Untold Magazine
Writing
I Wanna Be Soil1
Modern water systems are designed to be invisible. Pipes hum quietly beneath the streets. Treatment plants sit at the city’s periphery. We’re taught to turn taps, not trace rivers.
This invisibility feeds a broader condition: disconnection. A cultural and cognitive split often referred to as the “story of separation,” where humans are imagined as distinct from, and dominant over, the natural world.
Map of Barcelona c. 2010 from the Museu d’Història de Barcelona and the Ajuntament de Barcelona. The two dark squiggly lines on the edges signify the rivers that boundary Barcelona, and the dark swatch on the bottom indicating the seafront.
But this story is outdated. As Vanessa Machado de Oliveira in her book Hospicing Modernity describes,
“We are living off expired or expiring stories. Stories that expire can no longer dance with you. They are lethargic or stuck, they can’t move things in generative ways anymore, but we often feel we cannot let them go. Many of these expired stories give us a sense of security, purpose, and direction—precisely because they seem stable and solid. Thus, we become attached to them and get used to their weight in our lives. If we notice they are dying, we refuse to accept it and we put them on life support because we fear the void left in their place when they are no longer there”.
In other words, we are at the limits of an expired story, the story of separation.
Vanessa suggests that one of the most important first steps is to acknowledge, grieve, and—as her title proposes—hospice these stories. It is work we often skip, and even when we don’t, it can be deeply uncomfortable. Thankfully the book offers practices and exercises for navigating this process, helping us sit with the endings before rushing toward new beginnings. Eventually though, new stories must take root, replacing the old. And one way to begin shaping them is with questions.
The late Peter Berg, a leading voice in the bioregionalist movement of the 1970s, urged people to "re-inhabit" their places. He often began his workshops with a deceptively simple prompt: "Where does your water come from, and where does it go?".
When I first asked this of myself, and later my graduate design students in Barcelona, most of us couldn’t answer without researching it. But in doing so, we began to see the city differently. It wasn’t just infrastructure we uncovered. It revealed all different forms of disconnection: physical, cognitive, embodied, and emotional. To ask where your water comes from is to begin to develop intimacy with a place.
A Physical Separation
The maps we inherit – of cities, countries, and continents are often drawn with straight lines and hard edges, reinforcing this illusion of separateness. Borders separate Spain from France, a nation from its neighbour. These divisions feel natural only because we've been taught to treat them that way. But ecological realities don’t care for cartographic conventions. Rivers, wildfires, and pandemics flow freely across these human-made boundaries.
This rigid, colonial cartography contrasts sharply with older, more fluid ways of understanding land. For many Indigenous communities, geography was not a grid but a living, breathing rhythm. Across the Great Plains, the Lakota organized life around seasonal migrations. In the Arctic, the Inuit shaped their governance according to freeze-thaw cycles and the return of wildlife. Territories expanded and contracted with the patterns of wind, water, and animals. Their maps were not documents of possession, but calendars of ecological abundance (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021)2.
Projects like Native-Land.ca3 offer a glimpse into this, tracing these more fluid geographies, as shaped by watersheds, mountains, and kinship rather than conquest. They remind us that long before nation-states and zoning codes, people lived according to the contours of land and water.
![]()
Native-land.ca project mapping the numerous Indigenous communities across North America. The land and waters cannot be reduced to borders or lines, this is why the shapes on the map are translucent and layered.
Today, a growing movement is reviving this sensibility under the banner of bioregionalism. At its core, a bioregion is defined not by lines drawn by empires, but by natural features: watersheds, soil systems, climate, flora and fauna, and the cultures that live in relationship with them. It's a way of thinking and organizing society with the land, not against it.4
A Cognitive Separation
One need only look to the Colorado River to understand what happens when this intimacy is severed.
Once flowing freely from the Rockies to the Gulf of California, it is now dammed, diverted, litigated, and fought over. The 1922 Colorado River Compact, a foundational document in U.S. water law, divided the river among states and cut Mexico almost entirely out of the picture. Water was treated as property, a commodity to be allocated and owned. Today, what was once a thriving ecological corridor has become a symbol of environmental apartheid.
![]()
The Colorado River. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, 1946. Library of Congress, Flickr, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.
![]()
Map of the Colorado River flowing through seven U.S. states. Reprinted from The New York Times (2023), using data from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Arizona Department of Water Resources, and California Department of Water Resources.
