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.
The author shares her care for bones of different animals. She believes that there are teachings embedded bone deep, so deep that only working with her hands can release the remembrance. There is an unshakeable pull to work with these creatures, because somewhere, bone deep, she feels their loss. She also feels their loss to her ancestors. It is her honour, to be a Woman of the Bones, as she honours our animal kin in kind.
"Nature's Veil: Healing in Liminality," explores the profound healing power of nature, art, and photography in navigating traumatic loss, death, and dying, as conveyed through a creative dialogue between Carolina Herbert and David Moss. The conversation took place on Bae Cas-wellt, Penrhyn Gŵyr, Cymru (Caswell Bay, Gower Peninsular, Wales). David shares his experience of finding healing through painting after his daughter's death, how he experiences his daughter's presence through painting and nature’s "spirit messengers." The shoreline, for Carolina, becomes a "thin place" for navigating grief, recognizing death not as an end but a continuous journey between realms. The paper emphasizes both indigenous knowledge and Earth's consciousness, drawing from ancient Celtic animism where trees and oceans serve as sacred portals to deeper wisdom and the ongoing presence of loved ones beyond the physical realm.
The interview discusses the prospects for building an ecological civilization in Russia. One of the important angles of analysis is the idea of the opposition between different tendencies in Russia's civilizational development, the ideological and technological. Overcoming this opposition will require a third, ecological tendency. In the interview, the eco-integral approach to the study of the prospects ‘for the development of Russian civilization is substantiated, based on the strategy of the harmonious unity of people with the socio-natural environment. An ecological civilization is a human-sized, technologically-advanced, socially-sustainable and spiritually-oriented civilization, the development of which is aimed at maintaining and developing all forms of life. This is how Yurij Reznik imagines the civilization of the future Russia, the contours of which are outlined in the interview.
This review highlights the recent monographic exhibition Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work, curated by Tatiana Sizonenko, PhD, as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time, Art & Science Collide, 2024-25. The exhibition, which was presented across the four art galleries in San Diego, provided an overview of Helen and Newton Harrisons’ collaborative artistic practice that bridged conceptual art, science, and ecology. The Harrisons dedicated five decades of their pioneering work to the restoration of ecosystems. By agreeing “to do no work that does not benefit the well-being of the Web of Life,” the Harrisons reimagined the responsibility of the artist and the arts towards the unfolding planetary crisis.
The article proposes and substantiates the phenomenon of natural archetypes as a new category of ecopsychology. Considered from the point of view of the eco-human approach, archetypes of nature are thought-forms and works of world culture, combining various natural phenomena and objects, on the one hand, and human properties, the world of mental phenomena, on the other hand. Using Koestler's ideas about holons and holarchies, and Wilber's four fundamental abilities of holons (self-preservation, self-adaptation, self-transcendence and self-utilization), the author shows how these abilities are realized in human relations with the natural world.
The following article and imagery represent the experience of dwelling over time, with an image that arose in response to a figure I noticed looking up at me from a biologically damaged stream during the solar eclipse of April 8, 2024. I sat with the drawing and the live video of the figure for over a year, concerned for the welfare of the water and not knowing what to do. Recently, I suddenly felt compelled to invite the figure in the image to guide me toward the creation of another artwork. What arose was a composite (collage) in which the figure was removed from my drawing of the toxic water and placed in a photograph of a clean clear mountain creek. The resulting piece became a visual prayer for the Creek Woman and the health of the water in which she shared her Being. The article also briefly covers, as context, the research of Emoto Masaru, the Sacred speech of Pat McCab, the historical antecedents of the Creeks given name, and mythological potentialities.
This poetry series emerges from an ecopoietic engagement with landscapes marked by both beauty and devastation. These are geographies that have not only witnessed the erasure and displacement of human communities but have also endured ecological violence, forests burned, rivers polluted, and ecosystems disrupted by military occupation and extractive policies. The work draws on ecopoiesis as a mode of poetic co-creation with the more-than human world. Rather than seeing nature as a passive object or romantic background, ecopoiesis affirms its agency, memory, and capacity for regeneration.
This report highlights recent publications that showcase the progress and vision in ecological civilization construction in China and Russia. Russia released its first academic anthology on ecological civilization, advocating for a shift from industrial to ecological civilization. In China, a series of new books—including Contemporary China’s Ecological Environment, Integrated Development of Forest and Grassland National Parks, New-Type Urbanization with Chinese Characteristics, and Carbon Balance of Forest Ecosystems in China—explore ecological development from philosophical, urban, environmental, and scientific perspectives. These works emphasize the importance of cultural heritage, systemic transformation, and global cooperation in building a sustainable and harmonious relationship between humanity and nature.
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