Kurt, Merve. AESTHETIC RESPONSIBILITY AND RELATIONAL ONTOLOGY IN ECOPOIESIS

AESTHETIC RESPONSIBILITY AND RELATIONAL ONTOLOGY IN ECOPOIESIS  

Critical Review Essay

Merve Kurt

is a PhD researcher in Psychology, University of Dundee, Scotland-UK. She is an interdisciplinary researcher, poet, artist, and practitioner working at the intersection of expressive arts, ecological thought, and social justice. She holds graduate degrees in social sciences and humanities, and her current research explores ecopoiesis, posthumanism, and cinematic aesthetics. With over a decade of experience working with international NGOs and in community-based humanitarian projects, she integrates critical theory with creative practice to examine human–nature relations, ethical aesthetics, and the healing potential of art. Her poetic and visual works reflect a commitment to more-than-human narratives, affective ecologies, and transformative imaginaries.

Abstract
 

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. Rather than treating “nature” as a soothing therapeutic context, the essay argues that the volume repositions environment as an interlocutor that reshapes the conditions of perception, attention, and ethical encounter, destabilising the modern subject–object divide. 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.

Keywords: ecopoiesis, aesthetic responsibility, relational ontology, expressive arts therapies, environmental justice, politics of aesthetics, decolonial ethics

The volume Ecopoiesis: A New Perspective for the Expressive and Creative Arts Therapies in the 21st Century (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2022), edited by Stephen K. Levine and Alexander Kopytin, rather than relying on an easy language of “adding nature to therapy,” takes the ontological ground of creative and expressive arts therapies beyond nature as a “context” that simply feels good, and approaches it as an interlocutor that determines the conditions of how humans relate to the world, and that strains the subject–object divide [15], [20]. In the editors’ introduction, it is stated clearly that the aim of the book is to build an “eco-human” perspective drawing on the values of ecopsychology, deep ecology, and the environmental movement, and to situate arts therapies within an interdisciplinary “paradigm shift” that thinks human health together with environmental wellbeing [13].

The concept of ecopoiesis itself also contains an orientation that carries this claim. Etymologically, derived from the combination of the Greek oikos (οἶκος: home, dwelling, living space) and poiesis (ποίησις: making, creating; in a Heideggerian line, as bringing-forth and the revealing of what is not yet visible), ecopoiesis points to the human capacity to establish or re-establish the home not merely as shelter, but as a network of relations and obligations [11, 14, 19]. Kopytin connects this line to the idea of the environmental subject, framing ecopoiesis as the turning of the human poietic function toward responsible co-creation within the ecosphere, and as the necessity of approaching the environment not simply as a resource that meets our needs, but as an earthly home cared for with an orientation toward care and beauty [14]. Levine’s philosophical line, by contrast, does not reduce poiesis to artistic production alone. He thinks it as a historical–existential mode in which humans shape the world while simultaneously shaping themselves, and from this arrives at the idea of aesthetic responsibility, placing the responsibility to render the world sensorially meaningful and livable at the center of ecological thinking [19].

Within this framework, the book goes beyond being an edited volume composed of practical examples, and centers the questions of what arts therapies serve in the twenty-first century, and, more sharply, where the limits of the therapeutic lie when the planet itself is dying [13]. The weight of this question generates an epistemic tension that runs throughout the entire volume, keeping alive the question of whether healing is to be understood as the regulation of individual symptoms, or whether regimes of attention, spatial arrangements, practices of mourning and remembering, interspecies ethics, and reciprocity should also be thought of as part of a broader relational ecology within the therapeutic field [14].

The theoretical backbone of the book is built through poiesis. Poiesis appears here as the human capacity to shape the world and, within this shaping, to also establish the self [19]. The discussion Levine opens in his opening chapter shows that even the terms themselves are a field of struggle, and that the word “eco-human” and especially the word “eco-human technologies” brings out the need to re-signify these terms without hiding the relation between the ecological crisis and the wrong and violent application of technology [18]. As an honesty that strengthens the ethical claim of this book, ecopoiesis appears not as anti-technology, but more as a methodological proposal that asks which practices build what kind of world.

Levine’s proposal of a poietic ecology rejects the human–nature opposition and the romanticism of “returning to nature” that ecological thinking often falls into, saying that nature is always co-constructed with culture, and that even wilderness is declared wild by drawing a boundary [19]. Therefore, the issue is how we shape. Here the concept of aesthetic responsibility enters, and making the world liveable for the senses is not merely a matter of pleasure, but an ethical obligation that derives from the sensorial–existential condition of the human [19]. This idea is carried into the therapeutic field through a Heideggerian line of letting-be [11]. In that sense, therapy is not to shape the other, and in an expanded sense otherness, according to a project, but to open possibility, and to respect the conditions of growth in their own terms [18].

