The Land Remembers: On Trauma, Sentience, and the Limits of Our Solutions

We are, as a species, wired to solve problems.

Beneath every structure we have built, every treaty we have signed, every algorithm we have trained, sits the same restless engine: the search for a kind of paradise, not necessarily a place, but a state, an existence unburdened by lack. This searching manifests in different ways. It is the reason some of us pray, or work ourselves to the bone, or overindulge in whatever pleasure is for us. It is the reason we reach for the bottle, the pill, the swipe, the purchase. It is the reason modernity has been so successful at convincing us that money is not merely a tool but a destination, that enough of it might finally deliver the peace we have been chasing since we were capable of understanding the concept of happiness.

Psychologists have a name for part of this: the hedonic treadmill, our tendency to adapt to whatever gain we’ve made and reset almost immediately to wanting more, so that the finish line keeps receding at exactly the pace we run toward it.

Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death, went further still, arguing that most of human culture; our ambitions, our vanities, our institutions, is a defence we construct against the unbearable knowledge of our own mortality, a way of building something that outlasts us so the terror of ending might feel smaller. Whatever name we give it, the pattern holds: we are creatures in perpetual pursuit of a better elsewhere.

Almost everything we call civilisation is the residue of a problem someone insisted on solving.

And to our credit, this pursuit has produced extraordinary things. Almost everything we call civilisation is the residue of a problem someone insisted on solving. Which is what makes our present moment so strange, so almost absurd: we are, by most measures, the most knowledgeable version of ourselves that has ever existed, and yet we are losing, decisively, to the largest problem we have ever faced. We are destroying the planet at an increasing rate, and we know exactly where the issues lie. We have known for decades. We have the models, the data, the summits, the accords, the technology to decarbonise, to regenerate, to repair. We have entire academic disciplines and international institutions built solely around the ecological crisis; around the dying of forests, the acidifying of oceans, the erasure of species at a rate unseen since the last extinction event. And still, the trajectory does not bend.

Some of this is not mysterious at all: political inertia is real, and the imperatives of capitalist extraction do not yield to good intentions. Not all of us are complicit in the same way, and there are those who have spent their lives working against this current rather than with it. But taken as a civilisation, the pattern is undeniable: we are a species that solves everything except the thing that is killing us. That should trouble us more than it does.

I want to suggest that this is not a failure of intelligence, but a failure of orientation and ontology.

Modernity did not simply industrialise; it re-narrated what being human is. It gave us a self that is separate from nature rather than woven into it, an individual driven by personal gain rather than community, a notion of land as inert resource rather than kin, and a definition of progress that is functionally indistinguishable from rapacity and exploitation. Colonialism was this worldview’s most literal expression. It took land that belonged to communities and called it private property, took human beings and called them objects of labour. Capitalism generalised the logic, reorganising nearly every human relationship, even love, even meaning, around the calculus of the market. Industrialisation gave that logic a machine. And the economic systems we inherited from all of this still measure success almost exclusively through perpetual growth, largely indifferent to older questions of sufficiency, of reciprocity, of what, exactly, we are all accumulating for. We should not, then, be surprised that a civilisation built on a foundational misunderstanding of our place in the community of life has produced a planet in crisis. We built the world in the image of that misunderstanding. It is behaving exactly as designed.

And here is the peculiar, almost embarrassing pattern that emerges when you go further: science does not so much discover new knowledge about the natural world as it catches up to what these traditions already knew.

So, what do we do with a civilisational error this deep?

I don’t think the answer is more of the same instrument, sharpened further. I think it requires reaching for wisdom that modernity spent five centuries trying to discredit: the traditional ecological knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples across the world, systems modernity dismissed as primitive precisely because they refused the separations modernity depends on. And here is the peculiar, almost embarrassing pattern that emerges when you go further: science does not so much discover new knowledge about the natural world as it catches up to what these traditions already knew.

Aboriginal Australian oral traditions describing coastlines that no longer exist have been cross-checked against sea-level data and found to accurately preserve memory of flooding events that occurred seven thousand years ago and more, meaning some of these stories have been transmitted with recognisable fidelity for several hundred generations, in direct contradiction of the old Western assumption that oral memory degrades into fantasy within a few lifetimes.

More instances can be found with the Gunditjmara people of what is now Victoria, Australia, who built the Budj Bim eel-trap system consisting of channels, weirs, and ponds engineered into volcanic rock to farm eels year-round. Radiocarbon dating has confirmed the system is at least 6,600 years old, older than the pyramids, older than Mesopotamian irrigation, only recently recognised by archaeology as genuine hydraulic engineering rather than passive fishing.

In the Amazon, Indigenous communities deliberately engineered a form of dark, carbon-rich soil called terra preta, which remains fertile centuries later without added fertiliser. Western soil science is only now studying it seriously, and it has become the direct inspiration for biochar, one of the more promising tools we currently have for agricultural carbon sequestration. Case after case, the pattern repeats: knowledge dismissed as folklore turns out to be empirical science, arrived at through a method modernity has no comprehension of. It is knowledge generated through years of sustained, reciprocal relationship with a place, rather than the extractive practices we’ve seen with the advent of modernity.

