Ecological Storytelling

Outtake from my upcoming eco-memoir The Body Is a Doorway

Vintage National Geographic Photography

Step into the forest. Feel the plush imprint of your heels in moss. Scent the brightness of pine needles crushed underfoot. Birds call through wild rose bushes, lacing up the greenery with their love songs. The forest scintillates with late summer sunlight. Webs of song and pollen and spores tie together kin united by a shared desire to mate, to eat good food, and to create relationships. And below your foot, printing into a small patch of dirt, lies another world that nourishes these aboveground floral perfumes and sturdy trees. Modern advances in forest ecology and fungal science have showed us that ecosystems are tied together by underground fungal root systems. These fungal webs ferry nutrients and chemical messages between trees, nourish young plants, provide a highway for bacterial colonies, break down dead matter, and acts as the living connective tissue of the soil. Every step you take sends vibrations down through the soil into up to 300 miles of fungal cells. Underground fungal systems show us that no one in the forest is truly an individual. Our roots are all tied together. Every being – plant, insect, bacteria, mushroom, or animal – depends on a complex network of relationships. The word ecology comes from the Greek word oikos for household. Every footstep you take in the forest plants you deep into a shared household. Every breath you take, laced with dust and funk and pheromones, loops you into a physical reciprocity with landscape. We may look like individuals. But we depend intimately on the support of a household of more-than-human kinship.

And if you cut one thread from that web of relations, the entire household begins to fray. A tree goes extinct and then the squirrel dependent on its nuts for survival is also threatened. Pesticides kill off the bees that pollinate flowers that, in turn, are mutually connected to fungi belowground. Just as forests are large systems composed of smaller beings, tied together by relationships, so are our own bodies delicate ecologies of complex life. We now know that we contain more bacterial cells than we do human cells. Our gut is a teeming, tropical environment composed of up to 500 different bacterial strains, microbial romances and dramas playing out every time we eat a meal. Fungi weave between our eyelashes and festoon our skin. And our physical health is dependent on a constant conversation between these different beings. The bacteria in your gut misplaced somewhere else in your body can kill you. And alternatively, the lack of healthy microbes can fray your own healthy household.   

If we are nourished and constituted by tangled relationships with different species, why do our mythic and literary narratives prize heroic individuals and human-centric drama? Think of fairytales and myths you know well. The story is always linear. A knight kills the dragon and saves the maiden. A singular hero enters the dark wilderness, vanquishes beasts, and quests towards a neat conclusion. These narratives of progress, individualism, and human supremacy don’t just inform our ability to tell stories. They shape our culture and our culture’s relationship to the earth. They show us what to care about: individual human beings.

But in an age of ecological crisis, it is urgent that we reclaim the forgotten earth-reverent root system hidden below modern narratives of capitalism and anthropocentrism. For most of human history our stories were oral, carried in breath, sustained by constant retelling and revision. And they were mostly about animals and plants and weather systems. Older gods had horns and goddesses were often snakes. Stories weren’t linear, they were cyclical, teaching us how to live with seasonal fluctuations. Storytelling wasn’t concerned with human superiority. It wasn’t about individual characters. It was about relationships. When we look back at the earliest cave paintings, we see running herds of horses and bison. Crowds of animals. Chevrons and patterns tracking storms and moon cycles. Maps of kinship. Storytelling was a way of passing down environmental wisdom – the best times to gather and plant food, the herbs for healing, the places for ritual offerings – before the existence of writing. A compelling narrative was easier to remember and pass down, generation to generation, than a list of agricultural rules. Oral storytelling, tied to a concern for how to best live in a specific ecology, always requires a teller and a listener. It lives not in the singular author, but in the shared breath between audience and speaker.

Ecological storytelling, for me, embodies the space between. It embodies a fungal curiosity that lives between rootlets and between species. Fungal systems below ground are inquisitive and probing, growing cell by cell through the soil seeking pockets of decay and other beings with which to connect. Poured into a forest, fungi create a living map of relationships, tying orchids to bacterial colonies and grasslands to mother trees. Fungi show us how to create households rather than heroic individuals. Ecological storytelling is storytelling that prizes questions over answers, conversations over monologues, relationships over individuals. It is storytelling that rejects the idea of singular authorship. Rather, it acts as a messenger, carrying communications between members of the forest. It ferries nutrients between flowers and sporulates underworld wisdom into aboveground mushrooms. It roots human beings back into the home of our ecosystem- our wider family of furry, fungal, vegetal kin.

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I am overwhelmed with gratitude by how many of you have showed up here to support my work and widen my thinking. Right now you are literally keeping me alive and funding the out-of-pocket medical expenses that allow me to receive IV nutrition and connective tissue specialists.

I am grateful in a way that is wide and deep and low. I hope you can feel some sonorous note of it - the hum and grind of ice relaxing under the sun - in your body. I am sending the song of my thanks your way. I love you all so much.

My upcoming book The Body Is a Doorway: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human is now available for pre-order and comes out March 2025!