Deep Ecology Practice: An Invitation

The first essay in a series on finding joy and purpose in nature through developing a regular, personal Deep Ecology practice

Kat Palti

Published in

Deep Ecology Studies

7 min readJul 19, 2022

You are at home in nature.

You are a part of nature and live within it. Breathe in, and you draw air through your lungs, oxygen made by pine forests and ocean algae. Breathe out. You send back carbon dioxide to sea grasses and slow-growing lichens. You are at home, feeling the weight of your hips ground you in the Earth’s hold, or lifting your eyes to a passing cloud or the rising moon.

We humans are animals who’ve known the jungle and the Arctic tundra, desert and coral reef. We’ve seen to the edge of our solar system and beyond the darkness of deep space.

Do you feel at home in the world? Do you sense your belonging within restless existence?

The experience of homecoming can occur at any moment: looking at the stars or a baby’s fingers, a grasshopper poised to jump or ocean waves breaking. Life is generous with these moments.

Yet many of us will be familiar with the feeling of being cut off, separate from Earth, from nature, from one another, and even from our own bodies. In many ways modern life intensifies feelings of separation. Screens, walls, cars, packaged food and air conditioning in our material world make us feel separate, and mainstream ideas about humans and nature create barriers of the imagination.

In response, many people are seeking ways to connect with nature and bring the more-than-human world into their lives. The connection is already there. You are nature, and become yourself within a living ecosystem, but to experience this belonging it helps to have practices that affirm and explore that connection.

In yoga and meditation traditions, daily exercise of the mind and body is called practice. Practice is time set aside to train and improve at something that matters to you. Practice is also carrying out an occupation or identity through actions, as when someone is called a practicing doctor or a practicing Christian. This is an invitation to practice Earth kinship in both senses: to train the body and mind in recognizing radical inter-existence with all Earth life, and to live actively in alignment with that truth. This is living deep ecology.

Wherever you live, whether in the city or in the countryside, it is possible to experience true kinship with nature. You do not have to farm the land, nor go on wilderness adventures. You do not need to explore forests and connect to ancestral lands. Many of us cannot do those things. We are also a part of nature. If you can go outside into a living ecosystem, that’s a gift. If you cannot, for whatever reason, you still receive gifts. All are welcome in the living Earth. No one is cut off.

Sadly, many people live in a constricted, fear-based sense of self. They may identify their ‘self’ with a singular body and mind, as a limited individual who has to struggle in this world to make a living and prove themselves worthwhile. But there is nothing to prove. The Earth is home for each of us. Deep ecology practice develops a sense of self that is not isolated, nor trapped in competition.

Some might prefer to be separate from nature. In modern western culture nature has been insistently represented as a savage struggle for supremacy and survival. In so far as humans take part in this, the story goes, it’s because we’re individuals in a world driven by competition. We have to fight for ourselves, for school grades, for business success, for the survival of our selfish genes. Nature, then, does not feel like a place of nurture and refuge, nor of belonging.

But there have always been other ideas about what nature is, and who we are. Many non-western or indigenous traditions do not seek to separate humans from nature, and instead recognize that the Earth is alive and radically interconnected. We are a part of the living Earth’s body. Arne Naess expressed in the philosophy of deep ecology this fundamental interconnection. Today, scientists are rewriting evolutionary theory in recognition of the role of symbiosis, co-operation and complex bodies that blur the lines between individual and ecosystem. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the theory of evolution was developed within a context of imperialism and capitalism, which emphasized supremacy and competition, but it always also contained the truth of our kinship. In the twenty-first century, when many humans feel more cut off from nature than ever, science is revealing our connection within dynamic systems, as large as the planet’s climate and as small as our cells.

Zen Buddhist master, Thich Nhat Hanh, created the word ‘interbeing’ to express this:

The Earth is not something outside of us. Breathing with mindfulness and contemplating your body, you realize that you are the Earth. You realize that your consciousness is also the consciousness of the Earth. Look around you–what you see is not your environment, it is you.

Thankfully, wisdom traditions passed down through generations, scientific discoveries and creative practices all offer support in rediscovering the sense of interbeing, as well as our own personal experiences of wildness and nature. Understanding comes in glimpses, when a woman puts her bare feet into cool river water on a hot August day, or a man hears the calls of rooks settling for the evening near their autumn roost, or when your breath catches at the sweetness of a loved one’s smile.

Remembering our true connection with the natural world, immense joy becomes available. After isolation, opening to connection is like turning on a new sense. The world is brighter, richer, deeper. Life is full of wonder when appreciating the co-existence of the soils, trees, animals, oceans and skies.

This essay is the first in a series offering practices for experiencing interbeing, and living deep ecology. Practices include meditations on our breath and the elements of our bodies, and on the rich and diverse ecosystems and life forms that make up our world. Meditation is powerful because it trains the mind in ways that can be carried forward into how we live in daily life. Meditating on water, for example, can wake us up to unexpected depths of reality when simply drinking a glass of water, experiencing rain or dry weather, or washing an apple. Contemplating our evolutionary history transforms the way we might look at a fish or a lizard or our spine. Practicing a loving-kindness meditation might affect our next conversation, or our vote. These practices strengthen a sense of connection with nature, build resilience for challenges, and bring us back to source.

Another type of deep ecology practice explores Earth’s diverse living beings and ecosystems. It reaches out to deepen and widen our sense of who we humans are and our appreciation of the beings with whom we live, our kin on this astonishing planet.

The experience is joyous: to come home, and discover family in all that lives here with us, and the Earth herself. Yet, there is also pain. Humanity’s treatment of the wider natural world as a resource to be exploited has caused great damage. Diverse ecosystems have been destroyed, or are being destroyed. Wild experiences of the world from the snow leopard to the albatross to the coral reef are fading. With them, the Earth loses her brightest senses, her strength and vitality. Climate chaos threatens to bring destruction ever faster. And across our world billions of animals live caged and suffering, condemned to end their lives in the slaughterhouse.

Living in kinship with Earth life, you meet this shadow-side of our planet. Yet this suffering is with us whether acknowledged or not. You cannot build a wall around your heart to shut out the suffering of this world without great effort and constant vigilance. And still, despite this wall, the world finds its way in through the air you breathe and the food you eat. Since the mainstream society today is so individualistic, this pain is usually pathologized as the psychological problems of the individual, but pain on behalf of our world is real.

Deep ecology practices need to acknowledge grief and seek to strengthen compassion. They should also respond to planetary suffering through action, in our lifestyles and through activism. In this time of suffering and threat, of depletion in the more-than-human world, there is an invitation to take part in healing. Ecosystem destruction and climate chaos are a summons. We can attend to what is happening, and act. Our lives matter.

Human happiness deepens with purpose, and when you turn to the wider natural world today you will certainly find purpose. Be with the Earth now, and remember that you yourself are the Earth. Take part in the healing of this world. Be Gaia.

Practices

Here is a list of the practice topics to come in this series. It may evolve over time. As they are posted, I’ll update the titles below with links. Return to this page to see what’s new, and I’ll try to post a new topic each week. I welcome your feedback if you have any suggestions or requests.

Part One: Resources

1. Gratitude

2. Ground

3. Breath

4. Interbeing

5. Loving kindness

6. Evolutionary gifts

7. Body

8. Listening

9. Grief

10. Speaking of grief

11. Compassion