Hot Concrete: Paths of People and Earthworms

The Funeral

We lived in six houses across five countries before I was six years old. I grew up watching my mother and father appreciate the worms we found and, eventually, grew from house to house and from country to country where we lived over time. We shared the soil that bore our veggies, legumes, herbs, flowers, and catnip with them.

I find my mind wandering down a concrete pathway we had in Calgary, Canada, which connected the kitchen door to the garage through our backyard. I must have been four at the time¹. I do not remember whether the pathway was made of square slabs, or if it was one continual piece with grooves that imitated slabs. It was an early, hot summer afternoon. Rain had fallen the past few days, but you would not have guessed it. I remember looking around, curious about what the outdoors were to bring that day when, suddenly, my heart sank and my eyes started to well up. The path held a dark, uneven, linear shape that I recognised as a dried earthworm who did not make it across to the other patch of grass in time. To this day, I am proud, and sad, to say that this earthworm was one of my friends before it met this end.

My mother had built an elaborate kitchen garden in the backyard, and a small wooden box next to the doors leading up to the house for me to cultivate my own green thumb. It was the first little living system that was ever left under my care. And I cared very much for it, including every earthworm I came to meet.

That summer day I held one of many “funerals” for the worms that did not make it across the hot concrete path. I would gather them carefully, surround them with flowers from my mother's garden, and bury them in the soil in a little planter box. I did not yet have the language for what I was doing or noticing, however, I sensed that small lives were moving through spaces I barely registered, and that the surfaces adults had laid down for our convenience were ending these small lives – small to us – without that ever having been the designed intention of said paths.

Off the Beaten Path

I will remain zoomed in to the scale of an earthworm to reflect on a recurring limitation of environmental ethics narratives. Much of the field’s moral vocabulary has focused on value; asking whether we humans value the living world we are intrinsically a part of for the right reasons, and whether other species and ecosystems matter in themselves or because of what they provide for us.

Why do we care about the living systems being in balance?
Why do we care for the wellbeing of other living humans and other beings?
Is it because of what they do or mean to us?
Or the mere fact that they are alive, regardless of how we benefit from them, or how close we are to them?
Why do our suburban houses have hot concrete paths for us to cross our monocrop lawns that earthworms attempt to cross every hotter summer when they stumble upon them on their way to the rest of the soil in the lawn?

Those of us who are not particularly financially affluent cannot always escape the petroleum infrastructure that made concrete cheap at the time of manufacturing, the cultural ideal of the lawn, the labour systems that establish and maintain it, the property regime that built it, and the socio-political economy that made the suburban arrangement the dominant aspiration of post-World War II North American middle-class families. Behind these lie longer histories of enclosure, pragmatic “improvement”, extraction, and the conversion of complex living landscapes into spaces engineered to be owned, ordered, valued, and maintained.

Nobody is perfect, and not everyone can access ideal living conditions aligned  with their values. By far. It is also very easy to talk about not wanting concrete paths, not wanting the planet to get warmer, and not wanting earthworms to dry up on our property, but in practice, do we really look at these things after we step out of our writing and talking bubbles? Some might argue that nature is vicious and that the earthworms were going to die somehow, so why not dried up on a concrete path like this. Others might say there are plenty of earthworms out there! And others might even say, “ew! Somebody remove this gross worm from my walkway!”. 

How do we protect the earthworms from dying on our hot concrete paths? What do people mean when they speak of protecting “nature”, and why does this rhetoric rarely reach the scale at which damage is actually being produced? The damage runs through historic and contemporary arrangements of land, labour, materials, and routine, sustained by the slow institutional life of property law, insurance, zoning, and aesthetic convention _Fig.2. It’s hard to wrap one’s mind around how interconnected, complex and foreign all the systems are that make a very mundane, specific, and often overlooked building element such as a concrete walkway.

Pick Seeds, Not Flowers

I picked garden flowers for the funeral. I still do sometimes. I still hold these rituals for earthworms that I find when I have the time and the presence to notice them and do so.

