Rooting for Earth is an ecocentric sensing tank exploring how humans can communicate, collaborate and co-create with the more-than-human world. It begins with a fundamental premise: the human-centred paradigm has reached its limits.
Many of the ecological, social and cultural crises we face are consequences of a worldview that places humans outside of, and above, the living systems that sustain us. We have become extraordinarily skilled at designing for the world, managing it and extracting from it. We have become far less skilled at listening to it, learning from it and creating in relationship with it.
R4E explores what happens when we begin from a different premise: we are not separate from the living world. We are part of it.
What kind of future might emerge when humans and the more-than-human world create together?
Traditional think tanks primarily use human intellect to analyse problems and generate ideas. R4E begins from the premise that intelligence is not exclusively human. Forests, soils, fungi, plants, animals, rivers, oceans and ecosystems possess forms of intelligence, communication, adaptation and relational knowledge that humans have only partially understood. A sensing tank expands the process of future-making beyond conventional human knowledge, drawing on sensing, embodied and relational ways of knowing, ecological intelligence, traditional and Indigenous ecological knowledge, scientific and systems-based knowledge, and futures thinking.
R4E's aim is to explore how humans might learn to speak with, listen to and create alongside the living world, not to claim any authority to speak for it.
Nathalie Markiefka is an ecocentric futures practitioner exploring what becomes possible when humans re-enter relationship with the living world. Her work sits at the intersection of ecocentric philosophy, more-than-human relations, futures practice, food systems and embodied ways of knowing.
Nathalie's academic and professional background began in climate change, agriculture, food systems and sustainability. She holds an MSc in Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security and has more than a decade of experience facilitating work in sustainable food and nutrition. That experience gave her a close understanding of the ecological and systemic challenges created by contemporary human systems, and increasingly led her to question whether technological and systemic solutions alone could address the deeper problem.
Her exploration expanded into more experiential and relational ways of knowing:
Alongside these, she has spent years working with people as a facilitator, bringing together systems thinking, ecological awareness, embodied experience and transformative practice.
Nathalie's work is driven by a recognition that the human-centred paradigm has reached its limits, and that the next evolutionary step calls for humility rather than greater control over the living world. She is particularly interested in what it might mean for cultures disconnected from place to become indigenous to Earth again: a recovered, lived sense of belonging, humility, reciprocity and relationship, rather than an appropriation of Indigenous identities or knowledge.
For Nathalie, the body is central to this reorientation: we are not separate from Earth, we are Earth, and our bodies are one of our most valuable channels for sensing and listening.
