In this practical guide to radical kinship, everyone from urban dwellers to farmers follow the journey of rerooting and rewilding through myth-telling as we step into the sensory realms of the more-than-human world.

An interview with Claire Ratinon, Isaias Hernandez, Sophie Strand and Farmer Rishi.

“Humanity views itself as the singular author of culture, civilisation and time. But the role we play is definitely not author or main character, and it’s important to begin to shift the paradigm of control,” says ecological storyteller and American author Sophie Strand.

The colonial experiment tectonically shifted humanity’s root system, inducing stress, disorientation and disassociation, contracting the senses and severing our relationship with the more-than-human world. Now, techno-capitalism’s narcissistic reliance on technology to fix the climate crisis is causing further cultural loss and adverse environmental impacts. And with the digital world rerouting our fate to its cloud server, encoding toxic hyper-individualism into humanity’s behaviour, sensing our environment is becoming an abstract phenomenon.

“The system is intentionally structured so that we don’t sense our relationship with the natural, living world because then we won’t feel called to protect it,” says UK food grower and author Claire Ratinon. “When we feel our connection with the natural world, we realise that these exploitive systems are destroying our bodies along with the possibility of a thriving future.” But there is a growing movement of visionaries, rebels, gardeners and storytellers transforming the bitter rot of decaying structures and fermenting a revolution.

Part of the metabolic process of change is disrupting the illusion of pristine or conventional forms of nature. “One of the things I figured out early on was that Indigenous cultures don’t have a word for nature,” says Farmer Rishi, founder of Sarvodaya Farms in California, USA. “They’ll have a word for Earth and universe. But there’s no word for the part of the world that isn’t human. There’s no word for artifice, artificial, natural or unnatural.”

For most of us, the wild is usually visualised as ‘out there’, something outside of ourselves in faroff distant places with minimal human intervention. This unrealistic concept of nature reduces humans to a ‘virus’ who cannot live sustainably on Earth and is perpetuated by fossil fuel giants who use their carbon footprint propaganda to reinforce capitalism’s individual-orientated agenda. Meanwhile, wilderness rhetoric has justified denying Indigenous land rights through environmental policy. In the past two decades, scientists have confirmed that the Earth’s biodiverse ‘wilderness’ is not nature’s autonomous will, but the result of humanity’s interaction with nature over thousands of years. “If we look at Indigenous cultures, there’s a way of tending and stewarding the land and intervening in generative ways,” says Strand. “Our role now is to ask those communities that still have a knowledge of sustainability how to come back into a relationship with the land.”

The attack on nature is putting us all at risk and a further loss of our connection with nature would make this cultural knowledge critically endangered. And while the new green revolution promises just transitions and dramatic improvements in our society, political inaction is adding to an already suffocating atmosphere. “We are obsessed with grand gestures and big interventions, but actually we need to learn to step more softly and to do things in a slower, more innocuous way,” Strand adds.

The UN estimates that two-thirds of the world’s 8 billion people will reside in urban areas by 2030, and as more people flock to cities, these concrete jungles are becoming leading frontiers for climate solutions. While cities are major sources of greenhouse gas emissions and will place further pressure on people and planet, they are also a breeding ground for innovation. Citizens, policymakers and leaders are transforming urban centres into laboratories to begin making cities more resilient to climate change. Urban nature-based solutions are addressing multiple challenges, such as the urban island effect, biodiversity loss and food insecurity, while simultaneously providing human health benefits.

For Ratinon, growing food is political. “My journey to food growing unfolded mostly in cities, in these fiercely carved out pockets that would have otherwise been built upon for a capitalistic, ravenous endeavour, and to some extent that’s actually what made it fierce,” she says. “In a city, there’s nothing assumed about nature, you have to find your way towards it, cultivate it and protect it because it’s always under threat. Growing became a gateway to understanding how natural systems operate and how we could have a relationship with the living world in a meaningful and generative way. I don’t think I would have found a relationship with the natural world if it had been readily available. It was the implausibility of seeing it happening that made it so captivating.”

