Philosophy is often simply the art and craft of thinking too much. The risk of getting stuck in the head and becoming landscape-separate is inherent to spending a lot of time seated too comfortably. Traditional philosophy holds much benefit for the world and its study can lead to transformational action, but stuckness in the ‘thinking’ part is a disembodied philosophy. Philosophy is to be lived; thoughts inhabited, then birthed. Eco-philosophy/Deep Ecology brings philosophy home (Eco as Oikos, or ‘home’) to the land that feeds, houses and nourishes us.
The eco-philosopher’s mind is experienced as a function of their body, expressed when wandering through the land, bare feet on the soil, mycelium whispering, grass and moss re-minding. Such thoughts are a dialogue with place, relationship and belonging. Such thoughts occur in motion and are spontaneously paused at the passing flight of a kestrel, the hoot of an owl or the breeze kissing skin, planting more ecosophy into the body of the eco-philosopher, watering it, sprouting thought.
It is the land that does the thinking, through the ecosopher.
I myself am at risk of being the armchair philosopher only when I believe it is my thoughts that may provide some use to the world. If I buy my philosopher's armchair from IKEA and trudge my way through instructions and missing bolts, I miss a true opportunity for relational thought, lost in the belief that the thoughts come through my deracinated body, rather than as gifts of a wider ecology.
True ecophilosophy is spoken through the story of armchair creation in an ecosophy that takes me to the woods in search of just the right bough, to the local farmer in search of a hide to tan, whittling an armchair into being. In the process I become a true armchair philosopher (even the armchair itself) and henceforth my body becomes less lazy, despite being firmly planted upon said chair. The chair speaks through me, because just as I thought I was building a philosopher's armchair, the wood and hide and blade and weather were, in fact, whittling an ecophilosopher. This ongoing spiral of relating, moving, touching, experiencing and creating is the path of the embodied philosopher.
The ecophilosopher knows themselves as a thread in a vast fabric of being, of belonging in this wonderful world of relations. I am not the fabric and my task as a thinker on the topic of home is to feel myself being inexplicably woven back into the places where I wander, work and play, listening to the landscape itself as I am given my tasks in support of this entire ecology.
To be an ecophilosopher is to let the body and landscape and community build deep relationships that birth thought about what it means to make a home, to belong to a place and to discover one's niche within it. Deep Ecology/Ecosophy asks questions of human-as-animal by inhabiting natural ways of living and working on behalf of thriving home landscapes.
From here, meeting swaying wheat fields and their regenerative land tenders, baking bread with yeast cultures inhabiting the skies above and the circles of our nostrils, feeding the hungry bodies of our communities and finding the sun’s energy, gifted by the plant, in order to inhabit what our landscapes beg of us, is ecosophy, is a Deep Ecology.
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