), for a feminist politics that was ecological in its foundations and an ecological politics that was feminist in its analysis — a politics rooted in the recognition that the relational matrix of the living world and the relational possibilities of women's lives had been destroyed by the same historical process and could only be restored by the same political movement.

Winona LaDuke, an Ojibwe activist and writer whose All Our Relations (1999) documents the land-based political struggles of Indigenous communities across North America, shows what the politics of Mitakuye Oyasin looks like in practice: not a spiritual posture but a sustained, costly, often life-threatening commitment to the defense of specific relationships with specific lands, waters, and species against the ongoing operations of a colonial economy that cannot, by its own logic, perceive those relationships as anything other than obstacles to resource extraction.³⁵ LaDuke's communities are not defending abstractions; they are defending the actual material conditions of the relational life that Mitakuye Oyasin names. They are the contemporary face of the resistance to social Wetiko: the insistence, at considerable personal and communal cost, that the world is not composed of resources but of relations, and that these relations are not merely culturally significant but ontologically fundamental — that to destroy them is not merely to diminish the quality of human life but to perform, on entire communities, the ontogenic amputation that the grammar of English performs on every child who learns it.

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Section Seven: Re-Membering — Toward an Ecology of Initiation in the 21st Century

On the reversal of ontogenic amputation, and the five principles of an ecological developmental practice for a civilization in crisis.

The word remember contains within it the word member: to remember is not merely to recall but to re-member, to re-assemble the parts that have been severed, to restore to the body what has been amputated, to rejoin the member -to the community from which it was cut. This work is the reversal of ontogenic amputation, and it is work at multiple scales simultaneously: individual, developmental, therapeutic, cultural, political, ecological. The individual who re-members in isolation re-members into a culture that will methodically amputate again; the political movement that does not include the individual's inner development will find that the structures of domination are reproduced at the interior level even when they are dismantled at the structural level. Re-membering requires all the scales at once, or it fails at all of them.

Theodore Roszak's ecotherapy — the clinical practice that takes the human-nature relationship as central to psychological health, that treats the ecological unconscious as a therapeutic resource rather than a curiosity, that brings the healing encounter with the living world into the consulting room (or more accurately, brings the consulting room out into the living world) — offers a model of what re-membering looks like at the individual therapeutic scale.³⁶ Ecotherapy does not merely supplement conventional psychotherapy with nature-based activities; it reconceptualizes the therapeutic relationship itself, recognizing that the self that comes for healing is not merely a social self, constituted by its human relationships, but an ecological self, constituted by its relationship with the living world, and that the wound being treated is not only a personal wound but a civilizational one, inflicted by the ontogenic amputation that the culture performs on every child it produces.

Joanna Macy's Work That Reconnects — the collective practice of re-membering that has been carried out, in some form, with hundreds of thousands of people across four decades — offers a model of what re-membering looks like at the collective scale.³⁷ The sequence Macy has developed moves through four movements: gratitude, the opening of the channel of appreciation for the living world, the recovery of the felt sense of being gifted by a world that one did not make and cannot own; honoring the pain for the world, the breaking of the cultural taboo against feeling the grief, the rage, the despair that the dying world produces in any being that has not been completely amputated from it; seeing with new eyes, the cognitive shift that becomes possible when the grief has been felt and the channel of relation has been reopened, the capacity to perceive the interconnection, the resilience, the beauty that persists even in the midst of devastation; and going forth, the return to engaged action that is powered not by the desperate urgency of the traumatized but by the committed love of the being who has remembered that the world is kin and that kin’s defence calls to the heart.

These four movements are the analog of the developmental sequence that genuine initiatory practice was designed to facilitate: the movement from the defended self that cannot feel the world into the relational self that is constituted by its connection to the world, from the amputated individual into the re-membered member of the community of life. Macy's work is initiation by another name, conducted not in the forest or the desert or the ceremonial space but in the community hall, the conference room, the circle of chairs, in whatever space is available to a civilization that has lost the sacred ones, but conducted with the same fundamental intention: the restoration of the human being to the web of relation that is its home and its ground.

