How does Ecosexuality contribute to Sex and Happiness?
Dr. SerenaGaia and Lindsay Hagamen join Laurie Handlers on her weekly podcast Sex and Happiness for a lively exploration of the practical applications of ecosexuality in our every day lives.
Tune in to hear how Lindsay and Dr. SerenaGaia came to identify as ecosexuals, what it means to them to partner with the lands and waters they call home, and how nature can help heal the deep wounds of sexual shame.
–Sensheant Magazine Interviews Lindsay Hagmen and Dr. SerenaGaia, Cont’d . . .
SM: There’s this enormous movement under foot that most people don’t know about, but the overarching theme is that we each have a sensual relationship to our natural environment. An innate connection that few would describe as anything close to ‘erotic.’ Do you think we have been conditioned to keep this aspect of eros quiet?
LH: Our connection to sexuality and to our natural environment are intimately interwoven. Eros is life energy, the animating energy that flows through you and me, the energy that flows through all life. As we go through life, however, all too many of us have experiences that implicitly or explicitly shame our connection to the body, to the physical, and to the animal within us. And with it, shame our connection to the Earth, to the natural, and to the wild.
Since our sexuality and our experience of nature are so intimately connected, we are able to approach healing this erotic crisis from either side. For some, 
embracing their erotic nature, the pleasure of their body, and their sexuality is what opens them up to a greater sense of connection with, and reverence for, the natural world. For others, a deep connection to nature–often, a specific place or ecosystem–is what helps them to embrace their erotic nature, their pleasure and their sexuality. For me, it was the latter. The natural world, and its shameless and abundant expression of sexuality, was the only thing capable of permeating my shame deep enough to open me up to a life where I could embrace my body, my desires and my erotic self as much as I could embrace the intellectual and creative aspects of who I am.
SG: It’s hard for me to relate to sexual repression as a child because I was raised in a very sexually expressive era (the 1960s) by a very sexpositive family, a nudist and polytheistic slash atheist family where we learned about Greek mythologies rather than Biblical ones. My mother taught me all I needed to know about sexuality when I reached puberty. I also was raised before any significant awareness of global warming and other environmental challenges due to the extractive industries that treat lover Earth or Gaia as a victim to pillage, rape, and plunder. I feel sorry for younger people who did not have these privileges, who grew up in more repressive times. I also feel a need for solidarity across generations since life is one.
I do feel that ecosexuality is a movement that brings back nature as a teacher and inspirer in the arts of love. In the era of Romanticism, the French Revolution inspired people to take nature as a teacher in the arts of love. In the 1960s a similar movement was observed. In subsequent decades, there was a shift toward more cautious, artificial, contained and structured ways to express the arts of love. A fear of love prevailed in the culture at large, and the result was that many spontaneous ways to express the arts of love became criminalized. This had the good side effect of producing a whole new generation of educators and initiators in the arts of love that valued a diversity of practices, styles, and talents and therefore empowered a whole bouquet of expressions that were not, before, considered “natural.”
So when we return to the arts of love as part of a practice of ecosexuality, we come to this with an enhanced awareness of how diverse nature is. Of how, in nature itself, sexual expression is mainly a function of pleasure, connectivity, symbiosis, sustainability, diversity, and commonality, and only marginally, as a side effect, a function of reproduction.
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Post 3 of 11 in the The EcoSEXual RƎVO˩ution Series, to be continued . . . .
Stay tuned for the juicy details of this interview, when Lindsay and Dr. SerenaGaia answer Sensheant’s salacious and deep probing questions. We will be back on Wednesday next week.
Enchanted with pictures like the one above? Find them in Ecosexuality, Kindle edition, with Photo Gallery, find it here.
We gratefully acknowledge Rebecca Church and her team at Sensheant Magazine. This interview will appear in a forthcoming issue. We send our warm thanks to our interviewer, Cynthia Spence, and congratulate the team on their beautiful and brave initiative. Connect with Sensheant here.
Saturday, June 13th, The Dr. Susan Block Show will explore the burgeoning field of ecosexuality. Joining international sexologist and Bonobo Way author Dr. Susan Block in-studio live on the air will be Ecosexuality Movement Leader and co-editor of the forthcoming collection, Ecosexuality: When Nature Inspires the Arts of Love, Dr. SerenaGaia Anderlini D’Onofrio. Lindsay Hagamen, Ecosexuality‘s other co-editor will join the show remotely.
Listen to Green Diva Jennifer‘s conversation with Green Diva Meg about ecosexuality as it relates to nature, then read on for more…
It’s no secret that the stress of constant busyness is literally making us sick and taking years off of our lives.
