My Earth, Are We Still in Touch?

☙ Phoebe and Asude ❧

I have always felt this rumbling
For the hot and cold that I have kept count of
The rumbling never stops
A gentle gallop in beat
A train of shivers
A faint sway
Distant and near
It has always been there, in my earth

Now,
Every inch of me trembles in resonance
With the creature moving in a strange pattern
I try to follow, I reach further out with my finger tips
I travel, rooted in place, towards the origin of the rumble 
It comes from where the light rises
To where the light sinks
The rumble swells
A gust caresses me, as if knocking on my door
It is here
The rumbling finally stops

I have always felt this rumbling
For the hot and cold that I have kept count of
The rumbling only stopped once
I remember the force
Arriving from the light's source
My earth left me
No matter how hard I tried to cling onto it
I left my earth
Now I feel nothing but salty gusts
Caressing my bare fingertips in darkness
I feel nothing but endless sway
Rocking up and down, back and forth 
Just like when you and I were born 
in our mother’s arms

One day,
The rocking stopped
I went back to earth
Not my earth
But the rumbling comes back
A gentle gallop in beat
A train of shivers
A faint sway
Distant and near
Like it has always been there, in earth
my new earth

These are monologues from two trees, in two different contexts. The first from a harvested pine tree from a clear-cut¹ forest in Sävsjö, Sweden and the second is an Oriental Plane² in Carlsberg Garden in Copenhagen, Denmark. We do not know how aware they are of these two distinct contexts, but we can be certain that this clear-cut forest and garden are not perceived by them as by our species, through a human lens. Then:

How does a tree distinguish between these two human-curated concepts?

How do these two points of view help us, as humans, reflect on and critique our human-dominant conceptualisation of the planet and how we shape and inhabit?

Let’s stay in touch

☙ Magdalena ❧

03.07.2026 
Thoughts and feelings from the trail 
Day 12 

Walking through the meadowed slopes of the Neouvielle massif in the French Pyrenees, I am engulfed in honey-dense air flooding the area. The sweet scent of myriads of flowers fill my nostrils, and my skin tingles while I wade through the tall grasses. Colourful butterflies meander my body, fly by my head, their wings flashing by my eyes. I cannot stop looking around, seeing more insects than I can remember ever seeing in my life. Unable to recognise most of the surrounding species, I remain fascinated by their presence and I find myself fervently following some of them to meet them with intention and patience rather than by mere chance encounter. The meadow’s serenity is built through the abundance of the animals, plants, rocks and the microcosm of sensations I experience. Me and my partner are the only humans around, yet we don’t feel small even while being outnumbered by the non-humans on the trail. The beauty of the place is striking and being here feels surreal. As though this place, detached from ‘modern’ civilisation, could not exist in the urbanised world of my daily life.

These feelings have stayed with me long after the trip. The lasting vividness of the sensations that I experienced on that trail makes me ponder on our daily experience of living on Earth. By dwelling in concrete-covered cities, we humans have forgotten that we are just but a fraction of all the life that inhabits this world with us. We have grown unaccustomed to spaces filled with only the sounds of wind, crickets and worked-up insects, grasses bending their heads and perennial plants rubbing their stems against each other. We have forgotten the vast variety of scents of nature and the many names of the beings living alongside us. We do not see an abundant nor biodiverse presence of life in our cities anymore; not even in the scarce gardens and parks wedged in concrete urban fabric. We don’t hear other species as intensely anymore, such as songbirds or insects. They are disappearing. 

How can we preserve and cultivate those lost experiences that make us feel naturally connected and respectful of the non-human world?

