Disconnection: Why "Nature Connection" Keeps Us Stuck

Hello and welcome to wild:philosophy in which I explore what it means to live wisely in our wild times.

Also, if you interested in living wisely and in how to use philosophy as a practice in order to do so: you are warmly invited to join us for a PhilosophyGym at Grokkist this Thursday. This will be a recurring event to explore what it actually means to workout in a PhilosophyGym. I am very excited that the incredibly talented and wonderful soul

Nathan Dufour Oglesby

will co-host these workouts with me.

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created by author, no AI used

We are disconnected from each other, from the more-than-human world, and from ourselves. Our disconnection—especially from the more-than-human world, or nature—is often cited as the main reason we face an ecological crisis. In "Lost Connections," Johann Hari argues that a lack of connections to others is one of the leading causes of addiction and mental health struggles.

The solution, we're told, is reconnection. If only we could reconnect, we'd solve many of today's challenges. Work around reconnecting to nature is heralded as a key driver for flourishing futures.

While much of my own work has revolved around this idea, I've also encountered some challenges with this way of thinking—challenges that suggest we may need a different framework.

Let me share three realizations that made me question the reconnection narratives—and why they might actually be sabotaging our relationships with the more-than-human world.

The Paradox of Connection

We often declare that everything is connected, but this very declaration keeps us conceptually apart. To be connected, we must first assume we are separate entities capable of disconnection. The ontological assumption underlying reconnection narratives is that disconnection is possible—that we can sever our ties to the more-than-human world and must therefore work to reconnect.

But can I ever truly disconnect from the more-than-human world? My breath is always mingling with the exhalations of plants. My body is a community of bacteria, fungi, and cellular processes that are fundamentally other. The minerals in my bones came from ancient seas; the carbon in my cells has cycled through countless beings. There is a oneness to the very fabric of life that, no matter how alienated I might feel, I cannot escape.

Beyond Pre-Existing Entities

This leads to a deeper insight: we don't pre-exist our relationships. There are no things before relation. We don't simply interact with the world from the outside—we intra-act with it, as physicist-philosopher Karen Barad suggests. We are continuously coming into being through our entanglements.

Each moment, we are drawing boundaries—or choosing not to—forming as specific patterns of relation. Quantum physics tells us we are fundamentally entangled with the world at the most basic level of reality.

What we experience as "disconnection," then, might be better understood as a particular quality of relationship—one characterized by numbness, extraction, or domination—rather than an absence of relationship altogether.

Connection Is Not Relation

And lastly, as was recently pointed out to me by the sharp-minded Evelien Verschroeven, connection is not relation. She writes

“Unlike a connection, a relation is dynamic, contextual, and involves commitment and reciprocity. To be “in relation” with everything all the time would be impossible and inhuman. Relation asks something of us: it is where responsibility, depth, and transformation emerge.”

Much of the "nature connection" work actually keeps us in the realm of connection rather than moving us into genuine relation. We feel temporarily connected to a beautiful sunset, but we're not in ongoing reciprocal relationship with the crops that makes our lives possible.

Relational Being

So if reconnection isn't the answer, what is?

Instead of trying to reconnect, we might cultivate our capacity for responsive, reciprocal relation with the more-than-human beings who are always already sustaining us (which is often part of the work that is labeled as reconnection).

Instead of repeating a recovery story ("getting back what we've lost”), we can tell a generative one: learning to inhabit our always-already relatedness more skillfully. It's not about bridging a gap between ourselves and nature—it's about developing our capacity to sense, respond to, and care for the relationships that are already constituting us.

We don’t necessarily need weekend retreats to relate to the more-than-human in a different way, we can try daily practices of noticing:

• The breath flowing between me and the plant world

• The soil community that becomes my food that becomes my body

• The weather as the atmosphere touching my skin

Noticing the connection that is already there as an act of care for the relationship. Noticing what's already happening.

This relational understanding generates a different kind of ethics—not based on rights or duties to separate entities, but on the quality of my participation in the web of relationships that constitute me.

The question then becomes not "How do I reconnect to nature?" but "How do I participate in this relationship?"

Environmental action, understood this way, becomes a caring for the relationships that I am. Justice work becomes a caring for the relationships that I am. Personal healing becomes inseparable from collective and ecological healing.

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