While modern industrial civilization has brought significant material prosperity to humanity, it has also precipitated numerous crises, including an increasingly severe ecological crisis that is pushing humanity toward an environmental precipice. This civilization, rooted in the Enlightenment philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries, is fundamentally unjust and unkind, harboring self-destructive tendencies. To avert this trajectory of human’s self-destruction, time demands the emergence of an ecological civilization—a compassionate civilization that respects nature and affirms life, grounded in the principles of organic process philosophy and the Second Enlightenment. The compassion of ecological civilization is articulated through six core principles: 1) reverence for nature, 2) cherishing tradition, 3) respect for farmers, 4) the appreciation of heterogeneous cultures, 5) respect for non-science, and 6) treating others kindly. Such a civilization is urgently needed to address the existential challenges of our time and to foster a sustainable and harmonious future.
The article offers a comprehensive examination of the philosophical origins and evolution of the Chinese concept of Ecological Civilization, tracing its journey from early theoretical underpinnings to its formal adoption as a national strategy. The development of this concept is analyzed in a historical context, beginning with its philosophical roots and progressing through its academic formulation, official endorsement, and subsequent policy implementation. This analysis highlights the transformative role of Pan Yue’s eco-socialism and the influence of Xi Jinping Thought in shaping Ecological Civilization as an innovative model for sustainable development, emphasizing China’s commitment to reconciling economic growth with environmental stewardship. The introduction further explores the transition of Ecological Civilization from an intellectual concept to a central pillar of national governance, noting its growing significance within Chinese political discourse. It contrasts this model with the “America First!” agenda, a framework promoted during the Trump administration, which prioritized national sovereignty and economic interests over global environmental cooperation.
On March 28, 2026, Dr. Goran Carstedt, an outstanding European business leader, delivered a keynote speech themed "Creating a Sustainable Future: The Core Mission of Contemporary Leaders — From Volvo and IKEA to Ecological Civilization" at the 55th lecture of the Ecological Civilization Series Lectures of Cobb Eco-Academy. Combining his senior executive experience in the leading companies, as well as his academic and social identities as a visiting professor at the University of Gothenburg and Chairman of the International Foundation for "The Natural Step", Dr. Carstedt focused on three core dimensions: the reconstruction of leadership, the revolution of world outlook paradigm, and the turn of civilization. He criticized the "authoritative control" leadership model and "mechanical separation" world outlook of modern enterprises, advocated the "co-creation and symbiosis" leadership and the new world outlook of "organic wholeness", and clarified that sustainable development is an inevitable choice rather than an option for human civilization. His ideas are highly consistent with constructive postmodernism, integrate the wisdom of "governing by non-interference" in traditional Chinese culture. He emphasizes the win-win situation of individuals, organizations and nature, highly appraising China's practice in ecological civilization construction, and providing important enlightenment for global ecological governance and leadership reform.
This text reflects on felt-making as an embodied and material way of approaching memory. Developed over approximately two years through wet felting and needle felting, the work is shaped by interruption, return, and gradual transformation. Rather than treating memory as a fixed content that simply comes from the past, the text understands remembering as a layered and shifting process, formed within the present through affect, bodily states, and material engagement. The resulting image, an abstracted tree form emerging through fibrous textures and earth-based colours, is read not as a planned representation but as a structure close to memory itself. Through its hidden roots, the time it holds, its many branches, and its scarred surface, the tree calls to mind the layered and interconnected nature of personal and collective memory. Grounded in perspectives of embodiment and material engagement, the text proposes that actively participates in the processes of thinking and feeling. In this sense, the work proposes felt as a material field through which body, memory, and matter become entangled.
This paper discusses the changing nature of a human being under the influence of bio-, cogno-, socio-, and informational technologies. These changes are examined from the perspective of new approaches in the field of human studies—posthumanism, technohumanism, transhumanism, and ecohumanism. The so-called "third nature" of humans as a key factor in further changes in human qualities is discussed. Transformation occurring in the human environment and within humans themselves under the influence of digital and other high technologies are Illustrated with works by contemporary artists.