Five Principles of Ecological Initiation

First: The land as primary teacher. Genuine ecological initiation requires genuine encounter with the living world — not mediated, not managed for safety and predictability, but wild enough to be genuinely other, genuinely demanding, genuinely capable of producing the awe and the vertigo and the recognition that Keltner's research identifies as the triggers of the neural transformation that adolescence is designed for. The land as teacher is a developmental necessity, the recovery of what Shepard identified as the non-human others that the human psyche requires as the medium of its formation.

Second: Grief as developmental medicine. The honoring of pain for the world — the breaking of the cultural taboo against ecological grief.

Third: The relational grammar as developmental practice. Kimmerer's grammar of animacy is not merely a linguistic curiosity from an endangered language; it is a developmental technology, a way of structuring the child's earliest encounter with language such that the world arrives as community rather than as collection of objects. To teach children to say who rather than what when speaking of a tree, to teach them the names that honor the subjecthood of the beings they encounter,  —  the restoration of the original epistemology, the recovery of the perception that was intact at birth and was amputated by the grammar of objectification.

Fourth: Community as initiatory container. The developmental window of adolescence requires not only the encounter with the living world but the community that holds that encounter,  that receives the young person into a new social identity and new social responsibilities. The work of building genuine communities of initiation — communities that include elders, that include the more-than-human, that have the authority and the stability to hold the developmental process through its most frightening passages — is the political and cultural work that the reversal of ontogenic amputation requires at the collective level.

Fifth: The politics of all relations. The reversal of ontogenic amputation at the individual and developmental levels is not separable from the reversal of the political and economic structures that institutionalize the amputation at the civilizational level. The work of ecotherapy and the Work That Reconnects, the recovery of the grammar of animacy, the restoration of initiatory community — all of these are necessary and none of them are sufficient without the political work of dismantling the legal, economic, and cultural systems that encode social Wetiko: the systems that classify the living world as property, that reduce ecological intelligence to extractable resource, that perform, on every subsequent generation, the ontogenic amputation that this civilization has been perfecting for five hundred years.

 The organizing work at the political level to dismantle wetiko’s severance of institutions from Mother Earth is ongoing but the challenge is epic! A promising aspect of this work is “The Rights of Nature Movement, launched in Equador in 2008. Ecuador wrote Pacha Mama into its constitution in 2008, and the world is taking note. For the first time in the history of modern statecraft, a nation-state formally recognizes nature not as property to be regulated but as a subject bearing rights — the right to exist, to be regenerated, to flourish. (Constitución de la República del Ecuador, 2008) The Andean naming of Pacha Mama, the living world-mother who holds all things in relational being, enters the grammar of constitutional law (Acosta, 2010). It is a remarkable moment. It is also a deeply ambivalent one.

The ambivalence lives in the gap between naming and hearing. To name nature as rights-bearer is to extend the legal imagination beyond its Enlightenment inheritance — beyond the bounded individual, the sovereign state, the corporation as legal person. (Stone, 1972). It is to say: this river has standing. This forest can be wronged. These are not merely poetic declarations; they carry juridical weight, opening the door to litigation on behalf of ecosystems, to injunctions against extractive projects, to a fundamentally different calculus of harm. Courts in Ecuador, Colombia, Bangladesh, and New Zealand have since extended rights to specific rivers and forests, (Boyd, 2017) and scholars speak of a gathering "rights of nature" movement that may reshape environmental law as profoundly as the civil rights movements reshaped human rights law.

And yet the state that names nature as rights-bearer remains a state organized around extraction. Ecuador's constitution coexists with Yasuní — the Amazon basin reserve whose extraordinary biodiversity made it a global symbol of what must not be drilled — a0nd with the government's decision, under fiscal pressure, to open Yasuní to oil development nonetheless (Valdivia, 2015). The rights of Pacha Mama do not halt the drill. They require enforcement, and enforcement requires political will, institutional capacity, and an economic imagination capable of valuing a standing forest over a barrel of oil. These conditions are not guaranteed by constitutional text. They must be built, sustained, and defended against the very real pressures of sovereign debt, commodity markets, and the infrastructure of extraction that colonial economies installed and that postcolonial economies inherited (Escobar, 1995).