While we notice the urgency of climate change, with each generation we know less of the beauty that is preserved in dwindling reserves far away from the ‘civilised world’. Our daily surroundings have been changing slowly and continuously along with our daily habits affecting our relationship with the natural world. Yet, it is the big scale events of climate change, both spectacular and scary, that find coverage on news platforms and the attention of the media worldwide, like: repeated heatwaves hitting the European Continent this summer^{3 4};some of the biggest rivers in Europe (for instance, Danube) drying up to the point where the hydroelectric power stations stop working and nuclear power plants do not have enough water to cool down their reactors.⁵ We read that this year’s El Niño's temperature anomaly is growing to be the biggest ever seen⁶; or that repeated wildfires engulf Canada⁷, France⁸, Morocco⁹ and thousands upon thousands of other places across the globe.¹⁰ We headline how the planet burns in summer, and other events of a scale staggeringly larger than any one of us, than any of the cities we live in, than whole nations. In fact, events of a scale that surmounts whole continents. That geographical, systemic, spatial and material magnitude is hard to grasp regardless of how close or far to home it might be. I recognise that it triggers in me an unmanageable, grappling, inescapable and difficult to name feeling. What’s more, invokes perhaps, a sense of powerlessness and impotence. While trying to tackle those strong emotions, I start to believe that in times of climate change we should turn our eyes towards changes happening in our immediate locality. Constant, building up, spatial amendments and alterations that shape our connections to and/or disconnections from the natural world, making living alongside abundance of other species a rather rare occurrence.

What the word ‘curate’ is to the idea of ‘beautiful’

☙ Phoebe and Asude ❧

The Latin root curate (“cura”) means ‘to care for’ or ‘to attend to’, but in practice, curation is an act of selection, exclusion and framing. Disciplines such as architecture and landscape architecture, rely on a framework and a curated flow to achieve a consistent and useful design. Consequently, the process itself inherently includes certain elements while excluding others. The biases and decisions that are made throughout design-based processes have consequences down the line. They are subjective and determine what scale and experience of inhabitation of buildings, landscapes and spaces are relevant to the process. How we navigate this positioning, particularly when considering the potential of accommodating other living beings and their needs as part of our priorities when designing processes, buildings, landscapes and spaces, can either lead to a harmonious co-habitation, or a parasitic domination of the buildings, landscapes and spaces we design in reference to other living beings in our urban ecosystems.

A garden is a human-made, curated construct, as they do not exist in our un-tamed nature. A garden is often a curation that provides different forms of escape: it is usually designed to be a pleasure for the human eye, a source of healing for the human body, an escape for the human mind, often framing nature not as that which we are intrinsically a part of, but as something to be controlled, tamed and a construct of beings, spaces and materials separate and beneath us humans and our power of creation and control. Two very illustrative historical examples of how curation has been achieved – either through a negotiated symbiosis between human and nature, or through the wild domination of human desires – are as follow:

In traditional Chinese aesthetics, moral virtues and cultural ideals are often projected onto plants through human interpretations of their natural characteristics.¹¹ Wilderness is distilled, moralised and given a cultural form, after which curation operates almost as a reverse process of physical ‘editing’, selectively enhancing the qualities of nature that invite appreciation. Seen through this lens, the human-centric perspective begins with a search for resonance between human perception and the natural world, instead of leading with an agenda of exploitation.

For example, bamboo’s physical attributes mirror the virtues of the ideal human, which are hollow at their center (represents humility and open-mindedness) and are flexible enough to yield to strong winds without breaking (represents resilience). In landscaping, artwork, and miniature plantation, the growth of bamboo is curated via techniques like pruning, grafting, bending and containing. Such is the case of bonsai trees. The wilderness in bamboo is tamed to fit into the pursuit of a sense of resonance in culturally-evoked beauty beyond simply a pursuit of ornamental value.

In the 19th century, the invention of the Wardian case, a transportable glass enclosure that allowed living plants to survive long voyages, transformed the possibilities of gardening.¹² With this design, the concept of a curated garden expanded far beyond local flora, fauna and funga, as in the case of gardens as situated landscapes. In parallel with global colonial expansion, the Wardian case made it possible for garden owners to decorate their gardens with extraordinary, exotic plants from different continents, placing species from entirely distinct ecological contexts side by side. In this era, the traditional idea of ‘editing nature to enhance resonance’ shifted towards a more human-centric approach of ‘assembling nature according to pleasure’. Now, a fruit tree from Brazil could share the same sun, water and soil minerals with a plant from Japan. We cannot know how content these trees were together, but we can picture how proud and satisfied the garden owners must have been.
 

