ReRoot: Campaigns for Ecoself-Rooted Public Unlearning and Relearning
In our global ReRoot campaigns, we invite co-creation of art, music, and/or performance pieces that encourage people to (a) unlearn perspectives and beliefs that lead to self-deprecation and/or ecocidal/inequitable behaviors and (b) relearn how to understand and express their ecoself.

What if this type of captioned image appeared regularly on the covers of popular magazines, in social media, on the front pages of prominent newspapers, and as advertisements on television? Wouldn’t we begin to change the perceptions we have of what constitutes innovation and who an innovator is? If the caption instead read, ‘This year’s top scientists,’ wouldn’t we begin to question whether a scientist needs to be a white coat-wearing person (Euro man?) with safety glasses and a pocket protector tinkering with test tubes and flasks in an indoor laboratory with various types of expensive equipment?
What if we were bombarded with images of dark women having a whole array of facial features wearing clothes and textiles we in metropolitan areas rarely get to see, with the caption, ‘This is beauty’? Wouldn’t our perception of what constitutes beauty in a woman change? Wouldn’t we think differently about what type of physical features are considered attractive and what type of clothes are considered fashionable and trendy?
What if we were constantly exposed to images of a farmer in practical clothes working the soil using a bullock-drawn plough, with the caption, ‘This is what success looks like’? Would the image in our minds of a successful person being a profit-making light-skinned man wearing a Euro-style suit and tie sitting in a luxuriously appointed office change to that of a calloused person outdoors who grows our food, keeping us alive and healthy?
Sadly, for many of us across the world, especially those living in cities, we have been conditioned by years and decades of aggressive propaganda that aims to convince us that the way of life built on extractivism (exploiting human and ecological resources without replenishing them) is the only ideal we should strive for. We have been (force-)fed the notion that accumulating commodities and molding our thinking according to binary Euro colonialist ideologies — in which dark is inferior to light and dominion over other things and beings is superior to leading an ecoweb- and ecoself-rooted life — is how we must exist.
But it is this binary way of thinking that underlies the corporate extractivism that causes ecocide and inequity across the world. It is this racist, classist, misogynistic, materialistic way of thinking and acting that has caused irreversible climate catastrophe, biodiversity loss, hunger, and the widespread oppression and impoverishment of human beings globally.
The way we think must change. The way we act must change. On a large scale.
How do we do this? We must ReRoot ourselves in our ecoselves.
One of the components of the Ecosymbionts Regenerate initiative of the Śramani Institute is to engage in ReRoot campaigns. We invite anyone with passion to co-create art, music, and/or performance pieces that encourage people to (a) unlearn, i.e., to peel away the layers of, inhibition and untruths that may be burdening them with perspectives and beliefs that lead to self-deprecation and/or ecocidal/ inequitable behaviors; and (b) relearn how to understand and express their ecoself.
Only through collaborative, sustained, wide-ranging, and meaningful counter-messaging to the extractivist mindset (through campaigns such as ReRoot), on-the-ground demonstrations of transitional and regenerative ways of being (enabling humans to understand and express their ecoselves), and strategic reform of subjective man-made ELGE (economics-law-governance-education) systems can we hope to inspire the change necessary to bring about the interconnected wellbeing of humans and ecologies.