But not all green spaces are created equally. According to Natural England (which advises the government on the natural environment), one in three people in England cannot access nature near their homes. With trends for nature connectedness growing in popularity since the pandemic, building a sustained legacy for a vibrant, green future requires radical kinship with multi-species ecosystems connecting people to place and reimagining a flourishing world through relationality. Using this place-based approach to imagination, dialogues and stories emerge as we peer into the sensory realms of the more-than-human world. The stories stemming from the abyss of climate chaos are not contemporary heroic myths idealising individuals - after all, no single individual, solution, organisation or government can solve this crisis in isolation. They are the growing crescendos of unsung heroes who form the building blocks of resilience, connectedness and transformation and embed us into the underbelly of the Earth, propagating our roots into alternative visions of unruly futures.

A counter-culture is rising beneath our feet: the untouchables, the impurities, the invasive species, the grubs, the microbes, the fungi, the viruses, the single-celled organisms, the bacteria and the bacteria in us that sometimes cause dysfunction, are opening the pathways for our neurons to connect with another world. “The smalls, a term coined by microanimist biologist Siv Watkins, are the viruses, the bacteria and the fungi that undergird the biodiversity of the entire Earth,” explains Strand. “And yet we can’t see them and oftentimes we can’t honour them. In fact, we don’t include them in conservation attempts, or in conversations about biodiversity.” Increasingly, however, there are more efforts to preserve the wood wide web, the great nutrient highway, leading to a deeper understanding of our ecosystems and to solutions to the crises of our generation.

Even so, the current socio-economic model is not designed to ensure justice for all. Effective change will require a radical transformation of systemic structures. “We need to digest the house from the outside,” Strand explains. “There’s a mythology of vegetal gods in the Mediterranean basin before empire pours concrete over and tries to suppress those earlier animistic Earth-reverent root systems, which are often associated with vines and ivy. They trap moisture and water, causing houses to crumble. Oftentimes, these are species that we consider invasive, but that’s a very narrow, colonial idea of a climactic ecosystem. What are invasive species really? Are they teaching us something about what it means to midwife ecosystems that are trying to respond to climate change?” Over time, invasive species have survived the ravages of monoculture, ecosystem degradation and eradication, so perhaps their tactical approach can teach us how to relate to our ecosystems to ensure our own survival.

Take Bermuda grass, for example which was brought to California by Europeans for lawns. “It’s not just a bunch of grass, it has creeping roots that spread, creating a layer of subterranean roots,” says Farmer Rishi, “Currently in LA, people are trying to remove their lawns to replace them with landscape fabric and gravel, and if you try to tear Bermuda grass out six months later it comes right back and reroots, it’s a very vigorous, resilient plant.”

“One thing I learned from spending a lot of time with Bermuda grass is that it is very protective of soil. Bermuda grass comes in when nothing else is there and covers everything up, making sure that the sun is not baking the ground while resisting anyone trying to remove it. The only way to limit or remove Bermuda grass is to take care of that land because as the soil fertility improves, the soil loosens, develops structure and there’s more shade. The grass then loosens its grip; it previously held onto dry, hard soil, which prevented it from being removed. Now you can pull the whole root system out and as soon as the ground gets covered with plants and trees, there’s less sun for the Bermuda grass to eat, slowly lessening its impact.”

Beyond plant species, cultural ecosystems have defiantly formed a frontline of resistance against racial inequality by redistributing power among communities and orchestrating a new relational reality. “The neighbourhood where I grew up is very polluted and disinvested, but it has a lot of vibrancy,” says US-based environmental educator Isaias Hernandez. “It has its own ecosystem, because the people were each other’s lifelines throughout crises, from the local street vendors who provided food access, to the buses and local programmes that were available to get people vaccinated or to get free food. That is resiliency. Although we may not have a lot of trees, forests and gardens, we have culture, food and people."

Similarly, for Ratinon, growing food plays an essential role in building social cohesion and cultural resistance, revitalising their connection to the natural world. “[Now] I’m not just moving through a landscape, I am interacting with a very small parcel of earth and saying, ‘What can I do to ensure that you thrive?’ and turning up for it consistently as an embodied practice,” she explains. “Hyperlocal relationships give us agency through a network of interdependent connection, especially in the context of the climate crisis. It’s radical to sense an interconnection with the natural world that extends beyond the leisurely, sensory experience because while it’s important to ramble, walk or hike in nature, we need to think about what cultivating a relationship with the natural world looks like in a way that feels like we are implicated in its continuous thriving and protection.”