I remember when my parents taught me that picking flowers is not harmless and that it must be done sparingly; that without their flowers, plants cannot produce seeds, and without seeds, new flowers cannot grow. In Copenhagen, when I was a part of a very special community garden there, a sign was made by a member to show others to “pick seeds, not flowers”. We were involved in helping others learn how to harvest, sprout, and spread seeds in the urban and periurban fabric of the city.

Flowers are often perceived as objects of temporary beauty that one can take for themselves or for someone else. I remember one late summer day around August of last year (2025), when we saw a father pick the only orange daffodil (påskelilje) that was in a planter box along the perimeter of the community garden. It was a sweet gesture for his young son, but how are children to learn that we need to be mindful of which flowers we pick, and in what quantities, to make sure that there are enough for the plant to reproduce, if parents don't teach them? Flowers are delicate, very necessary moments in a much longer process of survival and adaptation of any living kind. Not to mention a much longer process of beauty in which we, in many contemporary societies, rarely appreciate the aesthetics of a drying flower that bears its seeds. To harvest the seeds (bulb flowers, such as daffodils, also have seeds) once the flower has wilted is to encourage the process of survival and evolution so the flora of our shared ecosystems in and outside of our cities become more and more resilient each generation. I was not taught this in schools.

Sometimes I pollinate flowers manually, and I am trying to teach my primary school students to do so as well. Last week (in September 2026), we tried it out with large flowering Rose of Sharon shrubs (hibiscus de Syrie) that are inhabiting the urban schoolyard, given how we have a dwindling population of pollinators, and how rising temperatures are sometimes too hot for those remaining to come out when the flowers have bloomed. The students then proceeded to spread the remaining pollen they had picked up on my face and hair. I took it as a compliment. 

The Politics of Being Part of Nature

Opposing politics coexist in the sentence “we are intrinsically a part of nature”. It anchors the patient, implicated, non-sovereign position I am trying to articulate. It also anchors blood-and-soil nationalism², eco-fascist rewilding aesthetics^{3 4}, and the neoliberal industrialists⁵ who plan to ensure their profit through the consequences of climate change.

One reading takes relational interdependence as a reason to share, redistribute, grieve, and remain humble about mastery. Our food, for example, depends on exhaustible, indispensable soil, water, human labour and countless more-than-human beings that we can non-negotiably do without. 

Another reading points to competition and hierarchy within ecosystems, and concludes that social hierarchy must also be natural, turning our inclusion in nature into a justification for purification and exclusion.

A third interpretation utilises the same sentence to justify engineering the planet more thoroughly, on the grounds that if humans are natural, so are our technologies, our interventions, and our right to optimise the systems on which we depend. 

A fourth treats human extinction as a natural outcome, perhaps even a correction. This leads to a denial of agency in the face of this crisis, which is a logic that tends to exempt the speaker from any obligation to act. This is a form of climate fatalism that can produce moral disengagement, because presenting destruction as inevitable releases the speaker from any obligation to act.

Finally, even much of the discourse in which this essay is embedded can use the sentence carefully while still universalising “we”. To say that “we are destroying nature” folds an oil executive, a subsistence farmer, an Indigenous land defender, and someone already displaced by climate disaster into the same grammatical subject. All are entangled in ecological systems, but they are not equally responsible, powerful, protected or harmed. The apparently inclusive “we” can therefore conceal precisely the unequal culpability and suffering that make it politically contested in the first place.⁶

Climate Narratives and the Fallacy of a Clean Enemy

My sister's undergraduate thesis, The Transformation of Ecological Grief: How Narratives About Climate Change Influence Action, examined why some climate narratives mobilise people while others produce paralysis in the face of ecological grief and climate anxiety⁷. Her work converged with a much larger body of research across social and political psychology, environmental communication, and sociology, which reveals the following:

Consuming exponential amounts of climate information can easily translate into helplessness in the face of the crisis when the threat appears immense but the available responses feel private, tokenistic or futile.^{8 9 10}  We need people with whom to act, institutions capable of responding, and some evidence that action might alter the conditions producing the harm.¹¹

Guilt is equally unstable when we focus on our complicity in the problem, yet there is no clear access or knowledge of routes towards repair, redistribution or political intervention^{8 12}. It can even provoke self-protection where people minimise the problem, dispute their responsibility, or turn away from an accusation they cannot meaningfully answer^{8 13}.