☙ Magdalena ❧

Every day we pass by so many spaces that change year by year – roads growing wider sometimes causing the adjacent trees disappearing, empty plots of land transformed into new developments erasing pockets of greenery, new estates sprouting like seeds after the rain, yet their immediate surroundings lack nature and breathing air between the tall walls of the buildings. Do we ever question how they affect our spatial perception? Sometimes they might give the impression of cleanliness in the city; of development. Newly renovated roads, continuous concrete pavements provide comfort after all; easy access by car, walk or the wheelchair, all serving our human needs and improving our lives in the cities. But do we notice that sometimes beyond human-directed-comfort they also compromise the existing nature surrounding them? Often those improvements in space come with the priority of human-based design over the other species that inhabit the adjacent spaces, such as trees, bushes, lawns, wild meadows, and wastelands. 

In consequence, our surroundings gradually evolve away from nature, as well as the lives of subsequent generations. Our cities become more curated and their surfaces more covered by concrete pavements, asphalt roads, steel-, glass- and plastic-covered buildings, and by-road spaces with non-native plants ‘designed’ to provide additional fancy greenery to the city. Small patches of grass and mosses fighting through the cracks of the impermeable surfaces are being plucked out, covered, burnt away. Lawns are mowed regularly, sometimes almost to the bare ground. Bees are unable to find water in the summer. Many of us don’t know how to help the soil recover anymore. In consequence, we care less or do not care at all. Empty plots of land are built over to maximise the use of space and efficiency with decreasing land becomes the priority. The motto of less is more¹³ has become the design guideline for its subsequent generations.

But who decides for spaces between pavement slabs to be ‘maintained’ by plucking the grasses, mosses, and lichens out? Who allows for lawns to be short to a few centimeters, deep into the summer, stripping insects and small mammals of their homes and letting the grass to dry down to the earth floor? Who agrees to plant non-native species by the roads instead of nurturing native meadows? Who agrees to cut down the trees so the roads can be widened? Or for shores of the rivers to be ‘supported’ by being built over with concrete? Spatial adjustments happening in our immediate surroundings are shaped by spatial development strategies decided on by city urbanists, local governments, investors, developers, management companies, and infrastructure firms. If they ignore beyond-human interests, do not hold accountability for breaches in the nature protection laws, more so, harm animal and plant habitats themselves, they make our daily surroundings reinforce disconnection from the natural world, and establish acceptance towards decreasing nature in the cities, shaping our lives and what is the established norms of aesthetics and curation of space. Who will hold them accountable when there is nothing more to protect or save?

Curation for beauty and pleasure: Carlsberg Garden

☙ Phoebe and Asude ❧

Most of us who live in Denmark are familiar with the Carlsberg family. The family’s legacy began with J.C. Jacobsen, who founded the Carlsberg brewery in 1847 and continued through his son Carl, with both generations becoming influential patrons of science, art and culture in Denmark _Fig.5.¹⁴

Today, their former private garden is open for public use and can be found within the Carlsberg Complex in Valby, Copenhagen. It is mainly used by daily runners and children. Anyone can walk around its beautiful exotic trees, and read their botanical labels. However, in the nineteenth century, the same garden was a private retreat for the Jacobsen family, who only welcomed members of their private and extensive social and professional network to their residence.¹⁵

The J.C. Jacobsen Garden was one of the earliest landscape areas that Carl Jacobsen drew up in his development plan for the Carlsberg factory alongside the brewery's main buildings. Designed specifically for the family’s taste, the garden functioned as an unsystematic arboretum¹⁶, with more than 260 species of solitary trees and coniferous and deciduous trees Jacobsen brought back from his travels across Europe and the rest of the world. This is how Danish fairytale writer Hans Christian Andersen described his encounter with the house and garden: 

‘Through the factory I reached Jakobsen’s residence, an affluent country house abroad, a magnificent terrace overlooking the garden; the agaves were gone but I saw how beautiful everything must be here in the summer.’¹⁷