And yet, there was an alternate vision. John Wesley Powell, the explorer who led the first U.S. government expedition down the Colorado in 1869, argued that the West should be settled according to watersheds, not arbitrary lines. His 1890 map of the "Arid Region of the United States" was based not on counties or territories, but on hydrology. He noted that a mountain ridgeline determines whether a drop of rain flows to the Atlantic or Pacific. He called for governance attuned to ecological realities. His insights anticipated what bioregionalists and Indigenous peoples have long known: water shapes life. He presented this proposal to the Senate in 1890, but his advice was ignored in favor of extractive development and settler expansion. A century later, the system is fracturing—ecologically, legally, and ethically.5
![]()
![]()
Left image: Map of the “Arid Region” as mapped by John Wesley Powell. Source: Eleventh Annual report of the Director of the United States Geological Survey, Part 2- Irrigation: 1889-1890 Annual Report 11. 18
Right image: Map of the Western United States in 1910. Source: Ralph S. Tarr, B.S., F.G.S.A. and Frank M. McMurry, Ph.D., New Geographies 2nd ed (New York, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1910) 26.
A Legal Separation
Dominant western legal traditions, such as the common law, determine who has access to space and under what circumstances. “Property,” “ownership,” “right of way,” “title” – these are human-made fictions that define how humans relate to land and water.
Through these traditions, humans have granted corporations personhood but ecosystems are reduced to resources. Few protections exist to represent the ecosystem's best interest separate from human beings. As environmental rights lawyer Thomas Linzey so eloquently puts it “we had folks discover land that was not their own, draw lines on it, and then say, ‘This is yours.’ And there's nothing more antithetical to bioregions or environmental protection than to see land as either developed or to be developed in the future, but not to see it as a separate or independent kind of entity with its own needs… We live in an age where we do a lot of crazy stuff.”6
One of the major shifts that needs to happen is from ownership to relationship. How do we “de-propertyfy” nature?
Indigenous people have been living in relationship with the natural world since time immemorial. Around the world, efforts to reimagine law and governance are emerging. Largely inspired by the principles of decolonization, these efforts range from radical legal innovations to powerful, community-driven models of stewardship.
A wave of “Rights of Nature” laws is challenging the property-based status quo. Rainforests in Ecuador have been granted constitutional protection from mining (Warner, 2024). In New Zealand, the Te Urewera forest (Middleton, 2024) and the Whanganui River (Gorvett, 2020) are recognized as living beings with legal personhood. Rivers in Colombia and Canada now have legal rights to flow, be free from pollution, and be represented in court (Municipalité régionale de comté de Minganie, 2021; Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia, 2017).
One striking example: in 2021, The Innu Council of Ekuanitshit and the Minganie Regional Country Municipality (Minganie RCM) recognized the legal personhood of Muteshekau Shipu (also known as the Magpie River). Muteshekau Shipu is a river which winds through Northern Quebec Canada. Guardians appointed by the Innu of Ekuanitshit and the local government now speak on the river’s behalf. But for the Innu, this was not a new idea, it was a sacred truth made legible to colonial institutions. Legal rights, in this case, support sovereignty as much as conservation.7
![]()
Rita Mestokosho, an Innu activist, poet, and educator, singing a healing chant for the Mutehekau Shipu (Magpie River). From I am Mutehekau Shipu: A river’s journey to personhood in eastern Quebec, by S. Nerberg, 2022, Canadian Geographic. Copyright 2022 by Canadian Geographic.
Yet these legal declarations are not without complications. In Colombia, after the Amazon was granted legal rights following a youth-led lawsuit, subsistence farmers were evicted in the name of environmental protection. What began as a gesture toward justice became an act of dispossession (Jain, 2023).
Michel Serres warned about this in his book The Natural Contract – that modern legal systems are built for humans, not for the Earth. Without a transformation of the legal imagination itself, we risk absorbing nature into human categories of control.
The broader challenge is not just legal, but epistemic. Philosopher David Abram coined the phrase “more-than-human” to describe the web of life beyond human dominion—rivers, fungi, weather, stone. It is an invitation to decenter ourselves, and ask: how do we protect what we are not separate from?
Around the world, models of shared stewardship offer alternatives. In southern Italy, the Rights to Seeds, Rights of Seeds project brings together farmers, designers, and scientists to preserve ancient, drought-resistant seed varieties.
Industrial agriculture incentivizes farmers to buy patented seedlings, which erodes both biodiversity and knowledge. To counter this, the project uses the museum as a legal and cultural tool: treating seeds as part of a “living collection,” they advocate for legal reforms to seed laws, allowing farmer-adapted seeds to be saved, shared, and cultivated.
![]()
Drought Nursery at SeminAzioni in Lecce, Puglia. From Seeds of Change: Reviving ancient wisdom to address the climate crisis. Copyright 2025 by Royal College of Art.
![]()
Rights to Seeds, Rights of Seeds installation at the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome, From Seeds of Change: Reviving ancient wisdom to address the climate crisis. Copyright 2025 by Royal College of Art.