This is not a failure unique to Ecuador, nor a reason to dismiss the rights-of-nature framework as merely symbolic. It is, rather, an honest account of where law meets its limit — at the edge of the institutions that must give it life. Rights are not self-executing. They require a community of interpretation, a set of practices and actors committed to their realization. The rights of nature, wherever they have been recognized, exist within states whose legal cultures were formed in the long tradition of treating land as commodity, whose fiscal systems depend on resource revenue, and whose judiciaries — however independent — operate within broader political economies shaped by global finance (Pistor, 2019). To enforce the rights of Pacha Mama against the logic of capital accumulation is to ask a legal system to adjudicate against the conditions of its own reproduction. This is not impossible. It has happened. But it is structurally difficult, and the difficulty is not incidental — it is constitutive (Martinez-Alier, 2002).

What is needed, then, is not simply more rights-of-nature legislation, though that matters. What is needed is the slower, harder work of building the institutional forms, the economic arrangements, the interpretive communities, and the political coalitions that can make such rights enforceable in practice. This means rethinking the fiscal foundations of states that depend on extraction. It means developing new metrics of wealth that count ecological integrity as an asset rather than a residual. It means cultivating legal cultures in which the rights of rivers and forests are taken as seriously as the rights of shareholders — cultures that do not yet exist at scale, but whose possibility is glimpsed in the rulings of courts that have dared to say: this mountain can be wronged (Constitutional Court of Colombia, 2016–2020).

Until then, nature's rights exist, but their enforcement depends on the very institutions that have long treated land as resource rather than relation (Coulthard, 2014).

Coda: The Grammar of the Future

Ending where I began: with forest friends, with the mycelium moving beneath the duff, with the network running its ancient conversation through the dark. The network does not know that it has been severed in most of the forests of the industrial world; it simply continues, where it persists, the work it has always done, offering to any root that finds it the resources of the community: the carbon, the nitrogen, the water, the information, the unceasing reciprocal acknowledgment of existence that is the deepest form of what we call relation.

What would it mean to raise a generation of children in the grammar of animacy? Not merely linguistically — though the linguistic work is real and important, and Kimmerer's invitation to restore the word ki as a pronoun for the animate living being deserves wider adoption than it has yet achieved. But cosmologically, developmentally, ecologically: to raise children who know, in their bones and their grammar and their neurological architecture, that they are not atoms in a void but nodes in a network, not subjects in a world of objects but members of a community of subjects, not consumers of the living world but kin to it, constituted by it, responsible to it, and — this is the word the grammar of animacy points toward, the word that ontogenic amputation takes from every child it performs upon — loved by it.

The cedar, Omphalos, at the entrance to a Vashon forest does not know the word love. But it has been feeding its community, through the mycorrhizal network, for five hundred years. It releases into the air the compounds that the understory needs. It offers its root system as infrastructure for the seedlings of its neighbors. It participates, without hesitation or negotiation, in the reciprocal labor of keeping the community alive. If there is a word for this that is not, at its root, the word love, I do not know it. And if the grammar of English cannot say so — cannot name the bay as a verb, the tree as a subject, the exchange of carbon through the dark as a form of kinship that deserves the same grammatical recognition as the exchange of words between persons — then perhaps the task of the 21st century is not to reform the grammar but to supplement it, to insist on the existence of what the grammar cannot contain, to find the words for what the mycelium knows.

The web we are woven from is older than our language. It will survive the grammar of objectification, as the mycelium survives the clear-cut, waiting in the dark for the conditions that will allow it to rise again. The question is whether we will survive the grammar long enough to remember that we are woven from it — and, remembering, to choose differently the language we press into the hands of the children now arriving at the threshold, ready to be taught what kind of world they have been born into.

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Notes

¹ The concept of Wetiko as I use it throughout this chapter draws primarily on Forbes (1978/2008) and Levy (2013, 2021), but it is worth noting that the concept exists in a variety of related forms across multiple Algonquian-speaking traditions — Windigo (Ojibwe), Weetigo (Cree), Wintiko (Powhatan) — each with its own specific cultural context and ceremonial significance. The philosophical generalization of the concept that Forbes and Levy perform is a move that should be made with the awareness that generalization always risks decontextualization; I use Wetiko as Forbes and Levy use it, as a name for a pattern that they have docum7ented with sufficient care and cultural acknowledgment to warrant its application at the scale I am applying it.

