Wild:Health

Philosophy for Personal and Planetary Health

Hello and welcome to “rewilding philosophy”—especially to the many new faces who’ve joined this space in recent days. Your willingness to read these imperfect words and sit with questions, is a gift I don’t take lightly. Thank you.

Like so many of you, I’m learning to navigate life in a body that often feels like a contested territory—mine is woven with chronic illness. And like you, I suspect, I’m watching the systems we’re told to trust—medicine, economics, politics—erode the very web of life they claim to sustain.

What I’ve come to believe is that solace lives not in answers, but in asking better questions together. Today’s essay is an offering in that spirit.

If you’re new here: these essays aren’t about fixes, wellness, or abstract philosophy. Instead, they represent the messy work of staying present to a world that’s both breaking and being remade.

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The “metacrisis” is often used as a term describing the interwoven catastrophes of ecological collapse, social inequity, and cultural disconnection. Yet, it is not merely a set of problems to solve. As previously explored, it is a relationship crisis.

And if the crisis is relational – so is the cure.

We cannot untangle climate change from colonialism, chronic illness from industrial pollution, or spiritual alienation from extractive capitalism. Yet mainstream narratives still treat these issues as separate, prescribing fragmented solutions: Fix your mindset. Overthrow capitalism. Eat organic. Rewrite the narrative.

But what if all these actions are necessary?

What if it is the unraveling of the sacred ties that bind bodies to ecosystems, stories to soil, and care to power? As feminist philosopher María Puig de la Bellacasa reminds us,

“Matters of care are not only about repairing harm, but about sustaining the ongoingness of life in a broken world.”

To treat the metacrisis as a technical puzzle to “solve” is to perpetuate the very logic of separation that birthed it.

What if healing requires us to tend to every scale – from the microbial ecosystems in our guts to the stories we tell about progress, from dismantling oppressive systems to rewilding our inner landscapes?

As Bayo Akomolafe insists,

“The cracks in modernity are not problems; they are portals.”

Healing begins when we stop trying to “fix” and instead learn to dwell in the fissures.

Philosophy as How & Why

The way I see it, philosophy is the how that gets us to personal and planetary health. And personal and planetary health has always been my why. It’s the why of so many others, too: the longing to belong to a world where our bodies, communities, and ecosystems aren’t just surviving but thriving.

But philosophy isn’t just a tool to achieve health. To live philosophically is to live healthily. Health is not an achievement, a checkbox, or a static state. It’s a process — a verb. Healthy-ing. The same goes for philosophy. Philosophy-ing.

For my highly abstract, meta-conceptualizing mind, these two processes are inseparable. To ask, “What does it mean to be healthy in a sick system?” is philosophy. To confront the discomfort of not having an answer? That’s healthy-ing. To rewild our imaginations by questioning the stories we’ve inherited about progress, purity, or perfection? That’s philosophy-ing. To sit with grief for a burning world while planting seeds in cracked soil? That’s healthy-ing.

Philosophy-ing and healthy-ing are both practices of staying alive to complexity. They reject the tyranny of endpoints — the idea that we’ll someday arrive at health or solve philosophy. Instead, they root us in the fertile, messy middle: the daily work of tending relationships, challenging assumptions, and metabolizing paradox.

The beauty is in the living of it. To philosophize is to participate in the ancient, collaborative practice of making meaning and making healthy living — a practice that nourishes us as much as clean water or nutritious food. Just as a forest’s health lies not in individual trees but in the mycelial conversations between them, our health emerges from the questions we ask together: How do we want to live? What do we owe one another? Who gets to be well in a world built on unwellness?

To philosophize is to trace the capillaries connecting microplastics in our blood to offshore oil rigs, autoimmune flare-ups to the unceded territories of our cities . It is to ask, with

Nora Bateson

,

“Who are we when we are with?”

Philosophy, here, then is not an academic exercise. It is a survival tool. To be philosophically healthy means cultivating ideas that align us with reality: the reality of ecological fragility, of bodies that defy cure, of systems that demand transformation.

In my own life, it was a chronic illness that seems to feel at home in my body paired with the seemingly chronic destruction of the planet, that drove me to philosophy. Diagnosed with an autoimmune condition deemed incurable, I confronted the absurdity of chasing individual purity in a world saturated with microplastics and inequity. Was I unhealthy because my body rebelled, or was it rebelling against a status quo?

As Jiddu Krishnamurti famously warned,

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

Our task is not to adapt to dysfunction, but to rewild health itself.