In urban contexts, tree stewardship platforms like NYC’s TreeMap or Giess den Kiez in Berlin engage residents in caring for street trees by monitoring, watering, and protecting the living infrastructure of their cities.
And in the south of England, a river charter has been in place since 2019, reflecting the collective vision of over 1,250 participants who want to ensure the Dart River remains "fishable, drinkable, swimmable, paddleable, and sustainable" for generations to come. More than just a document, the Bioregional Learning Centre supporting this initiative views the charter as the first step in a three-part process toward citizen-led management of common-pool resources: (1) establishing the charter, (2) appointing riverkeepers to steward the river, and (3) forming a river council to address emerging issues.
![]()
Screenshot of the Giess den Kiez platform, highlighting information about a specific tree (circled in blue) in the Kreuzberg neighbourhood of Berlin.
These models aren’t about managing nature. They’re about collaborating with it. These transitions and paradigm shifts are hard not because we haven't thought through them enough, but because they stretch beyond the frameworks we’ve inherited. Joanna Macy, environmental activist and scholar, calls this moment the Great Turning. A shift away from extractive, industrial systems toward life-sustaining cultures. Cultures rooted not in domination, but in relationship.
An Embodied Separation
Our tools for knowing nature are getting sharper. We can now decode sperm whale dialects (Savage, 2024). Projects like Europe’s Curiosoil aim to increase “soil literacy”, one approach being to record soil sound otherwise known as bioacoustics. These efforts deepen our intellectual understanding of non-human species. But knowledge is not only expanding in the lab; it’s also taking root in art, education, and culture.
In upstate New York, artist and educator Lize Mogel offers an alternative way of knowing. Her project Walking the Watershed invites participants to embody the infrastructure that brings water to New York City. In one activity, Performing Infrastructure, people take on the roles of reservoirs, aqueducts, pipes, trees, and faucets. They move and sound like water: trickling, gurgling, rushing. It’s playful and transformative. You become the system. You feel its connections, its fragility, its reliance on every part moving in concert. It's not a lesson. It's a sensation.
![]()
Participants in the workshop Performing Infrastructure. Lize Mogel.
![]()
Elements of New York City’s watershed at Onsite Gallery installation 2018.
This embodied approach to knowledge represents a deeper form of reconnection. To engage, not just intellectually but physically with the systems that sustain us, is to begin dissolving the boundary between self and environment.
This shift, from knowing to embodying, is happening in many places and in different forms. In Melbourne, ‘walkshops’ along the Birrarung River transform strolling into ecological awareness. In Kyoto, a citizen-participatory collective equips people to design their own tools for observing nature. In Barcelona, design students in the master’s program I direct collaborate directly with ecosystems, using design as a form of ecological dialogue.
![]()
![]()
![]()
Design students in the Master of Strategic Design at Elisava School of Design and Engineering Barcelona create a public exhibition prompting visitors to reflect on their relationship with water- in the form of postcards and sms chats.
That same spirit is emerging in music. Cosmo Sheldrake, a UK-based multi-instrumentalist, producer, composer, live improviser, and field recordist…you read that correctly “..and field recordist”, creates what some call “interspecies collaborations”.
Weaving the songs of endangered birds, the bioelectric pulses of fungi, and the rush of local rivers to create a truly polyphonic performance. Imagine being in a dimly lit venue with friends, swaying to music that blends folklore with science — one song about moss, another about becoming soil — and leaving with new knowledge lodged not only in your head, but in your body.
The Moss, by Cosmo Sheldrake
Legend has it that
the moss grows on
The north side of the trees
Well, legend has it
when the rains come down
All the worms come up to breathe
Well, legend has it when the sunbeams come
All the plants, they eat them with their leaves
Well, legend has it that the world spins round
On an axis of twenty-three degrees
Soil, by Cosmo Sheldrake ft. Nature
I wanna go downwards
I wanna be ground
I wanna be fed on
I wanna break down
I wanna be all gone
I wanna be food
I wanna be walked on
I wanna be soil
I wanna be soil
I wanna be sound
I wanna hold secrets
That will never be found
I wanna be soil
Live upside down
But it will never get lonely
With everyone round
In a way, Sheldrake’s concerts already hint at a new kind of performance, one where nature is not just a subject, but a co-star. I imagine it’s only a matter of time before we see a New York Broadway musical in the style of Hamilton, but instead of hip-hopping through the conquests of European and American white men told via a cast of people of colour, we get a psychedelic sing-along told from the perspective of fungi, plants, and whales.
If we are to reconnect with nature, we must do more than study it. We must feel it, sing it, and dance with it.
