Articles

Newton Harrison was among the pioneers of the eco-art movement, a member of the collaborative team of Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison (who died in 2018) that worked for over forty years with biologists, ecologists, architects, urban planners and other artists to initiate collaborative dialogues to uncover ideas and solutions which support biodiversity and community development. It seems like a recent illness of Newton's has inspired him to have some new ideas about our relationship with the environment, which he has put in the artistic message called "Epitaph." It is published in the journal together with a page of comments or a "debate."

How does it stand with ecopoiesis in this period of global conflict? It would be easy to lose sight of our underlying concern for the fate of the earth when reading the everyday headlines. In fact, we could think of this conflict as the negation of ecopoiesis. Violence occurs when one party attempts to impose its will on the other. Both then necessarily become involved in a struggle based on domination. In Nietzsche’s philosophy, the Will to Power is seen as basic to every form of life. However, we do not understand this basic drive as the will to dominate others. Rather, it is best seen as the drive to become fully alive with all one’s potential realized. We maintain that we have an aesthetic responsibility to the fate of the earth, to transform devastation into beauty. Ecopoiesis is the way in which we must carry out this responsibility.

 

The question arises, what could be our creative response to the destruction of the environment today? Contributors to the Ecopoiesis journal are based in diverse artistic, therapeutic and educational practices. There is something in both therapy and art-making that runs counter to the practices of domination characteristic of our epoch, as the contributions to the current issue show. It seems to us that the common denominator is the practice of poiesis.

This thematic issue of the journal focuses on ecological / nature-assisted arts therapies based on poietic ecology, ecopoiesis. In the Anthropocene era, ecological arts therapies implement a life-affirming creative initiative for sustainable development, thus allow humans to maintain health and well-being, living in unity with their earthly home, the global web of life, appreciating its gifts and maintaining its beauty as an essential ecological quality.

This essay was written in response to Alexander’s Kopytin’s questions inviting Shaun McNiff to expand upon his presentation at the Ecological/Earth-Based Arts Therapies Conference in August of 2020 where he discussed the need for a depth psychology of art and nature. Based on an all-inclusive idea of nature and with reference to the ideas of James Hillman and Thomas Berry, the author presents his understanding of art as a force of nature, the mainstream of imagination accessible to all and focuses on the process of painting. He illustrates his statements with his own art.

This editorial serves as a manifesto of Ecopoiesis. The mission of the journal, Ecopoiesis, is to build sustainable, just, and beautiful human and “green” communities and create an ecological civilization based on the human propensity to respond to and shape the world around ourselves together with nature. This mission of Ecopoiesis thus lies in revealing the intrinsic human ability to love and appreciate life in all its myriad forms. In doing so, it aims to support beauty, health and resilience, providing the conditions for life to flourish and for human exploration and creativity to move into the future.

 

The author reflects on the significance of our fear of nature, which results from our inability to establish complete dominion over it. In the process of knowing nature, a person may gain a certain degree of control over it, but only at the cost of losing this fear, which, the author believes, is one of the prerequisites for creative imagination. The author reveals the contradictory nature of human relationships to nature using the example of his changing  experience of being in the woods where he grew up.

 

 

This multi-arts project arose from the encounter between the painting of Judith and the poetry of Odette. Inspired by the intermodal aspect of the expressive arts, which promotes the practice of diverse artistic languages, Judith invited Odette to get to know her paintings and explore the possibility of creating poems in response to them. The verses arrived and this is how Vital Exodus came about, a meeting of visual and poetic images. It invites us to stop, take distance, contemplate and pause to learn to breathe differently, sharpen our senses and dance again to the rhythm of the universe to which we belong.

The article discusses the pernicious idea about harmonious, idealized human relations with the natural world, which contradicts the real practice of nature management and relations in the animal kingdom. The author calls for a tendency characteristic of Western culture to perceive the natural world through the prism of its symbolic interpretation, as a projection of human reality. He emphasizes the need for a change in perception based on a sensual, physical connection with the natural world and the development of aesthetic perception. This allows us to comprehend the natural world in a specific environment as more complex, diverse, rich and beautiful.

This article examines the connection between the postulates and key theoretical positions of archetypal psychology and the eco-human multidisciplinary approach. The eco-human approach outlines the poietic nature of human beings, associated with their ability to shape the world in order to fulfill their needs and take care of environmental well-being with an aim to beauty. In order to demonstrate the proximity of the theoretical positions and tasks of archetypal psychology to those of the eco-human approach, the author examines human relationships to the environment and the subjectivity of the natural world. Archetypal images are considered in their relation to "archetypal natural environments" and their participation in the creative ecopoietic process. 

 

We are proud to introduce a new issue of the ECOPOIESIS journal during this critical period of human existence. As populations all over the world are threatened, we have to ask ourselves: What is worth saving? What is worth our dedication? What can we embark upon in a time of these global challenges? The coronavirus pandemic and its wide-range impacts at social, psychological and economic levels worldwide invite us to search for answers on these questions from an integrative perspective, combining not only biomedical sciences, but ecology, the humanities, the arts and cultural knowledge as well. This issue of ECOPOIESIS aims to bring together those who have dedicated themselves to the spirit of eco-human potentiality, the spirit of ecopoiesis, in all the countries in which they work. 

The article explores environmental culture from the perspective of the humanities, using an eco-human approach in education, for the study of the socializing potential of environmental education in particular. The eco-human approach is considered as a new methodology in science and culture, applicable to the social sphere and education. The unity of learning and educational processes to establish an ecological culture of human beings and society as a whole is discussed. The author demonstrates the unity of ecological (natural) and educational (cultural, artificial) systems, and emphasizes an "educational ecosystem" concept. The application of an eco-human approach in a wide range of inter- and transdisciplinary studies, is also outlined, as well as the trend towards convergence of science and culture’s main concepts, in respect of their meaning as well as the technologies and approaches they use to assess their effects.

The article outlines the main content of a new interdisciplinary field of the eco-humanities, combining ecology and the human sciences. The main subject of the eco-humanities comprises the study of the nature of the human being in the process of self-knowledge, and its system of relations with the environment, thereby generating an ontological wholeness of the human being and the living environment. The characteristics of the eco-human approach are given as a pathway to the understanding the human being; when it is considered as a self-conscious part of the united subject of the study, “The Nature – The Human Being”, in which both “The Nature” and “The Human Being” constitute two subsystems of a single subject of eco-humanity. 

Today marks the first publication of the web-based, open-access, peer-reviewed journal, Ecopoiesis: Eco-Human Theory and Practice. The journal introduces a new trend in science and culture as a whole: the eco-humanities, uniting contemporary ecology in all the diversity of its research areas with the human sciences.

 

In the age of the Anthropocene, ecological thinking needs to go beyond the opposition between humanity and nature and instead be based on poiesis, the human capacity to shape what has been given to us. Poiesis is traditionally thought of as referring solely to art-making, but it has the wider significance of shaping the world in response to our needs and, in so doing, shaping ourselves.