At this point, Winnicott’s idea of holding and play is read not only as a clinical technique but also as an ecopoietic stance [27]. Winnicott’s concepts of holding and potential space are read in ecopoiesis less as a technical repertoire and more as an ethical orientation. What is therapeutic is not to shape the client, and in an expanded sense otherness, according to a pre-determined narrative of healing, but rather to establish a relational field in which play and creative exploration can be possible, that is, a held ecological stage [27]. On this stage, nature, place, material are not only a backdrop, but the carrier of transitional experience and sometimes appear as a third party, and thus healing becomes not an inward closure that reproduces the inner–outer split, but a practice of re-connection built together with the world.

This move is strong because the settled ontology of mainstream psychology or psychotherapy tradition often constructs a subject inside and a world outside. Whereas the eco-human approach loosens the inside–outside split by saying that the human is already ecological [14]. Kopytin defines ecopoiesis by acknowledging that the human capacity to shape the world can be both destructive and reparative, and by tying creative action not to self-expression but to motivations of serving nature and supporting life [14]. This takes the object of therapy beyond the individual story alone, and our being an environmental subject, our regimes of care, our attention, and our relation to space become included within the therapeutic field [14].

The phenomenological vein of the edited volume becomes clear here, and the world stops being data that enters the body and turns into a field of perception co-formed with the body. Rugh’s discussion of attention re-figures attention by taking it out of being a cognitive function and rebuilding it as a style of relating to the world, and he argues that the language of “using” nature (use) pulls even therapeutic practices back into an instrumentalizing ontology [24]. This approach becomes even deeper when read together with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological line that frees perception from representation. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is not an inner consciousness reproducing the external world through mental images, but a reciprocal and pre-reflective relation established between the body’s orientation toward the world and the world’s opening to the body. From this angle, the world stops being an object standing in front of consciousness and becomes a prospect of lived experience that gains meaning together with the movements, rhythms, and orientations of the body [22]. For this reason, attention moves beyond being only a mental function that selects and focuses and becomes a bodily–existential ethical stance. It becomes a relational field that determines which beings can approach us and which can become sensible and meaningful [22, 24]. Rugh’s critique gains a political dimension at this point, because she draws a structural kinship between the commodification of attention in the modern attention economy and the reduction of therapy into a technical repertoire that “uses” nature [24].

Abram’s emphasis on sensuousness and reciprocity also strengthens this context. For Abram, perception is a participatory event in which the body and the environment affect one another; seeing is entering into relation with the sensible, and it also carries the possibility of being seen at the same time. The fact that nature is not a background but a field of being that returns to us breaks the modern subject-centered regime of perception, and phenomenologically grounds the ethical shift that ecopoiesis demands, from use to relation, from instrumentality to reciprocity [1].

This phenomenological line is also worked through the concept of beauty in the edited volume. Atkins’s text thinks beauty as a stimulus that awakens the heart, and through the distinction of poiesis, ecopoiesis, and sympoiesis, it brings creation closer to the idea of making-with, of co-making [5]. This resonates directly with Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis. She criticizes survival as a human-centered project of control, that is, a paradigm that proceeds by dividing the world into measurable parts, making it predictable, counting risks as manageable, standardizing complexity, and arranging the more-than-human as resource or background; instead, by accepting that on a damaged planet we cannot fully eliminate uncertainty, she proposes rebuilding relations of dependence and reciprocity, and the capacity to live-with and build-with [9].

McNiff’s foreword prevents the aesthetic claim of ecopoiesis from falling into a sterile pastoral idealism of nature-as-peace-and-healing, emphasizing that nature should not be treated only as harmony, calm, and a bucolic scene, and forcing us to think nature together also with its dark, toxic, chaotic, and even at times destructive forces. The whole art viewpoint cannot be healing precisely for this reason, if it relies on an aesthetic regime that selects only the “good” side of nature and leaves the rest outside [21]. This warning is important against the risk of turning ecopoiesis into an aesthetics of escape, because nature-based practices can easily become a décor of healing, and can build the therapeutic relationship by excluding what is disturbing such as grief, loss, fear, disgust, mourning, uncanniness. McNiff’s emphasis says that ecopoiesis must move toward a harder but more realistic claim. The relation with nature cannot be thought only as accessing a regulatory resource; in this context it is also the capacity to stay within the wholeness of the world, that is, instead of managing the binaries of good and bad, beautiful and ugly, to carry them together and to hold them together [21]. This shifts aesthetic responsibility out of being a matter of pleasure and brings it closer to taking on the ethical cost of relating to the world. In this way, the healing is thought as the capacity to establish a field of attention and witnessing that can be in contact with what is disturbing without suppressing it.