The Story of Reconnection
One way we might reconnect is to begin with questions. Like Peter Berg asking, where does your water come from, and where does it go? inviting us to trace the river on a map, walk its banks, and stand at the estuaries. Perhaps it’s about listening with a different kind of attention and perspective as Cosmo Sheldrake asks in Does The Swallow Dream of Flying:
Does the Swallow Dream of Flying, by Cosmo Sheldrake
Does the swallow dream of flying
As it sleeps on the wing
Does it long for the summer
As it flies home for spring
Does daisy feel a sadness
At the last rays of sun
Does the wind feel a gladness
At the work that it’s done
Does the river ever wonder
What will come 'round the bend?
As it twists and meanders
Down its slow descent
By Toban Shadlyn
Written from Barcelona, sandwiched between the watersheds of the Besòs and Llobregat Rivers, the mediterranean sea and the Collserola mountain range.
Thank you to the many people who read, edited, and inspired this piece: Arielle Permack, Sebastian Tirlui, Tim Rodenbroeker, Blasius Walch, Prateek Shankar, Arden Mathieson, and Jenny Andersson (Really Regenerative).
The maps we inherit – of cities, countries, and continents are often drawn with straight lines and hard edges, reinforcing this illusion of separateness. Borders separate Spain from France, a nation from its neighbour. These divisions feel natural only because we've been taught to treat them that way. But ecological realities don’t care for cartographic conventions. Rivers, wildfires, and pandemics flow freely across these human-made boundaries.
This rigid, colonial cartography contrasts sharply with older, more fluid ways of understanding land. For many Indigenous communities, geography was not a grid but a living, breathing rhythm. Across the Great Plains, the Lakota organized life around seasonal migrations. In the Arctic, the Inuit shaped their governance according to freeze-thaw cycles and the return of wildlife. Territories expanded and contracted with the patterns of wind, water, and animals. Their maps were not documents of possession, but calendars of ecological abundance (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021)2.
Projects like Native-Land.ca3 offer a glimpse into this, tracing these more fluid geographies, as shaped by watersheds, mountains, and kinship rather than conquest. They remind us that long before nation-states and zoning codes, people lived according to the contours of land and water.
Native-land.ca project mapping the numerous Indigenous communities across North America. The land and waters cannot be reduced to borders or lines, this is why the shapes on the map are translucent and layered.
Today, a growing movement is reviving this sensibility under the banner of bioregionalism. At its core, a bioregion is defined not by lines drawn by empires, but by natural features: watersheds, soil systems, climate, flora and fauna, and the cultures that live in relationship with them. It's a way of thinking and organizing society with the land, not against it.4
A Cognitive Separation
One need only look to the Colorado River to understand what happens when this intimacy is severed.
Once flowing freely from the Rockies to the Gulf of California, it is now dammed, diverted, litigated, and fought over. The 1922 Colorado River Compact, a foundational document in U.S. water law, divided the river among states and cut Mexico almost entirely out of the picture. Water was treated as property, a commodity to be allocated and owned. Today, what was once a thriving ecological corridor has become a symbol of environmental apartheid.
The Colorado River. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, 1946. Library of Congress, Flickr, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.
Map of the Colorado River flowing through seven U.S. states. Reprinted from The New York Times (2023), using data from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Arizona Department of Water Resources, and California Department of Water Resources.
And yet, there was an alternate vision. John Wesley Powell, the explorer who led the first U.S. government expedition down the Colorado in 1869, argued that the West should be settled according to watersheds, not arbitrary lines. His 1890 map of the "Arid Region of the United States" was based not on counties or territories, but on hydrology. He noted that a mountain ridgeline determines whether a drop of rain flows to the Atlantic or Pacific. He called for governance attuned to ecological realities. His insights anticipated what bioregionalists and Indigenous peoples have long known: water shapes life. He presented this proposal to the Senate in 1890, but his advice was ignored in favor of extractive development and settler expansion. A century later, the system is fracturing—ecologically, legally, and ethically.5
Left image: Map of the “Arid Region” as mapped by John Wesley Powell. Source: Eleventh Annual report of the Director of the United States Geological Survey, Part 2- Irrigation: 1889-1890 Annual Report 11. 18
Right image: Map of the Western United States in 1910. Source: Ralph S. Tarr, B.S., F.G.S.A. and Frank M. McMurry, Ph.D., New Geographies 2nd ed (New York, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1910) 26.
A Legal Separation
Dominant western legal traditions, such as the common law, determine who has access to space and under what circumstances. “Property,” “ownership,” “right of way,” “title” – these are human-made fictions that define how humans relate to land and water.
