Sentience, Cycles, and the Geography of Repair: Restoring Kinship in a Disconnected World

The Culture of Separation

In the harsh rhythm of modern life, where urgency has become the dominant language, we have grown accustomed to a world that deadens us to our own aliveness. It is increasingly difficult to feel ourselves, let alone the fullness of the beings and forces—human and more-than-human—that make life possible. We've adopted a kind of forced numbness, a survival tactic woven tightly into the fabric of industrial, capitalist culture, a kind of armor that lets us keep moving through days unmoored from the pulse of the earth. This numbness—a dissociation from the land, from animals, from the sentience in plants and even in rocks—is not a neutral state. It is a spiritual injury, a political wound, and an ecological rupture carried in our collective body. To endure the impossible systems we’ve inherited and are told to uphold, we must cut ourselves off from the relational world—and doing so costs us everything.

The dissociation that defines modern life didn’t just happen. It was laid down slowly, deliberately—layered into the institutions we depend on, the ideologies we unconsciously uphold, the very language we’re taught to speak. And from that scaffolding, violence grows. Not always loudly. Often quietly, through policies, zoning lines, textbooks, endless rows of fluorescent lights. It shows up in the cages built for humans and animals alike, in prisons and factory farms, in the enclosure of fields and the severing of wild corridors. In the slaughter masked as progress, in the industrial silence of monoculture, in the asphalt that replaces soil’s breath. This kind of forgetting isn’t benign—it’s orchestrated. It allows us to look away. To lose sight of kin whose names we no longer say aloud: rivers, deer, fungi, coral reefs, old-growth trees, prison abolitionists, Black farmers, migrant foragers, and yes, even the patient stone, whose memory endures long after ours begins to fade.

We are taught to separate—to accept that this is just how it is. The consequence is a manufactured culture in which our very survival appears to depend on denying connection. This is the disconnection Richard Louv described as “nature deficit disorder,” particularly acute among children who grow up behind screen glass rather than field grass. But it is more than missing playtime among trees—it is a kind of constitutional exile, a sense of homelessness in a world built from the erasure of roots. Kenneth Worthy refers to it as “phenomenal dissociation”—an unconscious but practiced distance from the world’s pulse. We no longer recognize the thread between our own breath and the breath of the leaf, nor the quiet symphony of soil and water in which life once felt possible and close. Philosopher Andrew Light connects these patterns to urban design and technology: we’ve built societies structured to place us outside of place, outside of ourselves, until the seasons become a rumor and our bodies forget the shape of belonging.

This forced disconnection is not an emotional state—it’s a political condition.

How Empire Was Built: The Ideology of Extraction

The soil of this society grew on Enlightenment ideologies that positioned nature as machine and humans as masters. Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature demonstrates how the feminine, the Earth, and the unknown were colonized in tandem—and how the rise of rationality was coupled with the de-sacralization of the world. Nature became a thing. To be used, conquered, extracted. And with that shift, domination became ethic. Enslavement became easier—the bodies of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, labeled as “other,” were written out of subjecthood altogether. The land could be stripped, water redirected, ecosystems erased. This is the philosophical foundation of colonization: the myth that one can dominate without being implicated. And it persists, lodged in how we build cities, teach science, and organize power, visible in the very lines that divide neighborhoods and the pipelines that slice through the bodies of rivers and tribes.

Ecofeminist scholars like Rosemary Radford Ruether and Carolyn Merchant argue that patriarchy and extractivism co-arise: control over women and control over the Earth were born of the same logic. We see that logic played out in the contemporary carceral state, in the quiet violence of zoning laws, in the criminalization of poverty and migration, in the way corporate-driven narratives constrict imagination. To dominate, one must cut away the possibility of relational belonging—and we’ve been doing just that for centuries. Michael Pollan, in his explorations of food systems, points out that commodification distances us from not just the land, but the story of the animals and plants that feed us. The supermarket becomes another frontier, blurring the lessons of the field and the animal’s eye, reducing flesh to barcode and nutrient to transaction.

Yet even within these oppressive logics, seeds of refusal persist. Indigenous land defenders, climate activists, and radical urban planners offer reminders that extraction is neither natural nor necessary—it is by design, and can be unmade.

The Denial of Death and the Collapse of Time

The mechanistic worldview that underpins our cultures doesn’t just shape our relationship to land, but to life and death itself. We are taught to fear death, to avoid it, to overcome it with technology, optimization, abandonment, infinite substitution. But death is not an aberration—it is the pulse between flower and compost, the mushroom that grows from a fallen body, the fire that clears space for regrowth.

To fear death as final is to forget we are part of an ecosystem made of rebirth—a wider circle in which endings are just beginnings in disguise.

Our societal addiction to linear time—forward motion, upward progress, exponential expansion—renders the cyclical illegible. But nature does not move forward in lines. It circles. Decays. Regenerates. Over and over again. We see it in the endless round of seasons, in the return of salmon, in the ring cycles of a tree, in the uncoiling of ferns. When we forget this, we treat collapse as failure rather than as invitation to transformation. We view the end of a forest, an economy, or a family lineage as annihilation instead of transition.

