An article by Soul Nature
What does it mean to experience an eco-awakening? For most people, awareness is rising quickly about the need to care for and protect the planet we all live on. It’s hard to avoid or ignore the fact that we are entering into a climate crisis. We see first-hand that severe weather events, like flooding or drought, are becoming more common, both here in South Africa and around the world. The causes of biodiversity loss and the threat of species extinction are more clearly linked to human activity; the over-exploitation of natural areas (seen as ‘resources’ for human living, e.g. fishing, forests), habitat loss, large-scale ‘conventional’ agriculture, deforestation and climate change.
With this recognition can come deep grief, sorrow, anger and accompanying anxiety, as we start to see that human-designed constructs and systems, of which we are all a part, are life-threatening, rather than life-affirming. What future do we want to leave our children? And our children’s children? And the children of all those more-than-human beings in the greater Earth community?
I was reminded recently of a beautiful quote, often tributed to Chief Seattle – ‘the Earth does not belong to us, we belong to the Earth’. For me, this fundamental shift in consciousness is at the core of what will enable each of us to step up to the challenge of changing our relationship to nature, to no longer tolerate the term ‘natural resources’, as if this Earth was here purely to provide resources for our human lives. And to shift our way of being, of living on this Earth, towards being in right relation – the birthing of a life-sustaining future.
True eco-awakening is when we have a bodily experience of ourselves as nature, not separate or distinct from it, but absolutely intertwined. It is a gnosis that this Earth is our primary place of belonging – rather than one’s primary partnership, workplace, similar-interest group, family, place of worship, neighbourhood or village. While connection with these groupings of other humans brings colour and vitality to life, it will always be secondary to our primary way of belonging to Earth, as integral beings in this ecological web of life.
This gnosis is visceral. This is the movement towards eco-centrism, a centre of gravity far removed from our Western ego-centric worldview and culture. Our loyalty will forever shift; from human-bound to Earth-bound. In the process we will likely also begin to experience our belonging to the greater Universe and Cosmos.
This is the revelatory experience Thomas Berry wrote about in his book ‘The Dream of the Earth’: “An experience wherein human consciousness awakens to the grandeur and sacred quality of the Earth process. This awakening is our human participation in the dream of the Earth.”

Eco-awakening is a full-body and truly transformational experience, not an experience that is merely cognitive. And for me that’s why wide-spread eco-awakening has so much power to truly shift our human trajectory, and the future for all beings. Automatically, it will shift the Western worldview, the lens through which all human structures and constructs are built. Many would say eco-awakening is also a spiritual experience. As Bill Plotkin so eloquently writes ‘it is the somatic, heart-rending, and world-shifting realization that you are as natural, as wild, as interconnected and related, and as magical as anything else on our planet.’
This simple movement of falling back in love and seeing the majesty, beauty, and enchantment of this Earth, has the power to completely shift our relationship(s) with and within Earth. By truly experiencing the animate and sacred nature of all life- ourselves as part of that- we can cultivate the heart-centered courage to give ourselves fully to this world and to enable the ‘Dream of the Earth’ to enact through us.
Written By Soul Nature
https://soulnature.co.za