A Continual State of Becoming: A Letter from the Incoming Editor

Deepening Our Understanding of the Human-Nature Relationship

We must continue to deepen our understanding of the human relationship with the more-than-human world. Robert Greenway (2009) captured this imperative in the inaugural issue of this journal:

[We] work towards an ecopsychology that will find within language an accurate articulation of the human-nature experience. This will of course be based on experience, but will be couched in language…. It must take up the deepest meanings of relationships in general and relationships between “mind” and “nature” in particular. It will be based on a variety of “modes of knowing” (neither ignoring nor privileging science). (p. 50)

Experience is the root of relationship. However, its articulation takes many forms: oral and written narrative, Indigenous knowledge, theoretical frameworks, and empirical research. The field benefits from methodological approaches that honor this diversity by integrating first-person, qualitative, and phenomenological data alongside measurable outcomes, grounded in shared theoretical constructs that can travel across research contexts without losing nuance. Practiced this way, scientific inquiry need not be reductionist.

These varied modes of knowing are not competing alternatives but complementary pathways toward fuller understanding. Robin Wall Kimmerer (2024) offers a useful frame: “[C]ompetition makes sense only when we consider the unit of evolution to be the individual. When the focus shifts to the level of the group, cooperation is a better model, not only for surviving but for thriving” (p. 76). The same logic applies to ecopsychology’s methodological landscape: convergence, not competition, advances the field.

Bridging Individual Healing and Collective Transformation

Ecopsychology has at times retreated into individualistic therapeutic models that address one person’s disconnection from nature while leaving largely unexamined the social, political, and economic structures that produce and reproduce that disconnection at scale. The field must therefore develop frameworks that connect psychological healing to collective action and systemic change—theorizing how community, place-based identity, and shared ecological experience generate the relational ground from which both personal and social transformation can grow. This means asking how ecopsychology can engage with movements, institutions, and the structural conditions that shape human relationships to the natural world. As Kimmerer’s cooperative model suggests, the unit of healing, like the unit of evolution, may ultimately be the group rather than the individual. The task, then, is not simply the restoration of individuals but the cultivation of communities capable of acting in concert with the natural world.

Moving Through Grief Toward Hope

As the ecological crisis deepens, eco-anxiety and climate grief have emerged as among the most pressing clinical and cultural challenges of our time. Yet the field risks pathologizing what are, in many respects, appropriate responses to real conditions: the felt experience of a world in distress. A critical research frontier lies not only in understanding these responses but in examining what moves people through and beyond them. Elin Kelsey (2020) argues compellingly that hope is not naïve denial but the most powerful tool for change; changing how we think about the future is itself a form of ecological action. This reframes the clinical task to not just eliminate grief or anxiety but to cultivate the psychological conditions (agency, connection, meaning, and possibility) from which hope can genuinely grow. Research is needed on how practitioners can hold space for ecological despair while actively fostering hope-based orientations. Crucially, this work must resist the individualization of what is a collective emotional experience. Hope, like grief, is most sustaining when it is shared.

Attending to Intimacy and Awe

Our relationship with the natural world spans a remarkable range—from the quiet, intimate act of noticing to the overwhelming experience of awe in the face of vastness. Richard Louv’s (2026) new work, Noticing, invites us to recover the former: the slow, attentive, and deeply personal knowing of a particular place, creature, or moment in nature—a caterpillar on a leaf, the sound of a specific creek, the way light moves through a familiar grove. This quality of noticing is not passive; it is a practice of presence that deepens ecological identity and restores felt connection. At the other end of the spectrum lies awe—that distinctive and disorienting experience in which the scale of the world exceeds our ordinary frameworks. I recall sailing across the Pacific on an utterly still night. The stars reflected on the glassy ocean surface so completely that the boundary between sky and sea dissolved—the sensation of sailing not across water but through the universe itself. Awe of this kind is marked by wonder and a profound shift in perspective: the simultaneous feeling of being very small and yet wholly, inexplicably part of something wondrous. Research in ecopsychology would benefit from attending to both ends of this continuum by investigating how intimate noticing builds ecological attunement over time, how awe disrupts habitual self-concern and expands moral consideration, and how these two modes of encounter interact and reinforce one another across the lifespan.

Reorienting toward Wellness and Flourishing

Much of ecopsychology’s research foundation has been built on a deficit model documenting the psychological costs of disconnection from nature. This work has been necessary and generative. Yet the field is now positioned to ask a more expansive question that not only considers what is lost in the absence of nature connection, but what becomes possible in its fullness? Wellness and flourishing, understood not merely as the absence of pathology but as the presence of vitality, meaning, relational depth, and engaged purpose, offer an aspirational and generative research horizon. This shift does not minimize the real suffering produced by ecological disconnection and crisis; rather, it insists that suffering and flourishing be held together, and that the field articulate not only the diagnosis but the direction. Even where flourishing remains aspirational, it serves as a guidepost to orient practice, policy, and research to what we are moving toward, not only what we are moving away from.

Recovering What Has Been Lost

One of the quieter tragedies of ecological loss is that we often do not know what we have lost. The “shifting baseline” (Pauly, 1995) and “environmental generational amnesia” (Kahn and Friedman, 1995) independently capture the same phenomenon: each generation accepts the depleted world it first encounters as the normal baseline, with no felt sense of the abundance that preceded it. Together, these concepts describe a profound and largely invisible impoverishment. The gradual erosion of encounters with nature that shaped our species over hundreds of thousands of years have been lost so incrementally that their absence is rarely mourned because it is rarely recognized. Our earlier work proposed one response to this problem in the concept of a Nature Language, a systematic effort to catalog and recover the deep patterns of human-nature interaction. From being recognized by a wild animal to sleeping under the night sky, each an instantiation of the evolutionary inheritance we carry and increasingly cannot access (Kahn, Ruckert, Severson, Reichert, and Fowler, 2010). Yet, the nature language speaks not only of what is missing but of “what is beautiful in our relation with nature, and what is missing but still possible if we change course” (p. 65).

Mary Oliver understood this imperative not as a scholarly project but as a living practice of attention. In “At the River Clarion” (Oliver, 2009, p. 51), she writes:

And all afternoon I listened to the voices of the river talking.

Oliver’s invitation to listen, to pause, to take seriously the possibility that the lily sings points toward a form of knowing that predates and exceeds our current frameworks. A future ecopsychology must find ways to recover, document, and transmit these old ways of attending to the world (Kahn et al., 2010; Thomas, 2006): not as nostalgia, but as a living counter to the shifting baseline; a reminder, and a practice, of what the human-nature relationship has always been capable of becoming.

Conclusion

Ecopsychology’s deepest contribution is the insight that the ecological crisis is also a psychological crisis, and that psychological healing is inseparable from ecological healing. This insight remains both urgent and underutilized. The observations offered here are not merely technical refinements. Rather, they ask the field to embody its own values of relationality, accountability, humility before complexity, and genuine commitment to the well-being of the more-than-human world. I invite you to write to me with your reflections, refinements, concerns, and critiques so that Ecopsychology may collectively engage in a continual state of becoming.