Jem Bendell’s “Deep Adaptation” work articulates what many refuse to say aloud: that ecological collapse is not coming—it’s here. Many systems cannot and should not be saved. But from within grief—if we allow ourselves to feel its generous ache—we can discover a new kind of harmony. Bendell shows that the refusal to grieve leads to paralysis and denial, while the willingness to face extinction can become the ground for an ethics of care and adaptation. To move from terror to tenderness is the work of embodied grief—a grief that can compost itself into action, into hope, into new life.

Ancestral traditions—particularly Indigenous ones—have always understood that death tempers life. To resist death is to resist becoming part of the whole. Linda Hogan, in her stories and poetry, reminds us that mourning and renewal are inseparable, and that the bones of animals are not “waste” but the future of the soil, of medicine, of spirit.

Returning to Relationship: The Sensory, the Sacred, the Seen

To move beyond this rupture, we must begin by remembering how to relate. This memory is not just intellectual—it is sensory, embodied, lived. It looks like harvesting nettles and giving thanks. Stepping barefoot into the ocean. Listening to birdsong without needing to name it. It looks like planting a native tree, nourishing a compost pile, sitting still long enough to wonder if the lichen growing on your great-grandmother’s grave remembers. In the words of Robert Macfarlane, “to walk the land is to recover the language of the ground.”

We don’t need to invent new systems—we need to remember. The wisdom is already here, woven into ancestral stories, Indigenous science, daily ritual that ties hands to soil and hearts to each other.

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s lens of the “grammar of animacy” offers a powerful key. She asks whether a maple might be a “who,” not an “it.” Language maps perception, and perception drives relationship. If a river is a person, we speak to it differently. If a fox is kin, we meet it with acknowledgement, not mastery. Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass is a love letter to the possibility of kinship, to the ways plants teach us generosity, patience, reciprocity.

That shift is echoed in James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler’s term “plant blindness”—a cultural inability to perceive the agency of floral life. We prize what moves, what mirrors us, what speaks as we do. But root networks send warnings. Trees grieve. Fungal threads compose symphonies of nutrient exchange beyond time or touch. Black and Indigenous land stewards, like Leah Penniman and Winona LaDuke, revive cultural traditions in which plants are ancestors and teachers, not mere resources.

Indigenous peoples have long cultivated and recognized relationships with plant and animal worlds. Natalie Diaz’s poetry, for example, speaks of rivers and seeds as relatives, refusing the hierarchies that render place invisible. This relational stance is both a survival strategy and a spiritual truth.

And what if we dared go further? What if we remembered that rocks, too, are sentient?

Rocks Remember

In many Indigenous cosmologies, stones are not inert—they are elders. Volcanic rock, in Diné stories, is the solidification of ancestral sorrow. Crystals in Andean traditions carry dreaming. For Māori, stones possess mauri—life force, and are greeted as relations, not objects. Environmental philosopher Kenneth Worthy and ecopsychologist Deborah Du Nann Winter insist these are more than myth—they are medicine, crucial to a healthy psyche and society.

Modern Western science may dismiss such narratives as poetic metaphor, but in reality, stones hold the heat of Earth's birth, shape rivers, cradle roots, reflect the moonlight our ancestors prayed under, and hold stories in their fissures. Geological time deepens our sense of humility, reminding us we occupy but a fleeting heartbeat of the world. To deny the sentience of stone is to tear ourselves from the geological memory of this Earth.

Reclaiming the sentience of stone is not romantic; it is essential. It reorients our ethics, our speed, our extractive hunger. It lengthens time and deepens perception, calling us back to humility. As Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee writes, “radical intimacy” with the mineral, vegetal, and animal realms is our inheritance, if we’re willing to remember.

Designing for Kinship: The Built World as Sacred Practice

Deanna Van Buren’s work at Designing Justice + Designing Spaces brings these insights from ecology and ancestry into architecture. She insists that buildings and designs carry intention—either to divide or to gather, to reinforce trauma or seed restoration. Most carceral spaces are designed to isolate, wound, erase.

Van Buren’s designs do something else. She creates peacemaking centers, harm-reduction circles, community justice hubs made of natural light, organic materials, rounded spaces. These aren’t just buildings—they’re rituals, practices of relationship. Van Buren’s sacred geometry evokes pre-colonial memory, centering community needs, facilitating dialogue, and resisting the erasures of the punitive state. In her world, urban architecture is not separate from ecology—it is an extension of our capacity for care, dignity, and welcome. Her work in Oakland, creating restorative spaces for people harmed by the criminal justice system, is both architectural praxis and ancestral prayer.

These spaces teach that the world around us either reinforces dissociation or restores belonging. Architecture, like every other system, is either relational or extractive. And we get to choose. When design is rooted in justice, the built environment becomes a sanctuary, an ecosystem, a place where repair becomes possible.