² Kimmerer's account of the infant's animist perception resonates with a substantial body of developmental psychological research on the perception of animacy in early childhood. Infants as young as six months show differential responses to self-propelled versus mechanically moved objects (Premack and Premack 1995); by eighteen months to two years, children are reliably attributing mental states to moving objects. The question that Kimmerer raises — whether this attribution is a developmental error to be corrected or an original epistemology to be honored — is one that developmental psychology has not yet been equipped to answer, partly because the discipline itself is embedded in the same grammar of objectification that Kimmerer is challenging.

³ The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic relativity, exists in strong and weak forms. The strong form — that language determines thought, such that speakers of different languages literally cannot think the same thoughts — has been largely rejected. The weak form — that language influences habitual patterns of thought and perception — has received substantial empirical support in recent decades, particularly in work on color perception (Winawer et al. 2007), spatial reasoning (Levinson 2003), and temporal cognition (Boroditsky 2011). Kimmerer's claim, however, is neither the strong nor the weak form of linguistic relativity; it is a claim about ontological induction, about the way in which grammar installs a metaphysical framework before the child has the critical resources to examine or resist it. This is a developmental claim as much as a linguistic one.

⁴ Kimmerer's account of Wiikwegamaa in Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) deserves to be read alongside the broader literature on the animacy hierarchy in Algonquian languages, which is far more complex than the simple animate/inanimate distinction might suggest. The distinction in Potawatomi does not track the biological line between living and non-living but rather something closer to what the philosopher of science Karen Barad calls "intra-activity" — the capacity to participate in the ongoing constitution of the world. A feather, separated from the bird, may be grammatically inanimate; the same feather attached to a ceremonial object may be animate. The grammar does not merely describe the world; it participates in the ongoing negotiation of what the world is.

⁵ Deloria's distinction between spatial and historical ontologies has been criticized, by some scholars in Indigenous studies, as itself too sweeping — as generalizing across the enormous diversity of Indigenous North American traditions in a way that risks producing a monolithic "Indigeneity" that is itself a distortion. The criticism is well-taken, and Deloria's account should be read as a philosophical provocation rather than an ethnographic description. Its value is precisely in the sharpness of the contrast it draws, which illuminates aspects of the Western historical orientation that are rendered invisible by their very familiarity.

⁶ Viveiros de Castro's perspectivism has generated a substantial secondary literature in anthropology and philosophy, some of which raises important questions about the concept's applicability across the diverse Amazonian traditions it draws upon. The philosopher Martin Holbraad and anthropologist Morten Axel Pedersen have extended the perspectivism project into a broader program of "ontological anthropology" that has itself become controversial. For our purposes, what matters in Viveiros de Castro's work is the fundamental ontological claim: that the division of reality into persons and things, subjects and objects, is a culturally specific metaphysical assumption rather than a neutral description of the way things are. Whether or not every Amazonian tradition endorses the specific version of perspectivism Viveiros de Castro describes, the claim that multiple valid ontological frameworks exist is itself philosophically significant.

⁷ Allen's concept of the gynocentric cosmology of many Native North American traditions has also been subject to criticism, particularly from Indigenous scholars who find in it a romanticization that flattens the real diversity and internal tensions of those traditions. Allen herself was aware of these tensions; her project in The Sacred Hoop is explicitly political as well as scholarly, using the evidence of Indigenous gynocentric traditions as a counter-factual against the claim that patriarchy is universal and inevitable. The political move is legitimate even if the ethnographic picture is more complicated than Allen's account suggests.

⁸ Roszak's concept of the ecological unconscious is explicitly positioned against both the Freudian id and the Jungian collective unconscious, though Roszak acknowledges debts to both. The Freudian id is the repository of the infantile, the asocial, the death-driven; the ecological unconscious, by contrast, Jung’s collective unconscious is the repository of the cooperative, the reciprocal, the life-supporting — the evolutionary record of the species' successful cohabitation with the living world. Jung's collective unconscious is species-specific, containing the archetypes of human experience; Roszak's ecological unconscious is cross-species, connecting the human psyche to the broader community of life. This is a significant and underappreciated conceptual innovation.