In this context, the political-aesthetic dimension of aesthetic responsibility becomes unavoidable, and aesthetics cannot proceed with a simple definition like only choosing the beautiful. It also needs to be thought within a paradigm that determines whose experience is counted as sensible and visible. Rancière’s idea of the distribution of the sensible therefore enters directly, which experiences are audible and visible in public space, which pains are recognizable, which bodies are counted as naturally belonging to that space, are determined through an aesthetic-political order [23]. Here, Sara Ahmed’s line on the politics of emotions also shows that the social circulation of emotions sticks to certain bodies and codes them as discomfort or threat, and reveals that this aesthetic order is not only a regime of seeing and hearing but also a regime of feeling [3]. Affects that are stigmatized as excessive, hysterical, dangerous do not distribute equally across bodies and spaces. For this reason, if the aesthetic language of ecopoiesis is not politicized, it carries a risk of becoming normative, and it becomes important to also carry an ethical responsibility of questioning, within the political frameworks we live in, the questions of for whom nature is a refuge and for whom it is a threat, which bodies are safe and which are not, whose walk is read as therapy and whose presence is read as noise. If we say it with Rancière’s frame, nature-based expressive arts therapies also construct a sensible world, but unless the boundaries of this world, its inequalities, and its excluding aesthetic codes are made visible, aesthetic responsibility can easily turn into a well-intentioned but hierarchical language of care [23]. The edited volume signals this risk; yet weaving the ethical claim of ecopoiesis systematically with environmental justice, accessibility, and the politics of affect-regimes could have carried the book’s call for aesthetic responsibility to a much sharper and more transformative ground [21, 23].

Similarly, the edited volume’s line of subjectification, perceiving nature as a subject, also carries a double-sided possibility. In Kopytin’s chapter, it is described that subjectifying nature is a process that establishes ethical perception, and that it strengthens the environmental subject through personalization and relating with the environment [14]. Yet subjectification can operate in two different directions, one oriented toward reciprocity and humility and the other toward projection and possession. The volume leans toward the first direction especially in A’Court’s practical proposals, together with the critique of use [24] and examples of permission and respect rituals in nature [2]. Still, the critical question here is this: “Does recognizing nature as a subject truly produce respect for otherness, or does it turn into a new form of possession in which, with an easy language like “nature is telling me this,” we reduce nature to a screen of our inner world?” This distinction is vital for the ethical coherence of ecopoiesis. Because anthropomorphism is not always an innocent form of empathy, and sometimes by making nature speak and be made meaningful according to human needs, it strengthens not its subjectivity but our own paradigm of meaning.

In such a case, subjectification stops being the opposite of objectification and can evolve into a more sophisticated version of objectification, that is, into a mode of relation that re-labels nature as friend, resource, healing being. In other words, objectification is not abandoned, it only changes form. If that happens, then nature may no longer a bare resource, but it is still constructed as a figure that confirms the needs of the human subject, regulates the subject’s affect, and reinforces the subject’s meaning. At the epistemic level this reduces encounter to confirmation, and instead of the otherness of nature, the subject’s frame of meaning speaks; at the ethical level it makes the relation conditional, nature becomes valuable insofar as it makes one feel good; at the political level it opens a door for nature to be easily absorbed by a self-care language shaped by class privilege and by the wellness industry. In this way, instead of the reciprocity and obligation that ecopoiesis claims, it carries the risk of reproducing a gentle colonization under an aesthetic and spiritual cover.

At this point, Kimmerer’s emphasis on relational ontology opens an important space in the sense that it takes the issue out of an abstract debate about empathy and carries it onto the plane of obligation and reciprocity. The relation Kimmerer describes does not construct nature as an other that I interpret, but as a field of kinship that I live with and therefore carry responsibility toward; knowledge within this relation is not an act of taking but circulates within a give-and-take balance, reciprocity, and within a gift-and-debt logic [12]. For this reason, in Kimmerer, respect is not only loving nature or feeling good with nature; it is an ethical necessity embodied through practices of learning, gratitude, and giving back [12]. This frame makes it clearer why practices in ecopoiesis such as permission and ritual thanks are not only symbolic gestures, but expressions of an ontological stance, of how we are in the world [2, 12]. In short, Kimmerer frames the test of subjectification through the question of what this relation demands from me and what I return to the world. If the demand is limited to my own healing, ecopoiesis can easily slip into the language of the wellbeing industry. If the demand instead involves reciprocity and obligation, subjectification moves toward an ethical transformation.