This inaugural presents Handbook of Ecological Civilization as both a tribute and a call to action, which arises from a growing planetary consciousness that recognizes the urgent need to transition from industrial and extractivist civilization of modernity toward a more sustainable civilizational model—what is referred to as Ecological Civilization. Grounded in a rich platform of various cultural, spiritual, and scientific traditions, this volume embraces a global chorus of scientists and educators, indigenous leaders, and technologists to explore the concept, philosophy, methods, and moral imperatives of building a new type of global civilization. This Handbook also acknowledges China’s leadership in articulating Ecological Civilization as a state-level priority, with implications for global modernization discourses.
About a year and a half ago, the poetic legacy of Taliesyn, a sixth-century Early Medieval poet, inspired Alexander Kopytin to create the poetry cycle "Thus Spoke Taliesyn." By identifying with Taliesyn and using poetic language, Kopytin gained additional opportunities to express his eco-human ideals about the profound connections between humans and non-human beings, the world of nature. Six months ago, poems from this cycle were set to music using AI. This is how the musical and poetic album "Thus Spoke Taliesyn" was born. Some of the songs from this album are available for listening.
This article rereads Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World as a methodological and ethical resource for ecopoiesis. Focusing on the book’s discussions of smell, scalability, salvage accumulation, and latent commons, it argues that Tsing makes visible the sensory, infrastructural, and political-economic conditions through which relations are composed under capitalism. Read in this way, ecopoiesis emerges not as a promise of harmonious relation with nature, but as a disciplined practice of attending to interdependence, invisibilized labour, and common life without guaranteed outcomes. The essay further shows that ecological care requires attention not only to affective or restorative encounter, but also to the material apparatuses of property, logistics, and standardization through which relations are organized, commodified, or erased. In doing so, it positions Tsing’s work as a critical resource for rethinking ecological world-making under conditions of ruin.
The Neurotic Snorkeler is a hybrid essay that combines autoethnography, environmental humanities, and affect theory to examine how embodied anxiety mediates contemporary encounters with “eco-tourism” under conditions of climate crisis. Through a first-person account of a whale shark snorkeling excursion in the Maldives, the text stages neurotic perception not as pathology but as a form of heightened ecological attunement—an awareness of vulnerability, scale, and ethical disturbance produced by proximity to nonhuman life. The essay juxtaposes procedural description, memory, speculative thought, and cultural critique to interrogate tourism economies, extractive logics, and the aesthetics of environmental encounter, situating the human subject as both observer and invasive presence. By framing fear, hesitation, and bodily overwhelm as epistemological tools, the work argues that neurotic consciousness registers climate change not abstractly but somatically, as atmosphere, breath, and imbalance. Ultimately, the essay proposes neurotic sensitivity as a critical mode for understanding the psychic dimensions of ecological collapse, where intimacy with the more-than-human world produces neither transcendence nor mastery, but an enduring, unsettled awareness carried back into everyday life.
In this response to Dr. Zhihe Wang’s recent lecture, Lidi Yang considers his ideas of ecological transformation through the lens of civilizational paradigms, a fundamental transcendence of the hegemonic logic inherent in modern industrial civilization and the cultivation of a compassionate and constructive postmodern ecological civilization. Following Dr. Zhihe Wang’s stance in the world, she argues that human education must shift from narrowly defined “specialized training” toward a form of tongren education that re-situates individuals within the relational web of all beings.
In the "In Resonance with the Earth" section of this issue, we've included a selection of new poems by Beverly E'Court, exploring her relationship with her mother, her experiences with water, the influence of Mandelstam's poetry on her own poetry, and her art therapy work. She has been practicing art therapy since 1981, becoming a pioneer in its holistic approach, advocating for the recognition of the importance of poetic language, the body, ecology, and global cultural traditions in therapy.
The eco-human perspective on perceiving and transforming reality is the ideological and value-based direction our journal seeks to advance. Grounded in the recognition of the fundamental unity of humans and their environment, and in the urgent need to sustain this unity across spheres of life, we promote eco-human theories and practices as resources for shaping a new, future-oriented reality of ecological civilization. In this issue, we explore the creative potential of the eco-human approach and its relevance to pressing contemporary challenges, particularly those concerning culture and intercultural relations.
Judith Greer Essex shares her perception of Solstice as a special time for the sun to stop, and her too. A time to listen in and out. Every year, she takes that day to see the sun rise and set. She reads her journals from the year that ended, reflecting on what occurred. Hew artwork and poem are about the gifts of darkness, of stillness, of going within as if were the earth shows us the way: be quiet, take care of your body, mind, heart, and soul.
