Copyright Resilience
There’s a certain appeal to the phrase “ecological consciousness.” It sounds elevated, expansive—like a state of being we ought to aspire to in this time of environmental crisis. In many circles, especially in the growing fields of spiritual ecology and nature-based philosophy, the term is offered as a solution: if only more people awakened to a deeper ecological consciousness, perhaps the Earth would begin to heal. But I want to push back on that idea, or at least the assumptions beneath it. I think it’s time we question the usefulness—and the potential danger—of infusing our ecological language with spirituality, especially when that spirituality is vague and metaphysical and absolutely disconnected from the actual causes of the crises we are facing. It’s not that reverence or awe are unwelcome. Quite the opposite. I believe firmly in the importance of human humility before the living world; of cultivating, within ourselves, care and kinship. But when we begin to speak in terms of cosmic unity or some abstract intergalactic consciousness, we risk shifting our attention away from the political, economic, and social realities that are driving ecological collapse. That is the hazard of spiritually infused ecological language: it can become a type of spiritual bypass, a way of feeling connected without actually addressing the systems of domination and control that shape our relationship to land and life. This is what I mean when I invoke the idea of spiritual bypassing—a concept developed in psychology, but very applicable here. This bypassing happens when we use spiritual concepts or practices to avoid confronting hard truths. In this case, when we replace the need for material analysis and collective action with the search for inner balance or universal awareness. And it’s not hard to see how this happens. In a world of overwhelming ecological grief and dis-ease, people want to feel better. They want meaning. And spirituality offers a soothing narrative: everything is connected, we are one with the Earth, etcetera. But too often, these narratives float above reality rather than engaging with it. This isn’t new. We’ve already seen it happen with mindfulness. Once part of the Buddhist tradition grounded in ethics and collective liberation, mindfulness was extracted from its roots and repackaged as a personal wellness tool. It became a way to chill out workers without changing working conditions or a way to to train soldiers to kill better. It was sold as a remedy for burnout while the structures causing burnout remained intact. I worry that “ecological consciousness” is following the same path. Instead of dismantling the forces behind the degradation of the natural world—capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, industrial agriculture, fossil fuel dependency, and the list continues—we’re told to raise our “vibration” or return to nature and tap into some ancient Earth energy. It’s a comforting story, everybody likes a good fable. But it changes nothing. This is where I think Murray Bookchin’s critique remains essential. Bookchin, a political theorist and founder of social ecology, warned repeatedly against the spiritualization of ecology. He saw how easy it was for environmentalism to lose its teeth by shifting from a call to restructure society into a personal quest for harmony with nature. For Bookchin, ecological problems were not the result of a rupture in some metaphysical human consciousness, but of hierarchical systems that perpetuate domination—first of people, then of nature. If we want to address ecological crisis, we have to confront those systems. We have to make ecology political. This is why I prefer the term ecological literacy. It may sound less poetic than consciousness, but it’s more useful. Ecological literacy is not about accessing a higher state of awareness, rather it’s about understanding how living systems work, how they break down, and how they can be built back up and restored. It’s about learning the names of local plants, tracing the flow of water through a watershed, observing seasonal shifts, knowing where your food comes from, and understanding who holds power over land and the life-giving systems of Earth. It is practical, place-based, and rooted in observation and responsibility. But ecological literacy doesn’t have to be cold or technical. It can be filled with wonder, story, reciprocity, and reverence. It can help us speak of kinship with the more-than-human world, not through metaphysical unity, but through lived relationship. We don’t need to believe in planetary consciousness to act in good faith toward the forests, soils, or watersheds we belong to. When we focus on ecological literacy, we stay grounded, here on planet Earth. We make space for mystery, but we don’t rely on it. We resist the urge to soothe ourselves with abstraction and instead direct our energy toward material change—composting food waste, protecting local wildlife, building mutual aid networks, planting gardens and beneficial plants, reimagining governance, and working toward a truly regenerative future. These are not glamorous or esoteric tasks, but they are what healing looks like, and what we need now more than ever. The truth is, language matters. When we speak in terms of “consciousness,” we risk elevating the ecological crisis into a matter of personal insight or cosmic realignment, rather than one of justice, policy, and the necessary structural transformation needed to bring about an ecological society. We shift the responsibility from systems to selves, from the tangible to the ineffable. That may feel good in the short term, even soothing, but it leaves us disempowered and lost in some void of “what if.” It places the Earth’s future in the realm of the abstract and unknowable, the unfalsifiable. Ecological literacy, by contrast, keeps us engaged with what we can learn and know to be true, what we can do, and what we can repair together. So let’s be cautious with our metaphors. Let’s be aware of the line between reverence and retreat. And let’s resist the spiritualization of ecology when it threatens to replace action with sentiment or clarity with mysticism, and certainly when it teaches us to avoid politics and focus on “personal growth,” we must abandon ship. The Earth doesn’t need us at all, it certainly doesn’t need us to awaken. It needs us to pay attention, to get involved, and to become ecologically literate.