And certain degrees of optimism can lead to a different form of withdrawal when reassurance takes the place of a concrete plan. For example, faith that technology, markets or future governments will resolve the crisis allows present arrangements to continue largely undisturbed¹⁴. Curiously enough, collapse narratives appear to reject this optimism, yet they can lead to the same practical result. By presenting catastrophe as inevitable, they turn political failure into fate^{9 15}. Despair then becomes an alibi, backed by the logic that if the outcome has already been decided, there is no longer any obligation to ask who can still act, at what scale, and with what responsibility^{8 10}.

Across Europe, far-right parties have begun to turn ecological anxiety into an argument for national purification. Turner and Bailey’s analysis of twenty-two European far-right parties identifies an “ecobordering” discourse in which immigration is blamed for environmental degradation and restrictive borders are presented as environmental protection. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, for example, made this nativist environmentalism part of its 2019 European election rhetoric: the threatened object is the national landscape, the implied threat is the migrant, and the proposed response is exclusion^{4 16}. Here, the emotionally coherent story ensures that diffuse fear¹⁷ and ecological anxiety are reorganised into a simple account in which the national landscape is threatened, migrants are blamed, and exclusion is presented as protection.

We humans are often drawn to the stories that make our fear, anger, or grief feel intelligible. These stories identify causes, assign blame, and suggest where safety might be found. We cannot shake some sense into and create change in others with hard facts. The most emotionally coherent story, therefore, can feel true even when it simplifies what happened or hides who holds responsibility. They offer enemies, belonging, and a reason to act. The psychological appeal of eco-fascist and ethnonationalist¹⁸ movements is partly because liberal ecological discourse is failing to give people a clear story about the climate crisis, and to name what is being lost, who is responsible, and what kind of collective can respond. Liberal Ecological discourse often supplies measurements, targets and private duties without naming the industries and institutions producing the harm, the places and ways of life being lost, or the political collective capable of responding. This can leave an emotional and political vacuum. An exclusionary story that supplies the right to belong, blame and a promise of control may then be easier to inhabit than accurate information that leaves people feeling alone and powerless. This vacuum is then easily filled by eco-fascism, but I want to clarify that I am not saying that liberal ecological discourse, by any means, causes eco-fascism, but rather eco-fascism fills in the gaps that liberal ecological discourse fails to fill.

Narratives that allocate responsibility primarily at the individual consumer level exhaust the people they target and distract attention from the larger systems and collective actions that could lead to change. Narratives that offer clarity of enemy, purity of community, and certainty of action mobilise powerfully. The exclusionary narratives are wrong because they misidentify migrants or other marginalised groups as the cause of ecological breakdown. They are dangerous because they legitimise exclusion and violence. They are psychologically functional because they turn diffuse fear into a recognisable enemy and a course of action. Ignoring that function leaves their appeal uncontested.

The language of parts per million¹⁹ and global average temperatures has not failed because it is inaccurate, but because it asks people to mourn things they have never had the unfortunate chance of being able to grieve, and to act on timescales that feel discontinuous with daily life. A warmer, highly inhabitable future remains, for most, an abstraction until it arrives as a destroyed harvest, a flooded home, wildfire at the edge of a town²⁰. By then, grief and urgency merge in ways likely to produce rage as solidarity. Our climate and sustainability narratives are failing most people, and they will continue to do so if they are built for those who already agree rather than for the full range of people who will live inside the consequences.

Anticide

I went to primary school in Spain. I must have been around ten when I first saw a group of children hunched in a corner of the schoolyard over one of the biggest ant colonies on the grounds. It was a hot afternoon in June. To my horror, they were using their glasses as magnifying lenses, targeting and burning the ants alive one by one. I was so desperate for friends at that point in my life that I succumbed to the social pressure and took the glasses and killed an ant myself. I felt like I had cut a piece of myself out. I did not do it again. They stopped wanting to play with me.