In the mid-1800s, the garden continued to develop and expand with Jacobsen hand sketches and the help of landscape architect Rudolph Rothe. By the 1850s, the Jacobsen family had become part of the highest strata of Danish society. At the time when global colonial expansion was at its height, collecting from around the globe became a major obsession among the wealthy elite. In 1855, J. C. Jacobsen (the father) wrote an enthusiastic letter to his son Carl about his visit to The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, London, one of the places where Wardian cases were extensively used. The richness and exoticness of the garden immediately inspired J.C. Jacobsen, writing enthusiastically in his letter to Carl: ‘[the garden] seems intended to teach and to awaken and to satisfy the sense of beauty and I believe this intention has been most happily fulfilled.’  

Plants and trees, like people, root deeply in the ground of their homeland for survival. As a result of this newfound fascination, many trees were imported from their homelands faraway to be dislocated and relocated to the Carlsberg garden; to unknown soil, to unknown air, under unknown sky, severed from the physical, chemical, biological and ecological relationships that had previously sustained them and their ancestors before them. One might say it is the innate desire of humans to collect and long for alluring, bizarre, unfamiliar and glamorous aesthetics for pleasure and as a symbol of power. Perhaps genuine enthusiasm for discovering something new and beautiful and the desire to recreate that beauty in one's own homeland, played an important role in the garden's creation. But it is never that simple. Beneath this enthusiasm lies a much more complex political and emotional history.

Curation for Efficiency: Sävsjö Plantation

☙ Phoebe and Asude ❧

If the curation of a garden is a projection for power, pleasure and order, the curation for plantation reflects the desire for scalable profits and efficiency.

In October 2026, as part of our masters program in Political Architecture and Critical Sustainability (PACS) at the Royal Danish Academy, we had the chance to conduct fieldwork in Småland, Sweden for research into Swedish forestry. On a crisp autumn afternoon during this site investigation, we visited an area of plantation forest west of the Sävsjö train station in Sweden. We followed the hum of the highway, cut across a long gravel car lot and turned down a dirt track lined with golden birch trees, wide enough for a medium sized truck to pass. At the entrance stood two old pines, one on either side of the path, like weathered stone lions guarding a gate. Once we stepped beyond, everything was instantly, unnervingly clear: distinct variation of heights, clean indication of age and an immediate sense of value. The landscape was ‘easy’ to understand, like one of those labelled cross-section diagrams. There was only cleared ground and trees. It is deliberate to use the word ‘tree’ instead of ‘forest’ here. The stands were arranged in rigid, even-aged blocks, flat across the top like the teeth of a plastic comb. You might think that such uniformity would make them feel like a whole, resembling a forest. After all that's the literal definition, by its simplest definition: a collection of trees? But the scene sketching on the horizon made it clearer than ever that these were just trees, individual units. They were wood. They were logs. They were pulp. They were chips. They were everything except a forest.

It reminded us of those pin-impression toys from childhood, where you press your hand against the back, and a three-dimensional shape emerges from the front. You recognise the contour, but you never forget you are looking at thousands of loose, identical pins. Perhaps a tree does not know it is in a forest, because, to itself, maybe it never is. 

Days later, back at our desk, we tried to find that exact plot again.

We opened the forestry clearance datasets from Skogsstyrelsen¹⁸_{Fig. 6}, panning across endless swathes of forest damage around Sävsjö, which felt like searching for a single needle in the vastness of an ocean. 

By chance, Google had recently refreshed its satellite imagery for the area. Next to a busy highway, the site gave itself away. Across the screen, the clearing was scored with swirling, concentric arcs etched into the ground, like a terrestrial fingerprint pressed into the soil. Down on the ground, standing among the trunks, you only feel the muddy gouges under your boots. But from far above, the full geometry clicked into place. The arcs traced the turning paths of heavy timber harvesters, their movements calculated to minimise fuel consumption, manoeuvring time, and unnecessary friction. Their mechanical arms reached out to sever trunks, strip branches and stack timber in a continuous sequence of operations.  

