Ecoself: Restoring Our Wellbeing Rooted in Nature and Humanity
Ecoself is a reimagined Indigenous concept, the understanding and expression of which restores our wellbeing. It is who we are in the context of our own natures, abilities, and experiences, our genetics, our ancestral ecological webs (ecowebs), and our adopted ecowebs.

Increasingly, human beings across the world — especially those of us living in cities — feel isolated, anxious, mechanical, un/undervalued, and beleaguered. Often disconnected from our families and ancestral places, whether forcibly displaced or having voluntarily migrated in search of employment, we are left to fend for ourselves in artificial urban labyrinths. And so we become convinced that the only way to survive is to be aggressively competitive in a world characterized by scarcity. This leads us to focus on satisfying our immediate needs and wants, instead of understanding, developing, and expressing our individual potential, which in turn results in separating us even further from our true natures and from others around us.
The perception of scarcity and the unwillingness/ inability to explore and expand our inherent potential causes many of us to seek to quench our emptiness with commodified objects, produced mostly from ecocidally extracted non-renewable materials using high energy inputs and cheap exploited labor. However, accumulating commodity after commodity does not appear to allay the general disconnectedness that we feel. Thus, we remain perennially unsatisfied and unhappy, while entire human populations suffer inequities as they are relegated to manufacturing endless commodities under grueling conditions, and while nature continues being ravaged to satiate the hollowness we endure, causing irreversible biodiversity and species loss and catastrophic climate change.
What is the solution? How can we feel creatively fulfilled with joy instead of unimaginatively empty and miserable?
To answer these questions we must first understand what the underlying problem is. Modern industrialism — built on the ideology of systematically exploiting human and ecological resources without replenishing them (extractivism) in order to yield never-ending profits for a few — seeks to commodify humans almost as much as it commodifies nature. The hallmark of commodifying something is to completely separate it from its context, including disconnecting and severing it from its life-giving roots, so that it can be extracted, contorted, sold, consumed, and disposed of. It is this being disconnected from our vitalizing roots that we commodified humans — selling or unwillingly giving our time, labor, creativity, health, and sanity to employers — so viscerally feel and desperately attempt to quell.
How do we counter our own commodification, whether voluntary or involuntary? How do we reestablish our dignity as valuable, creative, and curious living beings?
The answer is at once simple and complex. We must restore our connection to our inherent natures and to our roots. Not only our genetic roots linking us to our ancestors, but also our ecological roots from which derive our physiologies and cultures, i.e., languages, knowledge and technology systems, food preferences, and practices. Reconnecting with ourselves and our origins is essential to understanding that we are not isolated, separate, interchangeable, and unworthy, as we are led to believe being replaceable mindless cogs in an industrial machine. Instead, we understand that we are creative and capable beings with inherent dignity, an integral part of the Great Web of nature and humanity, a web in which all living beings and other tangible and intangible entities (e.g., rock, rain, air) are intimately interconnected and interdependent. Once we become aware of our ecoself, we can begin understanding who we are in essence and how we can effectively and authentically contribute to the Great Web.
What is the ecoself?
Our ecoself is our entire being in the dimensional context of space (diverse bioregions across earth), time (past, present, and future), and simultaneity (made tangible, e.g., by the notion of a cohesive “I” when we think or feel, even though our bodies comprise millions of different cells). Our ecoself is who we are as individuals and communities in the context of our own natures, abilities, and experiences, our genetics, our ancestral ecological webs (ecowebs), and — for those of us who are migrants — our adopted ecowebs.
Becoming aware of our ecoself enables us to anchor ourselves in the Great Web of nature and humanity. Once we become aware that we are a valuable and dignified part of this Great Web, we no longer feel alone or dispensable, for we know that we are connected to and relied upon by countless other living beings and entities. We no longer feel mechanistic and unimaginative, for we witness the fecund creativity of living beings all around us and are inspired to curiously explore and expand our own potential. We no longer perceive scarcity, for we begin to discern the abundance of all that exists and is given freely in symbiosis. And as we become more attuned to this interconnected abundance, we begin to realize that our wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of all else in this Great Web. This realization in turn changes our thoughts and behaviors to those that optimize interconnected wellbeing, e.g., by ourselves ceasing to engage in ecocidal and inequitable acts, inspiring others to do the same, and helping to restore and preserve the biodiverse ecowebs without which we cannot be rooted.
How do we approach an understanding of our ecoself?
There are five paths that lead to this understanding:
- the path of devoting oneself to the omnipotent,
- the path of loving others,
- the path of discerning knowledge,
- the path of action, and
- the path of directly experiencing interconnectedness.
Some may use multiple paths and others may use only one, depending on their inherent proclivities.
Understanding our ecoself and expressing ourselves according to this understanding, including working to restore and preserve our biodiverse ecowebs, is the way in which we can decommodify ourselves. It is the way in which we can unsever ourselves from our life-giving and creativity-affirming roots. It is the way in which we can shed the isolation and emptiness we suffer and instead feel deeply connected and cared for in abundance. Rooting ourselves in our ecoself is what causes us to experience immeasurable joy.
You may also like