Through these traditions, humans have granted corporations personhood but ecosystems are reduced to resources. Few protections exist to represent the ecosystem's best interest separate from human beings. As environmental rights lawyer Thomas Linzey so eloquently puts it “we had folks discover land that was not their own, draw lines on it, and then say, ‘This is yours.’ And there's nothing more antithetical to bioregions or environmental protection than to see land as either developed or to be developed in the future, but not to see it as a separate or independent kind of entity with its own needs… We live in an age where we do a lot of crazy stuff.”6
One of the major shifts that needs to happen is from ownership to relationship. How do we “de-propertyfy” nature?
Indigenous people have been living in relationship with the natural world since time immemorial. Around the world, efforts to reimagine law and governance are emerging. Largely inspired by the principles of decolonization, these efforts range from radical legal innovations to powerful, community-driven models of stewardship.
A wave of “Rights of Nature” laws is challenging the property-based status quo. Rainforests in Ecuador have been granted constitutional protection from mining (Warner, 2024). In New Zealand, the Te Urewera forest (Middleton, 2024) and the Whanganui River (Gorvett, 2020) are recognized as living beings with legal personhood. Rivers in Colombia and Canada now have legal rights to flow, be free from pollution, and be represented in court (Municipalité régionale de comté de Minganie, 2021; Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia, 2017).
One striking example: in 2021, The Innu Council of Ekuanitshit and the Minganie Regional Country Municipality (Minganie RCM) recognized the legal personhood of Muteshekau Shipu (also known as the Magpie River). Muteshekau Shipu is a river which winds through Northern Quebec Canada. Guardians appointed by the Innu of Ekuanitshit and the local government now speak on the river’s behalf. But for the Innu, this was not a new idea, it was a sacred truth made legible to colonial institutions. Legal rights, in this case, support sovereignty as much as conservation.7
Rita Mestokosho, an Innu activist, poet, and educator, singing a healing chant for the Mutehekau Shipu (Magpie River). From I am Mutehekau Shipu: A river’s journey to personhood in eastern Quebec, by S. Nerberg, 2022, Canadian Geographic. Copyright 2022 by Canadian Geographic.
Yet these legal declarations are not without complications. In Colombia, after the Amazon was granted legal rights following a youth-led lawsuit, subsistence farmers were evicted in the name of environmental protection. What began as a gesture toward justice became an act of dispossession (Jain, 2023).
Michel Serres warned about this in his book The Natural Contract – that modern legal systems are built for humans, not for the Earth. Without a transformation of the legal imagination itself, we risk absorbing nature into human categories of control.
The broader challenge is not just legal, but epistemic. Philosopher David Abram coined the phrase “more-than-human” to describe the web of life beyond human dominion—rivers, fungi, weather, stone. It is an invitation to decenter ourselves, and ask: how do we protect what we are not separate from?
Around the world, models of shared stewardship offer alternatives. In southern Italy, the Rights to Seeds, Rights of Seeds project brings together farmers, designers, and scientists to preserve ancient, drought-resistant seed varieties.
“Although seeds are precious—holding history, genetic memory, and biodiversity—growing and preserving them is a difficult task,” says farmer Marco Reho, a member of the collective.
Industrial agriculture incentivizes farmers to buy patented seedlings, which erodes both biodiversity and knowledge. To counter this, the project uses the museum as a legal and cultural tool: treating seeds as part of a “living collection,” they advocate for legal reforms to seed laws, allowing farmer-adapted seeds to be saved, shared, and cultivated.
Drought Nursery at SeminAzioni in Lecce, Puglia. From Seeds of Change: Reviving ancient wisdom to address the climate crisis. Copyright 2025 by Royal College of Art.
Rights to Seeds, Rights of Seeds installation at the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome, From Seeds of Change: Reviving ancient wisdom to address the climate crisis. Copyright 2025 by Royal College of Art.
In urban contexts, tree stewardship platforms like NYC’s TreeMap or Giess den Kiez in Berlin engage residents in caring for street trees by monitoring, watering, and protecting the living infrastructure of their cities.
And in the south of England, a river charter has been in place since 2019, reflecting the collective vision of over 1,250 participants who want to ensure the Dart River remains "fishable, drinkable, swimmable, paddleable, and sustainable" for generations to come. More than just a document, the Bioregional Learning Centre supporting this initiative views the charter as the first step in a three-part process toward citizen-led management of common-pool resources: (1) establishing the charter, (2) appointing riverkeepers to steward the river, and (3) forming a river council to address emerging issues.
Screenshot of the Giess den Kiez platform, highlighting information about a specific tree (circled in blue) in the Kreuzberg neighbourhood of Berlin.
These models aren’t about managing nature. They’re about collaborating with it. These transitions and paradigm shifts are hard not because we haven't thought through them enough, but because they stretch beyond the frameworks we’ve inherited. Joanna Macy, environmental activist and scholar, calls this moment the Great Turning. A shift away from extractive, industrial systems toward life-sustaining cultures. Cultures rooted not in domination, but in relationship.