⁹ Abram's phenomenological account of the relationship between literacy and ecological dissociation draws heavily on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of perception and on the speech-act theories of J.L. Austin and John Searle, though it extends both in directions that neither would have anticipated. Abram's central claim — that alphabetic literacy performs a withdrawal of attention from the animate landscape — has been contested by media theorists who emphasize the complexity of literacy's cultural effects, but the core phenomenological observation — that reading requires a sustained orientation toward the page at the expense of orientation toward the environment — seems difficult to dispute on experiential grounds.

¹⁰ Forbes' analysis of Wetiko is developed most fully in the 2008 revised edition of Columbus and Other Cannibals, which includes a foreword by Vine Deloria Jr. that situates Forbes' argument in relation to the broader project of Indigenous intellectual sovereignty. Forbes is explicit that his use of the Wetiko concept involves a translation and generalization that he undertakes with awareness of its risks; he is not claiming to speak for the Cree or Ojibwe traditions that originated the concept but to use it as a diagnostic tool that those traditions have developed and that is, he asserts, applicable to the civilizational patterns he is analyzing.

¹¹ Levy's application of Jungian categories to the Wetiko concept is philosophically productive but requires some caution. Jung's concept of the collective shadow was developed in the context of a Eurocentric psychology that had its own blind spots around colonialism and race; the application of Jungian categories to the analysis of a specifically colonial pathology is therefore not without irony. Levy is aware of this tension and addresses it, though perhaps not with the thoroughness that the issue requires. The most useful element of Levy's Jungian reading is the emphasis on projection: the civilization that has split off its awareness of its own destructiveness projects that destructiveness onto others, who are then available as legitimate targets of the very violence that the projection was designed to conceal.

¹² Plumwood's logic of colonization is developed in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993) as an analysis of the dualistic conceptual structure that organizes Western thought, not merely in its explicitly political dimensions but in its most basic metaphysical categories. The five features I describe here are adapted from Plumwood's analysis, which presents them in slightly different terms; I have streamlined and translated her account for the purposes of the argument I am making, but I hope without distortion of the essential structure. Plumwood's book is one of the few works of academic philosophy that reads, at times, with the urgency of a political manifesto — a quality that reflects her conviction that the conceptual structures she is analyzing are not merely intellectually interesting but are actively producing the ecological crisis she is writing in the face of.

¹³ The maintenance of radical exclusion requires enormous and ongoing cultural labor, because the excluded categories are in fact not radically different from the dominant category: women are not radically different from men, non-human animals are not radically different from human animals, the "nature" that Western culture has opposed to "culture" is not radically different from the cultural processes that produce it. The labor of maintaining the boundary — the constant repetition of the difference, the punishment of those who blur it, the philosophical and theological work of justifying it — is itself evidence of the anxiety that attaches to the boundary's fragility.

¹⁴ Warren's logic of domination is developed in detail in both Ecological Feminism (1994) and Ecofeminist Philosophy (2000). The logical structure she identifies — (1) X is different from Y in some relevant respect; (2) X is superior to Y in that respect; (3) therefore X is justified in dominating Y — is a three-step inferential sequence that requires all three steps to be in place. The feminist and ecological political project is therefore not merely the assertion of equality but the challenge to the inferential move from difference to hierarchy to domination: the insistence that difference does not entail hierarchy and that hierarchy does not entail domination.

¹⁵ Shiva's concept of the monoculture of the mind, developed in the 1993 book of that title, has become one of the central concepts in critiques of the Green Revolution and of corporate seed patenting. Its broader application — to the colonization of knowledge systems, the reduction of the world's epistemological diversity to a single framework of market-oriented, reductionist science — is the dimension most relevant to the argument of this chapter. Shiva's analysis connects the monoculture of agriculture (the replacement of thousands of traditional crop varieties by a handful of corporate hybrids) to the monoculture of the mind (the replacement of thousands of traditional knowledge systems by a single framework) as two expressions of the same civilizational project.

