STORIES FROM ECOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY 89
the many-voiced landscape” (Abram 1996, p.ix). Abram calls us to
remember “a wisdom older than our thinking minds” (p.21). He
shakes us free from our mental constructions and calls us home to
ourselves, to the sensuous and sentient life of the body and to the
directly experienced life of the living landscape.
An epistemology of intimacy
Norwegian economist, psychologist, expressive arts therapist and
ecophilosopher, Per Espen Stoknes (2015), describes ecophilosophy
as representing the turn from an anthropocentric (human-centered)
worldview to an ecocentric (nature-centered) worldview. In an
ecocentric worldview each being has sentience, inherent value
and meaningful existence. Stoknes enlarges the concept of poiesis
to include the more-than-human world. As a striking example of
ecopoiesis , he discusses the poiesis of the air. The living air is actively
involved in being and becoming, and our own psyche, our life breath,
is always participatory. He points out how Western humans have
long understood themselves as separate from air, land and sea. He
asks those of us conditioned in such thought to think about where
the self ends. If we consider the air we breathe in and out, the air
in our lungs, the oxygen in our blood, the water in our cells, we see
that the air is not an object out there, not just the background of our
lives. The air is continuously creating the worlds in which our bodies
live. Our breathing is connecting us to others, to the quintillions of
molecules of oxygen from the trees nearby and the forests of the
Amazon to the phytoplankton in the oceans and to each other. What
we think of as the self is actually a web of interrelationships.
Citing the work of McNeley (1997), Stoknes (2015) offers the
Navajo worldview in which the Holy Wind holds central importance.
This is one example of many native cultures in which wind, air and
heavens are considered sacred before these understandings were
displaced by the chemical and physical definitions of modernity’s
view of air. From the Navajo perspective our own life breath is a