This article discusses a trend in the development of expressive/creative arts therapy related to the increasing attention to cultural and environmental context. Culture is viewed through the lens of ecological concepts, that is, as a "home" for human communities with their characteristic sets of material and spiritual values. Various forms of cultural organization and intercultural relationships are analyzed, reflecting various forms of environmental awareness and people's attitudes toward their environment. The concepts of colonization and decolonization and their connection to the relationships of human communities with each other and the natural world are also considered. Selected publications on creative/expressive arts therapy addressing the impact of colonialism and decolonization in the helping professions, are commented on.
The Anthropocene
This paper presents the international collective monograph «На пути к экологической цивилизации: экогуманитарная перспектива» ("On the path to an ecological civilization: The eco-human perspective") published in 2024 in Russia and edited by A. I. Kopytin, A. Gare, J. Wang, and S. K. Levine [3]. It explores the scientific understanding of an ecological civilization as one possible scenario for the future of humanity. The concept of sustainable development, its constructive potential, and its limitations are assessed. From the perspective of an eco-human approach, the prospects for the development of modern civilization and solutions to environmental and human problems are considered. A system of eco-human technologies that utilizes the potential of the arts and human sciences in education, enlightenment, medicine, and social work is described.
This critical review essay examines Ecopoiesis: A New Perspective for the Expressive and Creative Arts Therapies in the 21st Century (Levine & Kopytin, 2022) through the lenses of aesthetic responsibility and relational ontology. Drawing primarily on Levine’s poietic ecology and Kopytin’s notion of the environmental subject, the review traces how ecopoiesis reframes arts therapies as practices of world-making in the Anthropocene, where healing cannot be reduced to individual “symptom” regulation but must be understood as the cultivation of reciprocal relations, place-based attention, and capacity to remain with grief, uncertainty, and ecological loss. The essay foregrounds phenomenological contributions to show how attention becomes a bodily–ethical stance, and mobilises debates on beauty and making-with (Haraway’s sympoiesis) to articulate ecopoiesis as a shift from “using” nature to reciprocity and obligation. It also develops a critical line on the risks of romanticisation, normative aesthetics, and anthropomorphic subjectification, arguing that “nature-as-subject” can slide into projection and possession unless anchored in practices of indebtedness and giving back (Kimmerer). Finally, the review suggests that the volume’s ethical promise could be sharpened by more explicit engagement with environmental justice, accessibility, affect-regimes, and the politics of whose bodies and losses are recognised as sensible within nature-based therapeutic practice.
As a tribute to John Cobb Jr., the leading figure in the global process philosophy movement, the relationship between philosophy, theology and radical developments in the sciences, social, ethical and political theory and economic thought are described, along with the institutions set up by Cobb to facilitate work in these areas and to forge links between people in different academic disciplines, religions and political movements world-wide. It is shown how this movement became a major contributor to environmental thought, forging links with Chinese environmentalists and eco-Marxists and contributing to and advancing the quest for an ecological civilization, uniting the whole of humanity while acknowledging diversity, in place of the homogenizing civilization of modernity, the European civilization based on a mechanistic view of nature and the quest for total technological domination of nature and people, which in various forms, came to dominate most of the world, and is now destroying the ecological conditions for humanity along with a great many other life-forms.
As the ecopoiesis approach explains, creation emerges from the shared vibration between human and environment, aligning the human with nature and inviting them into a carnival of images of resilience, flexibility, and the multiplying of life. In this sense, every step taken among the trees becomes an act of co-creation and co-sensing. This poem and the photographs, too, came into the world through the co-sensing that arose within Merve Kurt, in the witnessing and inspiration of trees.
The ecological crisis and the crisis of the humanities are unfolding in close connection with each other, which is a consequence of industrial civilization and anthropocentrism. The way out of this situation is to affirm the ecological foundations of civilization, the eco-human way of being. We are far from that at the moment, being involved in the struggle with each other and the nature in and around us. But on the climax of that struggle and dissociation we come to the core of the ecopoietic vision, “the most ancient human truth: we cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet” (Hillman, p. xxii), and vice versa, the planet cannot be studied or cured apart from us in the era of Anthropocene, because today there is no such thing as nature independent of human activity.
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