¹⁶ Maté's clinical framework for understanding addiction has evolved significantly across his published works. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (2008) is primarily a clinical narrative, documenting his work in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside with severely addicted patients; The Myth of Normal (2022), co-written with his son Daniel, is a more systematic theoretical work that extends the trauma-addiction framework to what Maté calls the "toxic normal" — the pervasive and largely unrecognized trauma of ordinary life in contemporary Western culture. Both books are relevant to the argument I am making, but it is the extension of the framework in The Myth of Normal that most directly supports the concept of ontogenic amputation at the civilizational scale.

¹⁷ The extension of Maté's developmental trauma framework to the ecological domain is my own inference, not an explicit claim in Maté's work. Maté is primarily concerned with interpersonal developmental trauma — the early childhood experiences of neglect, emotional unavailability, and adverse experience that compromise the development of healthy attachment and stress-regulation capacities. He has, however, spoken in interviews and public appearances about the connection between his clinical framework and the broader ecological crisis, suggesting that the disconnection from the living world is itself a form of developmental deprivation. The inference I am drawing is therefore grounded in Maté's framework even if it goes beyond his explicit claims.

¹⁸ bell hooks' analysis of the emotional constriction of men in The Will to Change (2004) is one of the most searching and compassionate accounts of male psychology in the feminist tradition. hooks is unusual among feminist theorists in her willingness to treat male suffering as a real and serious phenomenon — not as an excuse for male behavior but as a condition that patriarchal socialization produces and that feminist analysis must engage with if it is to achieve the transformation of gender relations rather than merely the redistribution of power within existing structures. hooks' argument is that patriarchy damages men as well as women, producing in men a systematic incapacity for the emotional life that genuine intimacy, genuine relation, genuine ecological connection requires.

¹⁹ Sapolsky's account of adolescent neuroscience in Behave (2017) is comprehensive and illuminating, but it is worth noting that the evolutionary interpretation of the adolescent brain's risk-sensitivity — the argument that it is a feature rather than a bug — is more explicitly developed in other sources, particularly in the work of the developmental psychologist Jay Giedd, who led much of the early neuroimaging research on the adolescent brain, and in the philosophical elaborations of Shepard and others in the ecopsychology tradition. Sapolsky himself is primarily interested in the proximate mechanisms; the ultimate evolutionary explanations are necessarily more speculative.

²⁰ Shepard's concept of the ontogenetic crippling of the modern human is articulated most fully in Nature and Madness (1982) and elaborated in The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (1996). The 1982 book is one of the most radical works of ecological thinking in the English language — radical in the literal sense of going to the root, of refusing to treat the ecological crisis as a problem of technology or policy that can be solved without confronting the developmental pathology that produces the human beings who create and perpetuate the crisis. Shepard's argument is not that we should return to a paleolithic way of life but that we should take seriously the developmental requirements that our evolutionary history has installed in the human organism.

²¹ The distinction between Shepard's "ontogenetic crippling" and my "ontogenic amputation" is not merely terminological. Shepard's language emphasizes developmental arrest — the failure to achieve a developmental stage that should have been reached — while my language emphasizes an active severing, a production of disconnection by cultural forces that are working against the organism's developmental trajectory rather than merely failing to support it. The distinction matters because it shifts the analysis from a developmental psychology focused on individual pathology to a critical cultural analysis focused on the political economy of developmental damage. Both framings are necessary; they describe different aspects of the same phenomenon.

²² Keltner's research on awe, summarized in Awe (2023) and developed in a series of scientific publications, builds on a foundational 2003 paper co-authored with Jonathan Haidt that first formally defined awe as an emotion and distinguished it from related states like wonder, elevation, and the sublime. The finding that awe reliably reduces activity in the default mode network — the neural system associated with self-referential processing and rumination — is directly relevant to the argument I am making: the experience of awe in the presence of the living world is, neurologically, the temporary suspension of the amputated, object-focused mode of consciousness and the re-establishment of the permeable, relational mode that was suppressed by the grammar of objectification.

²³ Celidwen's work on Indigenous contemplative traditions, developed in Flourishing Kin (2024), brings together the scholarship of contemplative neuroscience, Indigenous studies, and developmental psychology in ways that are genuinely novel and productive. Her argument that Indigenous contemplative practices are developmental technologies — not merely spiritual practices but systematically evolved methods for guiding human development in ecologically and socially healthy directions — resonates with and extends Shepard's account of the initiatory sequence, adding the dimension of contemplative practice as a mechanism by which the ecological unconscious is cultivated rather than suppressed.