Locality is key for connections and kinship to grow through mutual dialogue and reciprocity. These links build mutual aid networks and community- led approaches rooted in our relationship to place. “Oftentimes we uproot cultures, environments and ecosystems to apply it to our own needs,” says Strand. “We have to make sure that kinship isn’t just a different word for extractive colonialism. Kinship has become an overdetermined word, conflated with friendship and family. But kinship is a dialogue, a channel that goes both ways. You have to learn to dialogue with your environment and web of relationality, to put out your hand, but also see if the other being or place puts out its hand. As American professor Donna J. Haraway says, ‘Everything is connected, but not everything is connected to everything’ and that difference is really important. You have to understand when you hear a ‘no’ from a place, a people, a story or a plant that says, ‘I’m not your kin’.

“In the natural sciences kinship represents everything on a continuum, from parasitism to mutualism. I like to think about kinship as an ecotone where we can hold tensions without dissolving them into homogenised universalism. An ecotone has a thick boundary [of liminality] and is where one ecosystem dramatically shifts into another. [Here] you can see a preponderance of biodiversity where there’s a lot of biological experimentation and new species often develop and diverge.” Strand continues, “Kinship is bigger than our simplistic human dualisms. For example, the microplastics in our blood are our kin. The Mesozoic programmes that are being turned into exhaust and then imprinted into the vasculature of our lungs are our kin. If we can begin to work with our difficult kin and take responsibility for the complexity within our environments, from pollution to belief systems, whereby we’re not trying to create some endemic, pure state of familiarity and return to some imaginary utopia, but rather understand kin to be something that’s much closer to an ecotone than an ecosystem, then that draws us into culpability and morally complex realms.”

Imagination is essential for developing visions of a common future to secure ecological, social, economic and cultural justice with our morethan- human kin. To dream beyond precedents and reshape, rather than adapt to, our environments we need to plant ourselves in our immediate concrete realities. “The landscape in the UK is a degraded landscape,” says Ratinon. “It’s been manipulated and partitioned in so many ways that only a handful of ‘wild’ places still exist. So, in order for me to feel part of a thriving, living world, I have to lean into a sense of mystery. I have to use an embodied sense of imagination to see the literal particles of oxygen and carbon dioxide that not just connect me to the willow tree at the bottom of the garden, but also to the banyan tree in Mauritius. Imagination plays a huge part in building a sense of connectedness because without it I wouldn’t necessarily understand myself as a part of nature’s interdependent web.” Alongside growing, we need to cultivate imagination too, adds Hernandez. “It’s curiosity that is going to lead to more solutions on the ground.”

While there is mounting evidence that shows the benefits of connecting to our local flora and fauna, access to nature is not always available. So, what’s the alternative? “I am disabled and kinship proposed by popular ecological conversations can feel inaccessible to someone whose body is decaying, a body that depends on synthetic drugs and cyborg interventions,” says Strand, “Often I can’t make it outside to be with my ‘outdoor’ kin. But my body is an ecology with complicated kinship and while the microbes in my gut are disturbed, they are also my bodily interlocutors.”

Rooting into the localism of the body and reinhabiting both space and place is an emergent ecosomatic strategy, a method recognising the relationship between body and Earth, that nurtures both our ethnosphere (our cultural heritage as a species) and biosphere. “I have an exercise called the omphalos, a term for the navel of the world, in which I problematise the idea of the womb,” says Strand “Everyone has a belly button, a flesh rhizome, reminding you that you were tied to another being, that the self is always connected to and created by another self. In the deep time evolution of human beings, we only developed the ability to have children through a viral incursion that formed the trophoblast layer of the placenta, and if we think about our belly buttons we realise that our ancestors are viral. They’re the bacteria that fused to create the complex nucleated cells forming our bodies today.”

Strand adds: “So, when we are unable to move, when the landscapes we love have been destroyed by extractive policies, we can lie on the ground and feel ourselves becoming an ancestor for some other being in the future. We often think of evolution as somehow climactic with humans, but we are on the way to becoming something quite different. We are one drop in a river that’s still moving.” The future is ancestral and embedded in our imagination, using its widespread neural network of connections with the more-thanhuman to build a better world, helping humanity and nature thrive now and in the future.