And in that moment, something shifted. The cold logic of land use dissolved and a landscape took its place.

It was deeply moving in a way we hadn’t expected. Stripped bare, the clearing ceased to be an invisible, working node in a supply chain. Seen from above, its scars had made it uniquely, undeniably visible. What was engineered purely for extraction now carried the poignant weight of a ruin, like a quiet monument to human ambition, labour and intervention etched into the soil, in the form of a pattern resting right on my fingertip.

In her book The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Tsing writes about her 2004 trip to the eastern Cascade Mountains in Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.¹⁹ On a plot of land that still showed signs of ‘industrial timber', matsutake²⁰ had made its appearance and stimulated a nonscalable forest economy in the ruins of scalable industrial forestry. Here, in the forest of Sävsjö, the machine had left behind a ghost of its own choreography, composed of muddy puddles, heavy truck traces, stubborn tree stumps, beds of wood chips. These evoked deep sentiments stemming from the reminiscence of human curation: we mourn for what was cut down, but what comes next for the wound itself, now that it has become a new terrain?
 

☙ Magdalena ❧

As we grow accustomed to scarce greenery in cities, their outskirts and the countryside, we might seek for hope for their restoration in the environmental protection programmes enacted by beyond-local scale legislative bodies. These include the European Union’s NATURA 2000 (aiming to protect biodiversity networks including birds habitats)²¹; the Nature Restoration Law; and the EU’s Biodiversity Strategies. Similar initiatives can be found at a national level, in the form of special measures to protect vulnerable wildlife, including, for instance, European otters, wolves, European Hamsters and beavers, as well as nature protection reserves, national parks, and nature parks.

The existence of these initiatives means that non-humans are being taken into account; that at least some specialists, officials and politicians care to look beyond human interests. They offer us a sense of reassurance, a notion that “Nature is being taken care of”.

Yet, looking more closely at the case studies of the said initiatives in Poland, the gap between the ambitions of these programmes and the ongoing degradation of biodiverse habitats across the European Union becomes increasingly apparent. Their implementation might seem to be majorly dependent on national policies, however, in most cases it comes down to local decisions about land use and spatial planning.

Over the past two years I have become gradually more involved in researching the local politics and spatial governance of cities and towns of different sizes across Poland, including the introduction of new planning policies, master plans for spatial development and their subsequent implementation.

Among them, repeated tree clearings in and around Kępa Bazarowa in Toruń, a highly protected area along the wild southern bank of the Vistula River, where the mayor gave the green light to cut down ‘invasive species of trees’ and thereby thinned down the green lungs of the city.²²

The changes in the local master plan for Winnica, another area of Toruń, that finds itself within the EU’s NATURA 2000 program intended to protect a network of habitats along bird migration routes. Here, a nearly 80-metre-high luxury residential sky-scraper has received planning permission from the city and regional authorities despite residents’ and scientists’ protests. Environmental protections were ignored for the project to get approved.²³

Górki Czechowskie, still not long ago a 150-hectare undeveloped, natural green area of meadowed hills and ravines in the city of Lublin, is inhabited by the protected and endangered species of European hamster. It was sold to developers by the local authority and followed by rapid construction of new housing for humans that took precedence over the existing homes of the more vulnerable and voiceless lives.²⁴

Concrete reinforcement of the shores of Saint Barbara Island, small and green islet on the Brda River in Bydgoszcz, a decision of the local authorities that has destroyed its wild nature.²⁵

Other ‘shore rebuilding’ or ‘reinforcement’ strategies covering the edges of drying up rivers across Poland with concrete supports, to, and I quote, “make car roads more stable and the flow of rivers smoother”.²⁶ Therefore, reducing water retention and accelerating the flow of water towards the Baltic sea. Such interventions raise broader questions about the work of Wody Polskie (“Polish Waters” in English), the state authority responsible for managing Poland’s rivers and waterways. 

