“The essence of community, of land, of people, of culture, is inextricably linked. If one part is broken, the whole is fractured.”

—Winona LaDuke

I’ve spent much of my adult life working to undo dissociation. This is a psychological term for how it feels to be split from one’s body or self, or referring to a state of mental disconnection from one’s surroundings. It often happens in response to trauma so overwhelming that the mind cannot process it and, in a sense, “leaves the building.” I believe that this is happening at a vast scale for our species—that the Anthropocene is marked by a splintering, collective ecological dissociation.

We know this story well: humanity has largely been divorced from the rest of nature through industrialization, colonization, urbanization,  and the enclosure of the commons. Many of our ancestral ties to the land and community have been severed. What I want to emphasize here is the psychic component: This rupture is a trauma, one that has invoked mass dissociation. And while dissociation can provide crucial relief in the short term, it creates fracture in the long run.

When one dissociates, there is often numbing, amnesia, disembodiment, and fragmentation. These same symptoms appear in our relationship with the natural world. We grow numb as forests are reduced to lumber and oceans to fish stocks. We forget ancestral ways of reciprocity with the planet. We become disembodied, living screen-bound lives in climate-controlled spaces, appearing only from the shoulders up on conference calls. As a species, we have fragmented ourselves, clinging to myths of separation from ourselves, one another, and the Earth.

The cost is steep. The more ecocide intensifies, the more we dissociate. Many wander through life feeling a sense of detachment. Modern life has an increasing quality of unreality to it. A trauma specialist recently described dissociation to me as “watching someone become invisible in front of your eyes.” I feel that way walking down the street, or when I step onto the subway and see a car full of people staring into their phones. It’s as if we have become invisible to one another, as has the suffering of the larger biosphere—one alarming report after another.

Themes of ecological dissociation resound in philosophical and psychological texts. The psychologist James Hillman lamented how modern consciousness has been cut off from the anima mundi—the soul of the world—leaving us to wander a landscape emptied of psyche. Carl Jung described our modern condition as a “dissociation of consciousness,” a fracture between reason and nature. The American ecologist and self-described geologian Thomas Berry coined the term inscendence, referring to the shift from wanting to escape or transcend the world to wanting to enter its core and become part of it. The late Joanna Macy called all of this “the work that reconnects.”

This is the antidote to dissociation. To enter the core we must pass through the wound. It requires reweaving body and mind; reconnecting split parts of the self by confronting the trauma once deemed unbearable. In therapy, this is done in safety and trust. What is the equivalent for our shared ecology, which requires reconnecting to the soul of the world? Time in nature, ceremony, habitat restoration, following the wisdom of Indigenous peoples who have resisted eco-dissociation, and so on.

Dissociation is not permanent. Just as individuals can heal trauma, so too can cultures. It is possible to return to the self. It is possible to become embodied, to find alignment once again. The path is frightening—but the gift of reconnection is that you get to really be here. To be part of this wondrous planet and to know the excruciating splendor of having a body. To be alive on this great green Earth.