Human language is powerful, complex, and offers us many avenues for creative communication. It is therefore natural for us to look for solutions to our ecological crisis through this knowledge system. But in this world, so wary of violence and consumed by distrust, is it enough? It would be worth more, I reckon, to offer you a logically-sound argument, if it could carry through some of the deeper emotional information my body is absorbing, and you could receive a more truthful telling of my reality and get a sense of where I am coming from. Then you could understand me as well as my environment better. Feeling deeply is surely an evolutionary asset, through which we can listen and learn from each other and understand our social environments better. In a world where we need each other to survive, where our existence is relationally constructed, understanding how we exist reveals to us where we exist. 

For an organism to survive and grow, especially in an ecological crisis, it is imperative to understand its environment as well as it can. Our social environment is one such physical place. In its deeper parts, we communicate through something fluid, where our sophisticated intellectual apparatus turns to the superiority of the physical, embodied, and emotional senses. Here we find an emotional ecology, a natural ecosystem, which facilitates social life. Navigating this ecology requires a more sophisticated and sensitive system than the one easily described in words. It is easy to miss, because it resists being experienced in words. 

I grew up in an incredibly patriarchal social environment whose abrasion and violence did not allow for my girlhood to exist and grow safely. I could not say how I felt. Society relegated me to make myself alone, in the quietness of my mind, unknowingly subjecting my growing body, my growing senses, to social erasure. Emotionally, I stayed awake and alert as my body navigated its fluid depths and taught itself its intricacies through evolutionary attunement, need, and curiosity. Socially, I grew mute. The part of my body that needed to integrate my emotional learnings into my rational mind became inactive because I did not exercise it. I did not use my voice. I hardly even knew it.       

Socially, I started eroding, but emotionally, I was so alive. Emotionally, I experienced life like any other child, and eventually had no choice but to make room to express my feelings, which were too large for my small body to carry. When no one wanted to speak to me, I spoke through music. When no one understood my fear, I looked curiously towards my nightmares. When no one wanted to acknowledge my anger, I busied myself with books, so I could understand the world that was not being truthfully revealed to me. On my own, I started to discover feminist ideas, historical analyses, and I was fortunate enough to be exposed to a schooling that fed me good writing and teaching. Yet, emotionally, I was still alone. Learning appeased me for a time, but I did not know what to do with this education. 

Somehow, it felt like my education would free me, but it never did. I clung to systems analyses to help me figure out the causal relationships that make up my world. Why do men and women treat each other a certain way? Why is our social system so entrenched in our economic system, or is it the other way round? Why do I feel compelled to think about my own life and experiences as something to extract from so I can turn it into commercial art? Such questions invoke heavy realities, and to deal with their weight, systems thinking itself became a kind of god worship activity for me. As long as I had a way to analyse why something was happening, almost mathematically, I lived under the illusion that I was somehow safe from it. Yet, I still remained who I was, a hypersensitive, racialised, queer, young woman living in an abrasive social environment. I had the whole world at my feet, but I had no voice. I was alone and I was afraid. My emotional reality was obscured to me, because in my social reality it had found no place. I was erased.   

As I grew older, I discovered that there were other people like me. In moments of shared tenderness, I could feel myself. In moments where others revealed tender parts of themselves, I could recognise myself. Parts of me that had long felt vacant started to spark with the excitement of being met. I became aware that there were parts of me that were unknown to my conscious mind. I became aware that these parts could be shared. I discovered the meaning behind my emptiness - it was the embodied memory of something true that had come to life in the past, had a physical effect in my emotional ecology, but had disintegrated before I could make sense of it, before I could speak and sound it out so it could find resonance in the social environment. 

When I think about it like this, I feel like a whale. That to navigate our social environments, we use something akin to echolocation. You speak to me, in words or in action, and it has an effect on me through my emotional ecology, this fluid space we share. I pick this up through my emotional senses and integrate it into my conscious mind. Then I speak to you, in words or in action, perhaps I thoughtfully choose silence, and through my reaction and resonance you understand where I am and who I am, and you also understand where you are and who you are. Through emotional interaction, we learn what our environment feels like, where there is softness that can allow us to grow closer and be emotional together, and where there is hardness that tells us to stay tough and more alert. This way we discover if we are welcome in each other’s waters. This way we discover community. With community, we become cultured.

Our emotional world is not private, it is made up of our interactions with the social world. We need resonance and feedback to navigate it, especially when we are young. Our emotions offer us rich, nuanced data about our physical space, which our bodies can understand very well if we spend the effort needed to learn. Then, our bodies can learn to be immersed and present in our shared emotional ecologies, and better navigate the social world. This is imperative to build any real resistance against social violence. By continually practicing emotional presence and attentiveness, we can collectively respond by creating more deep-knit human cultures that are strong and resilient against social indignities. The environment is violent - to survive we must acknowledge this and respond together.

We are natural creatures in a natural world. There seems to be an idea floating around that humans are not natural, that we are somehow far different from animals and how they communicate, because of technology, culture, and language. But the difference between humans and ‘the natural world’ is not that we are unnatural, it is that we are caged, and the world we think to call natural is still wild. If I tune into our shared emotional environment, using my empathy, I find that most of the people around me are in pain, or they are unable to move in ways they desire. They are stranded in waters they cannot swim in. They are even calling out for help, but until they understand their own condition and their own needs for connection, they cannot be met. 

Animals survive when they form cultures. Homeosapiens likely outlived other species of humans for this reason. Orcas around the world are famously learning new ways of hunting and surviving by forming local knowledge systems passed down from grandparent to grandchild. Culture is not something that can be easily taught. It cannot be industrialised and quickly reproduced. It needs to be demonstrated and learnt again and again by every generation. It needs to be understood and mastered so we may reap the benefits of our embodied communication systems.      

I realise now the point of my education. Good educators and good theory are not there to allow me to hide behind someone else’s words. They are there to fill me with courage, hope, and resonance so I too will speak. They are not teaching us through intellectualisms, they are teaching us through the impressions of experience they leave in us when they reveal truth to us. They are calling us through their song, so we will listen well and respond through ours, so we may discover community, so we may become a culture.   

What does it mean to socialise a human being? Is it learning cursive and grammar so I can copy the language of great writers or influential speakers? Or is it to learn the ability to think for myself and learn how to communicate intentionally with others in a social environment? Socialising tends to be thought about as learning how to behave appropriately in a social environment, but surely that is not the point of our social lives? Surely, learning how to be social is about learning how to communicate with others so we may navigate and survive a rapidly changing planet? 

Being ecological means we have to quit the fantasy that humans are separate from the natural world and can connect simply intellectually, severed from our emotional senses, because it makes us forget ourselves. We are not so different from animals who rely on their senses above all else, or from plants who have intricate parts and systems that support all their functioning. When we forget ourselves, we start to die. If I don’t maintain my connection to my soft self, one day I will no longer be able to utter my deepest experiences into the universe because I will have become so erased. The climate crisis is not just hurting our environment, it is directly hurting us. I see it all around me in my family who chooses stoic silence despite being deeply feeling just like me; in the sharpest and quickest peers and colleagues who would rather be correct and superior than come down to earth, confess their insecurities, and collaborate; and in my beautiful bright friends whose deep sensitivity has turned their day-to-day existence into a constant battle for mental wellbeing, making them want to disappear or wish for an end to their painful lives.  

I wish the world was a softer place. The very part of us that social violence is erasing, our emotional ecology, is what makes us sharper, stronger, and more capable of weathering our shared ecological crisis. It is what will bring us together and help us create culture so that we may survive. We must learn, again and again, how to listen and how to speak.