Any of the above-mentioned decisions had not gone unchallenged. Local activists and those who both care about the non-human lives, and greenery in cities often protested against them, provided they had learnt about these stories before it was too late to take action. At the same time, lost land, habitats and other living beings’ lives call into question the intentions of the ones in power – governments, municipalities, local politicians, Nature Protection Councils, and private companies.

Behind these institutions and political parties are people. People that often prioritise actions beneficial for their reputation, connections, and voters. People that have the ability to stop or put harmful investments in motion, who can choose to refuse developers’ agendas, who can stop or punish the ones breaching laws that intend to protect nature. If they choose not to, I ask, is there enough being done to nurture a sense of responsibility for the world around us in the individuals? Who will hold accountable those who destroy habitats of other species protected by the law, if the law is not enough? And what more can we do in the face of the multiplicity of nature protection programmes introduced by the legislative bodies of the European Union? Their existence provides a sense of reassurance, hope and/or ethical fulfillment among the people who care about nature and believe in the power of the law, as well as in the officials and scientists working to put these protections into practice. Yet, despite these efforts, the programmes so often fail to be executed and, therefore, fail to protect non-human lives. 

Ultimately, the effectiveness of environmental protection programmes depends on their protection and execution at the local scale where local governments and municipalities very often happen to prioritise human over the non-human lives, or even corporate and political agendas over either. Friction arises when ‘soft’ political ideals of environmental protection policies face the realities of self-serving governance.

And therefore, what can we do to protect non-human lives when so many people believe in the superiority of the human race over other species? This anthropocentric perspective leads us to act as though we were separate from the world in which we exist, from non-human beings and the material worlds we share with them. What’s more, how can we live together and share this world without imposing imbalanced self-serving forms of domination on one another and on other species? How can we preserve, nurture and care deeply for the more vulnerable and the voiceless? We so often speak of the disparities in privilege across different human experiences. Yet we are privileged to be part of this world and use its resources yet we choose them to propel our own, self-made idea of progress and greatness to extremes that cannot be sustained over time.

A shift in how we think about our place in the world as humans seems to me to offer at least a partial answer to that question. Donna Haraway’s ideas of worlding²⁷ and companion species²⁸ provide us with a framework to rethink that positioning. Our lives as humans are more entangled with those of non-human beings than we often dare to realise. The ways in which our bodies have evolved as mammals, the hormones we share across species, the hearts that beat inside of us. The food we eat, such as bilberries picked from bushes beside trails, roamed through by a bear just a few hours prior; honey crafted by bees savoured straight from a spoon; carrots that grubs had been munching on before the vegetables were plucked from the earth. Our sleep cycles. The warm rays of sunshine we stop to enjoy, just as cats shift their positions to catch them and a small lizard comes out from underneath a rock to warm itself up in. The wind that moves us to seek shelter, that swirls and blows our hair, which also sustains the airborne wings of vultures sliding above mountain ranges. Moss that seeks a living space in the scarce ‘housing market’ that concrete cities create.

We humans are merely a minute fraction of Earthly reality – in time, in scale, and among countless diversity of other species of fauna, flora and funga with which we share it. Yet the power of our voices, our tendency towards violence and the authority we abuse over the natural world make it more comfortable for us to believe that we are entitled to use it as we please.

How can we speak for the lives of those who cannot protect themselves from a world organised around profit, domination, and individual survival?

Curation, care.

☙ Phoebe and Asude ❧

Do you know you are chosen?
          I feel where lights come from

Do you know you are cared for?
          I know what reaches me

Do you know you are given names?
         I was growing before you came

Your roots hold my soil
         My roots hold the soil

Your leaves follow the light
         Your hands follow me

My hands follow yours
Perhaps you do not know
Perhaps I don’t have to know
You are in a forest
Perhaps you are too

As the curator exercises unilateral jurisdiction over life, placing it inside a sterile display and assigning it a new identity, a plant, a tree, a bug, or even a person can easily feel foreign to this unfamiliar space. Yet, as soon as we begin to find pieces that resemble us, that we identify as something familiar, we cling to them. From that small gesture of recognition and care, we begin to grow outward, forming capillaries through which new connections can emerge. Life does not flourish within a hierarchy constructed by a single dominant voice, but at those tiny points of contact where smaller voices meet. Precisely because of this, our true place is never an ‘exhibition space’, it is a flexible sanctuary that sees us, hears us and allows us to transform.