The question of colonialism expands the meaning and the analysis here. Because practices of forming ecological connection, even with good intentions, can quickly slide into a colonizing epistemology when Indigenous knowledge and rituals are seen as a kind of material repository. Colonialism here is not, in the classical sense, a land grab. In this context, colonialism constructs itself as a regime of knowledge by treating some ways of knowing as universal while either romanticizing others, spiritual exoticism, or instrumentalizing them, turning them into therapeutic technique. For this reason, the line between animist perception and anthropomorphic colonialism is determined not only by “intention” but also by “practice” who speaks, who is represented, who benefits, who takes risks, who is left outside. When ecopoiesis’s call to relate to nature is read from Kimmerer’s approach, relating can be read not as taking something but as becoming indebted and giving back [12]. There are strong signals in the edited volume in this direction; yet discussing this colonial risk more systematically through a clearer ethical frame, such as conditions of reference to Indigenous knowledge, consent, representation, critique of appropriation, and place-based justice, could have made ecopoiesis’s claim sharper both epistemically and politically [2, 12, 24].

The texts in the second section of the book show, at a practical level, that ecopoiesis should not be reduced to “feeling good”; Sweeney’s discussion of solastalgia sets, in this sense, a particularly valuable threshold. Solastalgia describes the point where grief accompanying environmental change and the loss of place appears not only as sadness, but as an experience woven together with feelings of powerlessness and injustice [25]; for the conceptual background, the definition by Albrecht and colleagues makes this context clearly visible [4]. Sweeney’s approach of therapeutic eco-scenography, on the other hand, takes space beyond being simply a therapy stage and thinks it as a practice of world-making in which meaning and safety will be re-established within an environmental meta-setting unraveled by crisis; she argues that the therapeutic field has to produce a new sense of place, a new ground for sheltering and for dreaming [25]. Sweeney shows this by treating space as something actively composed, where meanings of safety and belonging are rebuilt under conditions of ecological loss [25]. This frame invites us to think that Bachelard’s poetics of home cannot be defined, in a romanticized way, through the positive idea of refuge. Because when home is thought also through its fragility, home does not always protect; sometimes it can be uncanny, excluding, even a site of violence [6]. Thinking this point together with ecological crisis is especially important. Because the loss of home, or the uncanniness of home, also does not distribute equally, and for communities exposed to colonialism, marginalized, and made homeless, home is often already from the beginning an experience surrounded by dispossession and border regimes, already.

The account by Lebedev and Kopytin of the work carried out with war veterans honestly makes visible a blind spot of nature-based practices: nature is boundless and unpredictable, and for trauma it can sometimes be too open, too uncontrollable, and triggering [17]. The text emphasizes in particular that open space can be challenging for people with a high need for boundaries and frame, and that appropriate structuring of the therapeutic process is critical [17]. As an important contribution that prevents the romanticization of ecopoiesis, it shows the claim that nature is not an automatically healing medicine, but an interlocutor that can work within a correctly held, trauma-sensitive relationship [17].

What becomes visible across these chapters is also how ecopoiesis works in practice as a way of composing a therapeutic situation. Nature is not treated as a soothing background added to an already-established clinical frame. It enters as a co-present interlocutor that shapes attention, pacing, and the sensorial conditions of encounter. In this sense, practice begins with how a space is held, how boundaries and safety are negotiated (especially for trauma), how the therapist and participant attune to weather, ground, sound, and material, and how the work moves through small ethical gestures (permission, acknowledgement, giving back) that shift the relation from “using nature” to reciprocity [2, 12, 24]. Ecopoiesis therefore operates through the arrangement of attention and relation; hence, it re-orients what counts as therapeutic from controlling symptoms toward sustaining a field where grief, uncertainty, and attachment to place can be met without being romanticized or instrumentalized, and where the question of what kind of world is being made remains present as part of the process [17, 25].

Crucially, the volume’s most compelling achievement is that it refuses to keep arts therapies sealed within the clinical room and instead stages them as public, pedagogical, and ecological practices. Carpendale’s pandemic chapter makes this expansion concrete by treating digitisation as a problem of attention, access, and world-relation, an invitation to rethink how therapeutic creativity travels across online formats and nature-based work during crisis conditions [7]. In parallel, Rugh’s re-theorisation of attention strengthens the book’s critical edge: by exposing how “use” discourse and the attention economy pull even nature-based healing back into instrumentality, she positions attention as an ethical-political practice of resistance and reorientation, rather than a mere cognitive function [24]. Read together, these contributions show how ecopoiesis operates less as a toolbox of activities than as a shift in the conditions of encounter how, where, and with whom therapeutic practice becomes possible in the Anthropocene [7, 24].