I am now twenty-eight. My partner and I live in a house in the mountains and recently discovered a healthy ant colony on the property that found its way into our cupboards. I have been killing these ants, the same species I refused to burn at ten, because I cannot find another way to keep my food safe and the infestation from spreading. I speak and write about co-habitation with my kin, and I still kill ants in the kitchen, silverfish in the house, particularly near the bed, and mosquitoes anywhere near me.

People are Inseparably Part of Nature

As has been said by many before me, if we accept that humans are part of nature, rather than separate from it, then we have to rethink how we relate to other living beings. We need to reconsider sharing resources, acknowledging loss, giving up the idea that humans should control everything, and accepting that we can care for other beings while also harming them. There is something almost too convenient about our relationship with animals²¹. We can call them intelligent when intelligence is useful to us, loyal when loyalty pleases us, and wild when wildness lets us step away from responsibility or gives us permission to control them. To us humans, a dolphin can be a companion, a symbol of freedom, a colleague, a weapon and, eventually, simply an animal again, depending on what we need from it at the time.

It is also almost impossible to know what category, if any, a dolphin would choose for itself. Maybe the best we can do is understand something of what other living beings need and stop taking away the conditions that make their lives possible; space, food, habitat, relationships with other species, and ecosystems that can still function without our constant interference. I believe that what we owe them is about leaving them enough room to live and die without everything being organised around us and our needs.

A few months ago, I watched a video about dolphins used by national militaries. The United States Navy has trained bottlenose dolphins for decades, and Russian and Ukrainian forces have also run marine-mammal programmes. Dolphins have been trained to detect mines, locate divers, mark objects and retrieve things from the seabed.

I was deeply disturbed and shocked by the idea of forcing a dolphin to work for a navy, to fight our wars, as well as how easily we can recognise another species as intelligent, cooperative and even beloved in popular cultures across many nations, and still dominate and mutilate its nature in this way. Belonging to the same species has never stopped humans from doing violence to one another either, clearly. Look at the world we live in. But we are also capable of much care. Again, look at the world we live in. I truly believe that, under the right circumstances, at some point in our lives, that most of us have been, are, and/or will be capable of unspeakable violence as well as unimaginable generosity. What do we choose? How can we choose?

Humans have always been able to live in intimate, relational, often loving contact with other species while also harming them at scale. The relational position I am defending is very important to me, and it also has limits, as well as many ethical greyzones to acknowledge.

The distinctions we have built between domesticated and wild, between pest and companion, between acceptable wild (the songbird, the deer, the photogenic pollinator) and threatening wild (the rat, the wasp, the feral cat) are subjective. I will turn to psychology to help me explain part of this inconsistency:

Care follows social proximity more readily than abstract similarity: an animal folded into a household can enter a person’s in-group, while another animal of the same species remains food, pest or instrument. The bond is deep and important, but it does not automatically widen into a principle that protects other animals from the dog’s guardian^{22 23}. The same household may grieve a dog, poison a rat and eat a pig. By this, I mean that the category encoded by our socio-cultural context predisposes a response to different species in different ways before any individual animal is even encountered. These are categories that encode our preferences, our economies, and our fears. They determine which deaths we mourn and which we administer without ceremony. The ant I burned as a child was the same creature as the ant I now try to relocate carefully from my kitchen to the garden whenever I can remember to step out of my defensive autopilot. Notice how what needs to change is not the ant in these scenarios. We need to reconsider our behaviours if we are to weave realities where our presence on Earth can be reliably sustained over time.

Our activities are intrinsically part of nature. That fact implicates us more deeply in the consequences of what we have built, extracted, and rearranged. And in the unequal ways those consequences travel through bodies, borders, and species.⁶ We need to redirect our energy towards the slower work of living carefully within systems that are already badly damaged. In one place, this might mean farmers, residents and ecologists restoring a polluted stream together, even when they disagree about what caused the damage or how the land should be managed. The work will look different elsewhere because no small group of writers or experts can anticipate what every place and community will need.