An Embodied Separation
Our tools for knowing nature are getting sharper. We can now decode sperm whale dialects (Savage, 2024). Projects like Europe’s Curiosoil aim to increase “soil literacy”, one approach being to record soil sound otherwise known as bioacoustics. These efforts deepen our intellectual understanding of non-human species. But knowledge is not only expanding in the lab; it’s also taking root in art, education, and culture.
In upstate New York, artist and educator Lize Mogel offers an alternative way of knowing. Her project Walking the Watershed invites participants to embody the infrastructure that brings water to New York City. In one activity, Performing Infrastructure, people take on the roles of reservoirs, aqueducts, pipes, trees, and faucets. They move and sound like water: trickling, gurgling, rushing. It’s playful and transformative. You become the system. You feel its connections, its fragility, its reliance on every part moving in concert. It's not a lesson. It's a sensation.
Participants in the workshop Performing Infrastructure. Lize Mogel.
Elements of New York City’s watershed at Onsite Gallery installation 2018.
This embodied approach to knowledge represents a deeper form of reconnection. To engage, not just intellectually but physically with the systems that sustain us, is to begin dissolving the boundary between self and environment.
This shift, from knowing to embodying, is happening in many places and in different forms. In Melbourne, ‘walkshops’ along the Birrarung River transform strolling into ecological awareness. In Kyoto, a citizen-participatory collective equips people to design their own tools for observing nature. In Barcelona, design students in the master’s program I direct collaborate directly with ecosystems, using design as a form of ecological dialogue.
Design students in the Master of Strategic Design at Elisava School of Design and Engineering Barcelona create a public exhibition prompting visitors to reflect on their relationship with water- in the form of postcards and sms chats.
That same spirit is emerging in music. Cosmo Sheldrake, a UK-based multi-instrumentalist, producer, composer, live improviser, and field recordist…you read that correctly “..and field recordist”, creates what some call “interspecies collaborations”.
Weaving the songs of endangered birds, the bioelectric pulses of fungi, and the rush of local rivers to create a truly polyphonic performance. Imagine being in a dimly lit venue with friends, swaying to music that blends folklore with science — one song about moss, another about becoming soil — and leaving with new knowledge lodged not only in your head, but in your body.
The Moss, by Cosmo Sheldrake
Legend has it that
the moss grows on
The north side of the trees
Well, legend has it
when the rains come down
All the worms come up to breathe
Well, legend has it when the sunbeams come
All the plants, they eat them with their leaves
Well, legend has it that the world spins round
On an axis of twenty-three degrees
Soil, by Cosmo Sheldrake ft. Nature
I wanna go downwards
I wanna be ground
I wanna be fed on
I wanna break down
I wanna be all gone
I wanna be food
I wanna be walked on
I wanna be soil
I wanna be soil
I wanna be sound
I wanna hold secrets
That will never be found
I wanna be soil
Live upside down
But it will never get lonely
With everyone round
In a way, Sheldrake’s concerts already hint at a new kind of performance, one where nature is not just a subject, but a co-star. I imagine it’s only a matter of time before we see a New York Broadway musical in the style of Hamilton, but instead of hip-hopping through the conquests of European and American white men told via a cast of people of colour, we get a psychedelic sing-along told from the perspective of fungi, plants, and whales.
If we are to reconnect with nature, we must do more than study it. We must feel it, sing it, and dance with it.
The Story of Reconnection
One way we might reconnect is to begin with questions. Like Peter Berg asking, where does your water come from, and where does it go? inviting us to trace the river on a map, walk its banks, and stand at the estuaries. Perhaps it’s about listening with a different kind of attention and perspective as Cosmo Sheldrake asks in Does The Swallow Dream of Flying:
Does the Swallow Dream of Flying, by Cosmo Sheldrake
Does the swallow dream of flying
As it sleeps on the wing
Does it long for the summer
As it flies home for spring
Does daisy feel a sadness
At the last rays of sun
Does the wind feel a gladness
At the work that it’s done
Does the river ever wonder
What will come 'round the bend?
As it twists and meanders
Down its slow descent
By Toban Shadlyn
Written from Barcelona, sandwiched between the watersheds of the Besòs and Llobregat Rivers, the mediterranean sea and the Collserola mountain range.
Thank you to the many people who read, edited, and inspired this piece: Arielle Permack, Sebastian Tirlui, Tim Rodenbroeker, Blasius Walch, Prateek Shankar, Arden Mathieson, and Jenny Andersson (Really Regenerative).