A tree, then, does not know it is in a forest but feels it. 
 

☙ Magdalena ❧

Finally, is it even possible to save a world we are beginning to forget, in a reality engulfed by human factory-made materials that harm it? We have been polluting the space we inhabit that insects, birds, mammals, fungi, plants and soils have never known before and are not adapted to, and cannot adapt to fast enough. We poison our water, air and land with harmful chemicals and waste, yet struggle to imagine the reality we were born into, our ‘normal’, as though escaping it were possible. We intently bolster our anthropocentric position as self-appointed executives of the Earth and justify our expansion as progress, whereas in reality we are fulfilling deeply hidden desires of control and superiority over the world we live in. 

The measures we undertake to minimise the damaging impact we leave behind our existence is not living up to the needs of non-humans. Seeing protected habitats lost, and non-humans dying because of our expansion, I can only see protection policies being too soft, not radical enough, not executed properly and people or companies breaching them not held accountable. We have been damaging more than we are able to repair. The artificial materials unable to decompose are polluting Earth, eternal flow of waste, natural habitats constantly disappearing to new housing, roads, data centres, before they can be protected. We consume the land we co-inhabit with other species. And with the self-acclaimed superiority we perpetually strive to improve our lives with new inventions and new technologies without equal consideration of the impact it has on all the other life on our planet. We have grown used to doing so without comprehending, understanding and/or admitting the consequences of our actions. That is the world we were born into and the human-made reality we are most of the time not questioning enough. The status quo that is updated like a new software with every generation coming into this world. Progressing detachment from the non-human reality makes it harder to grow compassion, understand its importance and build appreciation for it. ‘To be noticed, is to be loved’ but is noticing the species we live alongside enough to coexist with them with respect and love they deserve?

Finally, should we allow ourselves to find fulfillment and a sense of achievement in participating in minute actions (on a very local scale) to ‘support nature’ – replantings, nurturing local greenery, supporting nature protection organisations? Should we find peace in the thought that the nature protection programmes do their jobs for us, without looking further into whether they are actually being implemented and those responsible are being held accountable? Or should we seek more radical ways to change the system, to live lives that are more respectful of the world and non-humans around us, to build, rebuild and rewrite world that not only serves us but also nurtures the lives of other species – as architects, local politicians, urbanists, everyday people maintaining our everyday spaces, allowing non-humans to simply be and live, to question the world that is and that was, to educate and show the beauty and vastness of what we lose – abundance of bird sounds, insects, flowers, species, natural habitats. Finally, to allow ourselves to feel uncomfortable, to feel heartbroken, to feel like we are also losing part of ourselves. 

I have written my part of this article from an auto-ethnographic, unsettling experience of observing Polish spatial management since my childhood, especially the friction between human- and non-human-made spaces harmfully co-shaping people’s disconnection from the world shared with other species. While noting down my thoughts, I was unable to escape the feeling of impending doom that we have brought upon ourselves by being passive and choosing passiveness in the system we are comfortably settled in. Glimpses of freedom from it that nested down in my head while being away from the ‘civilised human-serving world’ became a powerful tool to both rediscover deep love for nature but also join in the mourning of the world we know and that we are losing. With melting glaciers, collapsing gulf streams, desertification of the land, changing climate it is easy to drown in ecological panic and find oneself frozen in impotence. In this time of uncertainty, I find it impossible to give clear answers to how we should live our lives with the non-humans. Yet I believe that by practicing an exercise of active observing, scanning, and reflecting on our daily surroundings and its relationship with other species, we can build the awareness of being in the world. Not living our lives and subconsciously using modern, technological advancements serving ourselves but co-habiting. At last, maybe naively, my wish is that we could love the world we live in more and let nurturing it be as urgent as serving ourselves as humanity.