We need to accept that we are part of the systems we are trying to change. At the same time, we need to create ways of thinking, working, and organising that allow different people and forms of knowledge to work together, especially those that dominant institutions have historically ignored.²⁴

The Messy Ethics of Powerlessness and Empowerment

The available alternatives to extractive industrial design²⁵, fortress conservation²⁶, and consumer society are not innocent. Each of them is a position that has been worked out inside the conditions we are trying to leave, and each carries the marks of those conditions.²⁴

Every intervention requires honesty about the costs of every reparative move and a commitment to doing as much as our privileges and resources allow. A bio-based material might reduce our dependence on petroleum while creating new pressures on soil, water, and labour elsewhere. At the same time, a protected area might help an ecosystem recover while excluding people who have lived with and cared for that land. Replacing a concrete path with soil and plants might help earthworms cross and allow rainwater to sink into the ground’s aquifers, however one might argue that it also creates new patterns of movement, maintenance, and dependence. Someone will have to live with and care for what each intervention sets in motion. The reverse is also true, as continuing to inhabit an existing arrangement helps sustain it, even when we did not design it and cannot easily leave it.

We Need to be Open to Everyone? EVERYONE?!

The political condition of late modernity is the failure of humans to connect  across differences. We do not agree, across most of the divisions that matter, on what we owe each other. We do not share a story about why and how our next generations should inherit a habitable world, nor do we share a definition of what habitable means or who is worthy of inhabiting. Significant numbers of people in (semi-)functioning democracies vote for parties that explicitly deny that other groups of humans (let alone other species) deserve equal rights to protection, dignity, resources, or futures.

The translation problem is the same on both fronts. How do more-than-human stakes enter human deliberation when those interests cannot be explicitly expressed by those who bear them?? How do humans across deep disagreement sit in the same conversation when no shared language remains? Who holds the shared language, and what does it take to develop one? 

Common Ground

Among other experiences, my training in strategic design²⁷, working and researching in the Garden of Decay in Copenhagen, as well as living and being involved in rural areas in the Alps, relatively near Grenoble, marked by growing political tension, has taught me that disagreement does not need to prevent cooperation. We need to “embrace the tension”, as Camilla Hedegaard Møller²⁸ and Marianne Stang Våland²⁹. People who differ sharply in their politics can still recognise a shared responsibility towards the common ground that everyone can agree upon caring about, which is caring for the mountain. This gives us something concrete to work on together, even when our wider disagreements remain.

I am not trained as a mediator (yet) and not entitled to instruct anyone on how to do this work beyond my training and practice in collaboration and participation in relatively low-risk situations. What I can say is that the ecological argument this essay has been making needs to be paired with the harder, less photogenic work of staying with people we disagree with, including people who have caused real harm to others and to ourselves, including people whose values we find intolerable, including people whose political projects we are trying to defeat. The alternative is that the ecological argument continues to circulate among people who already agree with it, while exclusionary political movements gain more power to define what the crisis means and what should be done about it. They offer a clear – although false and violent – story by drawing a narrower “we”, by deciding who holds power of decision, whose lives and places deserve protection, and who can be blamed for the crisis or excluded from solutions. If we do not learn how to build political action across disagreement, we leave that wider political ground to them.⁴

To work within and through these asymmetries requires what diplomats and mediators know well: the people you most need to sit with are the people you most do not want to sit with, and the work of staying in the room is itself essential work towards humane change. It requires a patience that is rarely modelled in environmental discourse, because environmental discourse tends to assume that the people in the conversation already broadly agree, that it is us versus those who simply do not understand yet. “Oh, if they would only look at the facts; if they would only connect more deeply…” Our discourse tends to be designed to be well received among people who are not, in fact, in general conflict with it.¹⁰

Regardless of whether we succeed in surviving what is coming, I believe that life will continue, re-expand and evolve. Noticing the dead earthworm on the hot concrete path did not save it, but it did change what I understood the path to be. Do it for the next earthworm trying to cross, the one sprout, or the extremophile species³⁰ left, if nothing else works. Let’s take this as an opportunity to do what we can for ourselves and each other to, at least, avoid the planet from becoming like Mars.