In this way, philosophy-ing is healthy-ing. Both require us to stay porous, adaptive, and radically entangled. Both demand that we honor the process, not the product.

A Continuation

Paradise is on Earth by Kathrine Lovell

When I first stumbled across the concept of philosophical health through Luis de Miranda (who I continue to learn from), I was electrified. You know that feeling when you come across something and it resonates and excites you on such a deep level that it feels like you can’t contain yourself, that an idea uses you just to overflow into this world. I had that with philosophical health. Philosophy and health are not only two sides of the same coin for me, they are actually on the same side (no idea yet what’s on the other side).

Because health plays such an important role in my life and work, I am going to rename these essays from rewilding philosophy to WILD:HEALTH - philosophy for personal and planetary health.

Wild, because the fundamental philosophical assumption is that health is wild.

“Wild problems are untamed, undomesticated, spontaneous, organic, complex.” Russel Roberts

At the heart of WILD:HEALTH is philosophy for personal and planetary health. I have so many questions:

• What does it mean to be healthy in a body that’s suffused with otherness?

• How do we heal ourselves while healing the planet?

• What philosophies can guide us when wellness is a privilege and sustainability is a marketing ploy?

• What does our body know that the world needs to hear? How can our survival become a seed of planetary renewal?

• Can healing scale or is it fractal?

• How can the softness of the body and the steadiness of the mind tend to each other?

• How does the illusion of separation between self and environment perpetuate both chronic illness and ecological collapse?

• If health is a web of relationships, how might we redefine healing to prioritize reciprocity over extraction?

• What rituals could bind personal grief for ailing bodies to collective action for ailing ecosystems?

• How do systems of oppression live in our bodies as much as in institutions—and what would it mean to decolonize both?

• Can we imagine a form of health that dismantles the myth of human exceptionalism without erasing human responsibility?

• When wellness is weaponized as a marker of moral worth, how do we reclaim health as a radical act of solidarity?

• Is wildness in health a form of resistance against the commodification of life itself?

• Is healing possible without surrendering the creative power of brokenness?

• What lies beyond the tyranny of biomarkers and GDP? How do we measure the unquantifiable—like reciprocity, awe, or regeneration? Should we measure these at all?

• When algorithms reduce health to data points, how do we reclaim the sacredness of embodied intuition?

And honestly, so many more. And also, they are the questions that I have already always been asking myself in the name of sustainability. But sustainability is a term that has never truly resonated with me. Regeneration a little more. And yet, while health is a risky label, it’s also the term that resonates the most. Health means wholeness. Not the sanitized, individualistic health sold to us in pill bottles and step counts, but health as holy work: the repair of fractured relationships between body and earth, self and soil, symptom and system.

Those are philosophical questions. And they can only be answered philosophically - as embodied, messy, open-ended questions¹.

I don’t have a manifesto to sell you. What I have is curiosity, more than a handful of lived bruises, and a growing conviction that the most profound shifts start small—in the stories we tell, the questions we dare to ask, and the daily choices to stay porous to a world that’s both breaking and being remade.

I want WILD:HEALTH to be a space where philosophy becomes a practice for navigating these entangled crises of personal and planetary well-being.

I don’t consider this shift a rebrand, but a deepening and an invitation to think wildly about what health means in a world where our bodies, communities, and ecosystems are inextricably entangled, and where the systems designed to sustain us often leave us fractured.

I want WILD:HEALTH to speak to the messiness that concerns all of us, to the unwellness so many of us experience in our bodies and in our minds and on and as this planet, and to mesh and re-entangle them (clumsily, humbly), to re-embed them where they belong - in a joint ecosystem.

As

Sophie Strand

writes:

“The work born of the soil of desperation is hardier. It is the dandelion that finds a way through fractured asphalt... What story is your emergency? That’s the only one worth writing.”

WILD:HEALTH is that emergency story. It’s for those who refuse to see personal and planetary health as separate – who know that healing is messy, collective, and rooted in brokenness.

Healing is not a destination. It is a philosophical practice of staying present to the pain and beauty of entanglement.

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If this resonates — if you feel that health is not a destination but a way of moving through the world, of philosophy-ing and healthy-ing our way home, I am looking forward to connect. If you think someone might benefit from learning about these things, too, please share.

1. I am currently learning so much about embodying this from

Seth Kaufmann

and

Ganga Devi Braun

and their approach to multidimensional thriving as well as from Katja Markelova. I highly recommend checking out their work.