Beyond the physical, our mental and emotional health is also suffering. One possible solution is revisiting our connection to nature…
Our modern lifestyles have increasingly separated us from our natural environment and from each other. In fact, Richard Louv coined the medical-sounding term, “nature-deficit disorder” to explain the disconnection and resulting ailments humans are experiencing as a result of spending less time outdoors or in natural surroundings. Prior to this, Edward Wilson introduced the “biophilia hypothesis” which suggests that there is an instinctive bond between human beings and other living systems. (More recently, the Icelandic singer-songwriter, Björk released an experimental album and multi-media project, Biophilia. In it, she explores the links between nature, music, and technology. Listen to the album at the end of this post.)
But, nature as erotic? Stay with me for a minute. Eros, from which the term erotic is derived, in a much wider sense simply means “life energy.” Think about it. We were all conceived through erotic or sexual energy. Life energy is the force that animates us. The Earth is constantly revitalizing itself by reproducing life in a a variety of ways.
What might an expanded version of human eroticism and sexuality look like? It may mean thinking beyond the narrow definition of physical, heterosexual intercourse that has become the dominant perspective in modern culture. I’m not talking about getting freaky with a tree either. Rather, think about the feeling you get when hiking through the woods, or walking on the beach by the ocean, or climbing a mountain, or sitting by a creek looking up at the clouds, or tending to your garden, or camping under the stars, or whatever your favorite nature activity may be.
The practice of getting back in touch with nature or getting grounded, quite literally, is also known as “earthing.” It can be as simple as walking barefoot on the Earth, whether it be on the grass, sand, soil, gravel, or even unpainted concrete, and it’s free.
We, as humans, are electrical beings. Furthermore, we experience the flow of the Earth’s electric energy connecting with our physical body in such settings. Earthing brings us back to our physical body and senses; it situates us back into nature. Nature nourishes us—it provides us sun, shade, food, water, and oxygen. Does that make earthing an ecosexual practice? Perhaps. It’s at least ecosensual.
While intuitively practiced by many ancient and indigenous cultures, getting back to nature is increasingly being shown by science to improve concentration, spark creativity, and boost health. For example, contemporary articles in the Journal of Environmental and Public Health and the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine present evidence that earthing (or grounding) improves our health, from better sleep to reduced pain to cardiovascular health benefits.
Drug dependency studies are suggesting that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, but connection. Humans need contact. After all, we are social creatures, and as a part of nature, also ecological ones.
So, step outside and take a big belly breath, kick off your shoes and touch the earth, for your health.
Or, if the weather doesn’t permit, look out the window and enjoy Björk’s music…
Originally posted on February 21, 2015
Reposted from The Green Divas Radio Show
Concerns with the environment as well as concerns with social arrangements based on sexuality and gender have spurred a wide variety of social movements. The ecosexual movement is an emerging grassroots social movement that begins at the intersection of environmental and sexuality issues. As a cultural theory, ecosexuality draws from a wide range of scholarly fields including environmental studies, ecofeminism, and queer theory. In this essay, I examine the conceptual antecedents of ecosexuality from a social scientific perspective and show how the ecosexual movement resists dominant modern ideology in a quest for social change and social justice. Questions my essay addresses include: Where did the need for ecosexuality and its practices of love arise from, within cultural discourse? How is ecosexuality meeting these needs, and what added possibilities is this opening up?
First, I describe the core attributes of the modern era critiqued by early environmental social scientists, philosophers, and feminists. These emphasize the dualistic, hierarchical nature of the relationship between humans and the environment in this historical period when the quality of the environment began degrading. During that time, the dominant worldview shifted: initially humans were seen as situated within nature as part of the environment, and eventually they came to be seen as separate from nature and were idealized as masters over the environment. Next, I trace connections between environmental and gender issues through select works from within the intuitive writings of ecofeminism that align with the wider social science project and its scientific methods. These, coupled with insights from within feminist political ecology, dovetail into the comprehensive field of ecogender studies.
Contemporary feminist scholars demonstrate that gender and sexuality are separate but interrelated social constructs. For example the idea of a “heterosexual matrix” — a preordained alignment of sex, gender, and sexuality — became popular during the modern era (Butler 1990). However, the field of ecogender studies does not fully explore the relation between sexuality and gender. I propose to address this problem through the exploration of queer theory and the analysis of social movements through a queer lens. These add an explicit focus to the understanding of sexuality as a fundamental organizing principle of our society and our planetary life.
More specifically, queer theory critiques and challenges the sexual order where heterosexuality is viewed as normal. Queer theorists call this perspective heteronormativity, and observe that variants such as homosexuality are labeled as deviant. A heteronormative view aligns sexuality, biological sex, gender identity, and gender roles, creating a “sex hierarchy” that privileges some while marginalizing others (Rubin 1984). Utilizing a queer lens to examine environmental issues provides a way to better understand the ecosexual movement. Queer theory shines a light on the sexual order as a field of power, and challenges the wider ideology of dualism and hierarchy that organizes the modern era.