²⁴ The observation that contemporary industrial civilization produces adults who are "still trying to be initiated" is one that many anthropologists and depth psychologists have made, from Joseph Campbell's analysis of the hero's journey to Michael Meade's work on male initiation. What I am adding to this observation is the specific developmental and neurological account of why this is so: the ontogenic amputation performed in early childhood, deepened in adolescence by the absence of genuine initiatory structure, produces a developmental deficit that does not simply disappear when the individual reaches chronological adulthood but continues to drive behavior — often destructive behavior — in the adult life.

²⁵ hooks' concept of "emotional illiteracy" in men, developed in The Will to Change (2004), is not merely a critique of individual men's emotional capacities but an analysis of a socialization process that is, she argues, systematically and deliberately producing men who cannot feel, because feeling — the capacity for vulnerability, for grief, for the acknowledgment of need and dependence — would undermine the performance of patriarchal dominance that the system requires of them. The ecological dimension of this analysis is implicit in hooks but becomes explicit when we connect it to the wider argument: the man who cannot feel his own grief cannot feel the world's grief, and the man who cannot feel the world's grief will not resist the systems that produce it.

²⁶ Griffin's Woman and Nature (1978) is formally one of the most unusual texts in the ecofeminist tradition — structured as a kind of prose poem or dramatic oratorio, alternating between passages that enact the voice of Western science and patriarchal culture and passages that give voice to what has been silenced and suppressed. The formal experimentation is not mere literary play; it enacts, in the structure of the text itself, the argument that Griffin is making about the relationship between form and content, between the way knowledge is organized and the reality it describes. Griffin's book should be read alongside Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology (1978) and Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature (1980) as part of the founding moment of ecofeminist theory.

²⁷ Starhawk's analysis of the historical suppression of earth-centered spirituality in Dreaming the Dark (1982) draws on the historical scholarship of the European witch trials, particularly the work of the historians Richard Kieckhefer and, later, Silvia Federici, whose Caliban and the Witch (2004) offers the most rigorous Marxist feminist analysis of the witch trials as a specific moment of capitalist primitive accumulation, in which women's traditional ecological knowledge and community authority were simultaneously criminalized and expropriated. Federici's account and Starhawk's are not identical — Starhawk's is more focused on spiritual dimensions, Federici's on material ones — but they are complementary, describing from different angles the same historical process of ontogenic amputation at the civilizational scale.

²⁸ Estés' concept of the "wild woman archetype" has been criticized, by some feminist scholars, for its reliance on Jungian categories that may themselves reproduce certain essentialist assumptions about femininity. The criticism is worth engaging with seriously; the notion of a universal feminine archetype that transcends cultural and historical specificity is indeed in tension with the emphasis on the specific historical processes of patriarchal suppression that I have been tracing in this chapter. What I find most valuable in Estés, however, is not the Jungian scaffolding but the clinical and narrative documentation of the loss — the specific, detailed, emotionally precise account of what is taken from women in the process of patriarchal socialization. That documentation does not require the archetypal framework to be valid.

²⁹ Abram's use of the term "intelligence" in relation to the animate landscape draws on the cybernetic tradition (Bateson's "Mind and Nature," 1979) as well as on the phenomenological tradition (Merleau-Ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception," 1945), producing a hybrid framework that is philosophically rich. The recent emergence of the science of plant communication — particularly the work of Stefano Mancuso and Monica Gagliano on plant intelligence — and of mycorrhizal network information transfer has provided an empirical grounding for some of Abram's claims that was not available when he first made them. The convergence of phenomenological philosophy and ecological science on the theme of landscape intelligence is one of the most interesting intellectual developments of the past two decades.

³⁰ Roszak, Gomes, and Kanner's Ecopsychology (1995) anthology is the founding document of the academic field of ecopsychology, gathering together contributions from some of the most significant thinkers at the intersection of psychology, ecology, and political analysis of the time: David Abram, Chellis Glendinning, Jerome Bernstein, Paul Shepard (who contributed an essay developing his "ontogenetic crippling" thesis), and many others. The field has developed considerably since 1995, and some of the formulations in the anthology now appear dated; but the central conceptual moves — the ecological unconscious, the therapeutic significance of the human-nature relationship, the political analysis of psychological alienation from the living world — remain as important as they were when the book was published.