Footnotes
1 Title inspired by Cosmo Sheldrake's song “Soil ft. Nature”
2 In Graeber and Wengrow’s book “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity”, they challenge the dominant story of deep history, one that flows neatly from hunter gatherers to industrial revolution. Highlighting new archaeological evidence over the past few decades they suggest tells a different story. Instead, they portray prehistory as an era of rich social diversity, where communities ranged from nomadic bands to large, sometimes seasonal cities, and people shifted their social roles and structures throughout the year.
3 Native Land Digital is an Indigenous-led not-for-profit organization based in Canada. The platform maps Indigenous territories, supported by Indigenous and non-indigenous advisors, academics and experts in mapping, GIS, Indigenous governance, and community engagement.
4 For more on bioregionalism, listen to the podcast episode “Reconnecting to Place for Planetary Health” on the Great Simplification hosted by Nate Hagens in conversation with Daniel Christian Wahl
5 To learn more about the history of the Colorado River, watch the PBS docuseries. What happened to the once lush, now desert-like Colorado River Delta? (Season 2, Episode 5) [Video]. PBS. 2024
6 From the podcast Frontiers of Commoning, hosted by David Bollier, in conversation with Thomas Linzey, July 1, 2023. https://www.bollier.org/files/misc-file-upload/files/Thomas_Linzey_transcript_Episode_40.pdf
7 Although the Magpie River sets a promising precedent, it does not signal that all developments in Canada follow this path. For example, in Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia (2017), the Supreme Court allowed ski resort development on sacred land despite Indigenous opposition.
1 Title inspired by Cosmo Sheldrake's song “Soil ft. Nature”
2 In Graeber and Wengrow’s book “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity”, they challenge the dominant story of deep history, one that flows neatly from hunter gatherers to industrial revolution. Highlighting new archaeological evidence over the past few decades they suggest tells a different story. Instead, they portray prehistory as an era of rich social diversity, where communities ranged from nomadic bands to large, sometimes seasonal cities, and people shifted their social roles and structures throughout the year.
3 Native Land Digital is an Indigenous-led not-for-profit organization based in Canada. The platform maps Indigenous territories, supported by Indigenous and non-indigenous advisors, academics and experts in mapping, GIS, Indigenous governance, and community engagement.
4 For more on bioregionalism, listen to the podcast episode “Reconnecting to Place for Planetary Health” on the Great Simplification hosted by Nate Hagens in conversation with Daniel Christian Wahl
5 To learn more about the history of the Colorado River, watch the PBS docuseries. What happened to the once lush, now desert-like Colorado River Delta? (Season 2, Episode 5) [Video]. PBS. 2024
6 From the podcast Frontiers of Commoning, hosted by David Bollier, in conversation with Thomas Linzey, July 1, 2023. https://www.bollier.org/files/misc-file-upload/files/Thomas_Linzey_transcript_Episode_40.pdf
7 Although the Magpie River sets a promising precedent, it does not signal that all developments in Canada follow this path. For example, in Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia (2017), the Supreme Court allowed ski resort development on sacred land despite Indigenous opposition.
References
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Sheldrake, C. (2024). Soil (feat. Nature) [Song]. Tardigrade Records.
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Tarr, R. S., & McMurry, F. M. (1910). New geographies (2nd ed.). The Macmillan Company.
The New York Times. (2023, January 27). Biden administration moves to cut Colorado River water use. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/27/climate/colorado-river-biden-cuts.html
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. (1922). Colorado River Compact. https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/pao/pdfiles/crcompct.pdf
Warner, B. (2024, June 17). This Ecuadorian forest thrived amid deforestation after being granted legal rights. BBC Future. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240614-how-los-cedros-forest-in-ecuador-was-granted-legal-personhood
Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human world. Pantheon Books.
Berg, P. (n.d.). Talk by Peter Berg at Watershed: Writers, Nature and Community. Planet Drum Foundation. https://planetdrum.org/talk-by-peter-berg-at-watershed-writers-nature-and-community/
Bioregional Learning Centre. (n.d.). River charter for the Dart at Dartington. https://www.bioregion.org.uk/projects/river-charter-for-the-dart-at-dartington
City of New York Parks & Recreation. (n.d.). NYC Street Tree Map. https://tree-map.nycgovparks.org
CLIMAVORE. (n.d.). Sicilia & Puglia | CLIMAVORE. Retrieved August 11, 2025, from CLIMAVORE website: https://www.climavore.org/stations/sicilia-puglia
Curiosoil. (n.d.). Curiosoil: Soil health intelligence for a sustainable Europe. https://curiosoil.eu
Giess den Kiez. (n.d.). Berlin tree map. https://www.giessdenkiez.de/map?lang=en&lat=52.494590307846366&lng=13.388836926491992&treeAgeMax=200
Gorvett, Z. (2020, March 19). The New Zealand river that became a legal person. BBC Travel. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20200319-the-new-zealand-river-that-became-a-legal-person
Jain, A. (2023, October 17). Radical design for a world in crisis. Noema. https://www.noemamag.com/radical-design-for-a-world-in-crisis/
Linzey, T. (2023, July 1). Frontiers of commoning with Thomas Linzey [Interview transcript]. Bollier.org. https://www.bollier.org/files/misc-file-upload/files/Thomas_Linzey_transcript_Episode_40.pdf
Machado de Oliveira, V. (2021). Hospicing modernity: Facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism. North Atlantic Books.