Carpendale’s piece, in the context of the pandemic and global crisis, carries ecopoiesis outside the clinical room and turns it into a pedagogical and public question; as crisis opens therapy both online and toward nature, poiesis and sympoiesis are re-thought as a language of creative survival [7]. Here there is a shared ground with Haraway’s call of making kin [9]. Still, if this text had included a sharper discussion of inequality, bringing in the digital divide, care labor, safety, class, it could have strengthened the accessibility dimension of ecopoiesis. Because today nature-based wellbeing practices often rely on conditions of privileged access.

Lau’s metaphor of Colonialvirus can be evaluated as a strong contribution that raises the decolonial potential of the edited volume. The colonial mind is described here as a regime of separation and domination. Ecopoiesis, by contrast, is positioned as a regime of reciprocity and belonging [16]. This approach is valuable in that it treats decolonization as an epistemic paradigm question. Yet Tuck and Yang’s warning should be recalled here: for them, decolonization is a political process tied to material land [26]. In the book, Lau’s text does not remove this risk completely, but at least positions itself with an awareness of the problem [16]. It would not be wrong to say that there is a similar decolonial caution across the volume more generally. For example, McNiff states explicitly that learning from Indigenous cosmologies should not turn into appropriation [21]; and A’Court tries to structure working in nature through permission, sensory attunement, and practices of respect [2].

One of the greatest successes of the edited volume is that it establishes ecopoiesis not as a list of activities like walking in nature, an art event, but as a transformation of a regime of attention and relation [19 ,24]. When the epistemic dimension of this transformation becomes clearer, a productive contact zone with feminist epistemology also might emerge. Which beings’ testimony is counted as sensible, which losses can be conceptualized, whose experience is taken seriously. Fricker’s concepts of epistemic injustice offer a strong frame for connecting ecopoiesis’s claim of witnessing, and of relating to the world, to a political line of justice [8]. The volume does not directly enter this line, but I think it is possible to build the next step of ecopoiesis from here. In this way, the ecological crisis becomes readable together with dispossession, border regimes, resource extraction, militarization, and racialized inequality.

The interviews and art-focused materials in the final section consolidate this outward movement by placing arts therapies in dialogue with eco-art, policy, and activism. Harrison’s contribution, in particular, extends the book’s ecopoietic argument to the scale of infrastructural imagination. Sensorium is presented as an immersive “global classroom” that mobilises aesthetic experience and systems thinking to make ecological crisis perceptible and actionable, thereby sharpening the book’s claim that artistic practice can participate in world-making beyond the clinic [10]. This cross-field framing makes the volume legible not only for therapists but also for artists and activist publics who are seeking forms of response that are simultaneously ecological, epistemic, and political [10].

As a result, the edited volume Ecopoiesis, rather than showing creative arts therapies a wider world, makes us notice how narrow an ontology we move with within an already wide world [19]. The impact of the edited volume deepens here and lies in an orientation that re-forms how we think nature, relation, and the world. This widening is perhaps one of the strongest sides of the book. Because, in the midst of ecological breakdown, redefining what is therapeutic often requires thinking aesthetic, ethical, and political responsibility together. At the same time, the volume, rather than presenting this responsibility as a completed programme, leaves it as a framework that pushes the reader to think. Thinking aesthetic responsibility together with political aesthetics may be decisive here. Bringing more fully into this frame questions such as the distribution of the sensible, the public circulation of emotions, and whose pain becomes recognizable, may deepen the meaning. In order for the relation with nature not to turn into a new form of possession under the name of subjectification, making the logic of obligation and giving-back more visible can also strengthen this discussion.

Together with the uncanniness of space and home, questions of justice about for whom ecopoiesis is possible and safe could also have been made more visible through broader debates. However, this can also be understood as an openness that multiplies the questions the reader and other practitioners in the field can engage with. In this sense, while ecopoiesis moves beyond “feeling good,” it keeps its own claims open to ongoing ethical evaluation. In a world where forming a relation is not sufficient on its own, and where it also matters within which power arrangements this relation is formed, the potential of ecopoiesis becomes more evident to the extent that we can think aesthetic responsibility together with questions of justice.

References  

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Reference for citations

Kurt, M. (2026). Aesthetic responsibility and relational ontology in ecopoiesis. Ecopoiesis: Eco-Human Theory and Practice, 7 (1). [open access internet journal]. – URL: http://ecopoiesis.ru (d/m/y)