³¹ Macy's account of the "felt sense of belonging" that workshop participants report recovering in the context of the Work That Reconnects resonates with the phenomenological description of ecological consciousness that Abram, Roszak, and Kimmerer each provide from their different angles. The convergence of these descriptions — coming from a contemplative practice tradition, a phenomenological philosophy tradition, an ecopsychology tradition, and an Indigenous studies tradition — is itself significant: it suggests that they are describing the same phenomenon from different approaches, that the experience of ecological kinship is a real and recurring feature of human experience that the dominant culture has suppressed but not extinguished.

³² Bernstein's clinical work with "borderland personalities" in Living in the Borderland (2005) is one of the few sustained clinical engagements with the psychological experience of ecological identification — the experience of people who feel the pain of ecological destruction as direct personal suffering. Bernstein argues that this experience, which the conventional psychiatric framework would tend to pathologize as a form of overidentification or delusional thinking, is in fact a healthy response to a genuine reality that the culture has agreed to suppress. The "borderland" of his title refers to the boundary between the human and the more-than-human, which these individuals experience as more permeable than the culture's grammar of objectification allows. Bernstein's work is a clinical confirmation of the theoretical argument I have been making.

³³ Plumwood's relational self, developed in Environmental Culture (2002), is explicitly offered as an alternative to what she calls the "self as isolated atom" of Western liberal individualism and the "self as dissolved into the whole" of certain strands of deep ecology. Plumwood's critique of deep ecology's concept of "self-realization" (the idea that the human being achieves its fullest development by identifying with the whole of nature, by expanding the self to encompass the biosphere) is particularly important: she argues that this dissolution of the self, far from reversing the logic of domination, actually enacts a kind of colonization at the cosmic scale, the very large self swallowing the very world it was supposed to be in relation with. The relational self, by contrast, achieves connection through the specificity and irreducibility of its particular relations, not through the dissolution of its particularity.

³⁴ Mies and Shiva's Ecofeminism (1993) is one of the founding texts of the ecofeminist political tradition, arguing against both the mainstream feminist project (which largely accepted the framework of industrial capitalism and sought equality for women within it) and the mainstream environmental movement (which largely left the gender order unexamined).

³⁵ LaDuke's All Our Relations (1999) documents thirteen specific cases of Indigenous land-based political struggle — from the White Earth Land Recovery Project to the resistance to uranium mining on the Navajo Nation — in a way that grounds the philosophical abstractions of this chapter in the concrete political realities of specific communities, specific waters, specific species. LaDuke's book is a reminder that the politics of Mitakuye Oyasin is not only a spiritual aspiration but a daily practice, carried out at considerable cost by communities that have been fighting, for five hundred years, against the most comprehensive and well-resourced expression of social Wetiko in human history.

³⁶ The clinical practice of ecotherapy has developed considerably since Roszak first articulated the theoretical framework in the early 1990s. Practitioners like Bill Plotkin, whose Wild Mind (2013) and The Journey of Soul Initiation (2021) extend the ecotherapy tradition in the direction of depth psychology and initiatory practice, and the various practitioners in the tradition of "nature-based psychotherapy" who have documented the therapeutic efficacy of structured encounters with the living world, have built a substantial clinical literature on the healing of the wound that I am calling ontogenic amputation. The evidence base for the therapeutic benefits of nature exposure is also growing rapidly in mainstream clinical psychology, though it is typically framed in terms of stress reduction and mental health rather than the ontological terms I have been using here.

³⁷ The four movements of the Work That Reconnects — gratitude, honoring the pain for the world, seeing with new eyes, going forth — are described in detail in Macy and Brown's Coming Back to Life (2014), which includes both the theoretical framework and the practical exercises that have been developed and refined over four decades of workshop practice. Macy cautions that the movement through grief and into new seeing cannot be short-circuited by beginning with action or positive thinking, and that the cultural taboo against feeling the pain for the world is itself a major obstacle to effective ecological engagement.

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