Macy, J. (n.d.). Joanna Macy and the Great Turning. Films for the Planet. https://filmsfortheplanet.com/joanna-macy-and-the-great-turning/#:~:text=Joanna%20Macy%20and%20the%20Great%20Turning%20refer%20to%20a%20societal,both%20spiritual%20and%20scientific%20perspectives
Middleton, N. (2024, February 14). Meet Te Urewera, the New Zealand rainforest that has legal personhood. Orion Magazine. https://orionmagazine.org/article/te-urewera-rainforest-new-zealand-legal-entity/
Mogel, L. (n.d.). Walking the watershed. http://www.walkingthewatershed.com/
Mogel, L. (n.d.). Watershed. Public Green. http://www.publicgreen.com/projects/watershed.html
Municipalité régionale de comté de Minganie. (2021, February 16). Résolution n° 025‑21 : Reconnaissance de la personnalité juridique et des droits de la rivière Magpie – Mutehekau Shipu [PDF]. United Nations Harmony with Nature. http://files.harmonywithnatureun.org/uploads/upload1069.pdf
Museu d’Història de Barcelona. (n.d.). Carta Històrica de Barcelona. Ajuntament de Barcelona. Retrieved August 12, 2025, from https://www.barcelona.cat/museuhistoria/cartahistorica/
Nerberg, S. (2022, April 8). I am Mutehekau Shipu: A river’s journey to personhood in eastern Quebec. Canadian Geographic. Retrieved August 11, 2025, from https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/i-am-mutehekau-shipu-a-rivers-journey-to-personhood-in-eastern-quebec/
Observatory for Urban Ecologies. (n.d.). Home. https://observatoryforurbanecologies.studio.site
PBS. (2024). What happened to the once lush, now desert-like Colorado River Delta? (Season 2, Episode 5) [Video]. PBS. https://www.pbs.org/video/what-happened-to-the-once-lush-now-desert-like-colorado-river-delta-bruvka/
Powell, J. W. (1891). Eleventh annual report of the United States Geological Survey to the Secretary of the Interior, 1889–1890, Part 2: Irrigation. U.S. Government Printing Office. https://pubs.usgs.gov/ar/11-2/report.pdf
RiverFest. (n.d.). RiverFest – Celebrating culture, country, and community. https://www.riverfest.org.au
Ross, J. F. (2018, July 3). The visionary John Wesley Powell had a plan for developing the West, but nobody listened. Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/visionary-john-wesley-powell-had-plan-developing-west-nobody-listened-180969182/
Royal College of Art. (2025, May 21). Seeds of Change: Reviving ancient wisdom to address the climate crisis. Retrieved August 11, 2025, from Royal College of Art website: https://www.rca.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/seeds-of-change-ancient-wisdom-climate-crisis/
Savage, N. (2024, December 10). Will artificial intelligence let us talk to the animals? Nature. https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-024-04050-5/index.html
Serres, M. (1990). The natural contract (E. MacArthur & W. Paulson, Trans.). University of Michigan Press.
Sheldrake, C. (2014). The moss [Song]. Tardigrade Records.
Sheldrake, C. (2024). Does the swallow dream of flying? [Song]. On Eye to the Ear [Album]. Tardigrade Records.
Sheldrake, C. (2024). Soil (feat. Nature) [Song]. Tardigrade Records.
Shadlyn, T. (n.d.). Watershed moments. https://tobanshadlyn.com/Watershed-Moments
Tarr, R. S., & McMurry, F. M. (1910). New geographies (2nd ed.). The Macmillan Company.
The New York Times. (2023, January 27). Biden administration moves to cut Colorado River water use. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/27/climate/colorado-river-biden-cuts.html
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. (1922). Colorado River Compact. https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/pao/pdfiles/crcompct.pdf
Warner, B. (2024, June 17). This Ecuadorian forest thrived amid deforestation after being granted legal rights. BBC Future. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240614-how-los-cedros-forest-in-ecuador-was-granted-legal-personhood
Index