Practices of Reclamation: Restorative Movements

Across disciplines, communities, and ecologies, life-giving systems are taking root. Changing the story of who belongs, of how we heal.

Rue Mapp’s Outdoor Afro movement reconnects Black communities with wild spaces—in joy, in resistance, in healing. It isn’t simply about hiking; it’s about undoing the lie that nature belongs to whiteness, about rewriting legacies of exclusion. Similarly, organizations like Melanin Base Camp and Latino Outdoors foster connection across generational memories and ancestral geographies.

Leah Penniman’s Farming While Black positions land as both memory and medicine. Soul Fire Farm teaches soil health alongside abolitionist frameworks. The farm is altar and school, a site of generational repair where radical relationships bloom in the soil.

Melanie L. Harris’s EcoWomanism centers Black women’s spiritual ecology as foundational to environmental ethics. Her theology insists on the sacredness of Earth and body intertwined, where Black spirituality becomes a remedy for the dual wounds of racism and environmental destruction.

Jessica Hernandez, in Fresh Banana Leaves, asserts Indigenous science not as supplement but corrective—central to any viable ecological future. Hernandez makes visible the relational frameworks that have persisted through colonial violence, and how these models of reciprocity, seasonal wisdom, and resistance are keys to survival.

Foragers like Hannah Vega and Chrisha Favors are not “returning” to nature—they never left. Their work is ancestral medicine in action, teaching children—especially Black and Brown children—that the land is not foreign, but family. Foraging is resistance. It is a healing of historical trauma, a ritual of remembrance, a mapping of freedom. Their lessons refuse the myths of ownership and scarcity, choosing instead abundance and intimacy.

All of these leaders show us that the work of reconnection is not hypothetical. It’s happening—embodied, strategic, sacred. From Soul Fire’s beds to Afro-Indigenous water ceremonies, the memory of kinship is being restored.

The Political Consequences of Disconnection

None of this is separate from the political moment. Each fracture in relationship is mirrored in the rise of authoritarian power and the spread of ecological crisis.

The rise of autocracy—here and elsewhere—is made possible by disconnection. When people forget their own aliveness, they stop recognizing it in others. The numbing of the senses is a prerequisite for violence. And disembodiment is a requirement for authoritarianism. Systems thrive when we no longer feel the shape of loss—when the death of a river or a people is rendered invisible.

Murray Bookchin reminded us that the domination of nature by man leads, inevitably, to the domination of human by human. That’s what we’re witnessing—which means the inverse is equally true. Reconnection with the Earth, with each other, disrupts authoritarian control, grows resistance, changes the possibilities for justice.

Disconnection is a strategy of empire. But as empire collapses, as it always does, it leaves behind soil, stones, water, people who remember, stories that refuse erasure.

A Future in Kinship

This is not a call to nostalgia. We are not going back. We are going deeper. Home is not behind us—it’s beneath us, around us, inside us.

The way forward is through rooted systems that know how to compost grief and germinate story. Through forest and fire, through dismantling what harms and tending what heals, through remembering what the fungus remembers, what the stone remembers.

We are not alone. We never were. The world is still alive, still speaking, still willing to receive us—not as masters, but as kin, if we’re willing to listen. In the words of Winona LaDuke, “We are all related”—and the work is to live as if this is true, every day, in every breath.

What we are seeking is not to go back, but to go home—home to everything breathing, seen, felt, named, allowed to live again. To make kin across every border. To remember, together, with hands in soil and voices raised.

And again tomorrow.

And again, when we forget.

Again, we will remember.

References

Bendell, Jem. Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. Cambridge: Iff Books, 2019.

Bookchin, Murray. The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy. Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982.

Diaz, Natalie. Postcolonial Love Poem. Tucson, AZ: Graywolf Press, 2020.

Hernandez, Jessica. Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science. Chicago: North Atlantic Books, 2022.

Hogan, Linda. People of the Whale. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2008.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

LaDuke, Winona. All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999.

Louv, Richard. Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2008.

Macfarlane, Robert. Landmarks. London: Penguin, 2015.

Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: HarperOne, 1980.

Penniman, Leah. Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018.

Vaughan-Lee, Emmanuel. Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth. Point Reyes, CA: The Center for Spiritual Ecology, 2013.

Additional References on Deanna Van Buren and Designing Justice + Designing Spaces

Van Buren, Deanna, and Kyle Rawlins, co-founders. Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS), a nonprofit organization focused on restorative justice architecture and real estate development

“Deanna Van Buren Designs for Abolition and Restorative Justice.” Harvard Graduate School of Design, March 2025.

“Designing Decarceration: Architect Deanna Van Buren.” Center for Justice Innovation, October 2017.

“How Oakland Architect Deanna Van Buren’s Passion for Restorative Justice Helps Communities Heal.” NBC News, February 26, 2021.

“Larger than Architecture: Designing Restorative Justice Spaces with Deanna Van Buren.” VIRGINIA Magazine, 2025.

“Deanna Van Buren—Echoing Green Fellows Directory.” Echoing Green.

“Deanna Van Buren—UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design.”