It is against this backdrop that I want to take seriously one of the more contested ideas held across many of these knowledge systems: that the land is not inert. That it is a being. A subject, rather than an object. It is something with which we are in relationship, rather than something we simply stand upon and take from. This is not an idea foreign to the Western tradition either. Christian theology has long described creation itself as a kind of groaning, suffering subject, awaiting release from its bondage alongside humanity.

This language treats the earth as something capable of experience, not simply a stage on which human drama occurs. And in contemporary philosophy, the same intuition is being reconstructed from entirely different starting points: Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy argues that reality is made not of static, dead matter but of interlocking events of experience. That is, that the universe, all the way down, is a fabric of feeling in varying degrees of intensity, not a machine with consciousness switched on only in brains. Independent traditions arriving at structurally similar conclusions is not proof. But it is, at minimum, evidence that this idea deserves better than the reflexive dismissal we have trained ourselves to give it.

What does it mean to live upon land that has been so grievously wounded and has never been permitted to heal?

I am not asking anyone to believe this literally before they are ready to. I am asking what becomes possible if we act, provisionally, as though it might be true.

Because here is what I think we miss when we insist the land is only ever a backdrop: if the land is a sentient being, if it shares even a fraction of what we recognise in ourselves as capacity for experience, for registering trauma and abuse, then what are the implications of centuries of extraction and violence enacted upon it? What does it mean to live upon land that has been so grievously wounded and has never been permitted to heal? I think of the African continent specifically here, though the logic extends wherever colonial extraction touched the soil. We have inherited entire theoretical frameworks for understanding how colonial violence lodges itself in the psyche of the colonised.

Frantz Fanon built much of his life’s work around exactly this, and Achille Mbembe has written at length about how the afterlife of that violence continues to organise power, bodies, and death across the postcolony long after the coloniser has formally departed. We have accepted, in other words, that violence done to people leaves a residue that outlives the violence itself. I am asking why we resist extending that same logic to the land the violence was committed upon. Perhaps the extraction, the mining, the deforestation, the centuries of treating soil as nothing but a means to profit, did not simply alter ecosystems. Perhaps it wounded something more profound, whatever would equate to the land’s soul. And perhaps what we are calling ecological crisis, political failure, economic stagnation, cyclical conflict… The entire catalogue of what gets labelled “the state of the global south”, is in some part we have not permitted ourselves to consider, the visible symptom of land that has never been allowed to heal and recover.

If that is even partially true, the implications could be far-reaching, because it means our solutions have been aimed at the wrong register entirely. We keep reaching for policy, for industrial development, for the next technological leap, as though the wound were administrative or limited to human      beings. Perhaps what is required instead sits closer to what these very knowledge systems have been telling us all along: that the land needs to be cleansed. That it needs to be prayed for. That perhaps it requires nothing more complicated than finally being seen for what it is, and treated with love, patience, and respect, rather than as the next site to be developed into whatever next ‘unnecessity’ we think we need.

None of this is an argument against science, or against policy, or against the slow, necessary work of institutions. It is an argument that these tools, alone, have proven insufficient to the scale of what we are facing, and that we have spent long enough treating spiritual and Indigenous ontologies as decoration for movements that are, in truth, structurally uninterested in changing anything.

Interestingly, Nepal has been among the countries increasingly willing to take Indigenous and local knowledge seriously within its approach to climate resilience. Highly vulnerable to climate-related hazards including floods, landslides, erratic rainfall and glacial hazards, Nepal has recognised, at least in its policy frameworks, that a response to ecological crisis which disregards the knowledge of the communities most intimately connected to its landscapes would be inadequate. Indigenous communities have lived in relationship with these mountains, rivers and valleys across generations, developing forms of knowledge inseparable from long observation, memory and, often, spiritual relationship with place.

If these ways of seeing helped produce the crisis, then surely we must be willing to look beyond them for ways of understanding—and repairing—our relationship with the earth.

A 2015 report from Nepal’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment formally documented Indigenous and local knowledge as a resource for climate resilience. More recently, UNESCO’s Heritage Emergency Fund launched a project to document the ancestral knowledge of the Sherpa community of Thame. In the Rolwaling Valley, Sherpa communities have long regarded Tsho Rolpa, one of Nepal’s most dangerous glacial lakes, as sacred, offering pujas, prayers and rituals in relation to the lake and the mountain that holds it. Here, the landscape is not encountered solely through the language of risk management. It is held within a relationship of reverence.

This is one small instance of something Indigenous communities across the world have sustained for generations: a daily, embodied relationship with particular lands and waters, understood not simply as resources to be exploited, but as something closer to kin; something capable of being honoured, respected and, in some traditions, offended. Research suggests that culturally and spiritually embedded relationships with particular landscapes can shape risk perception, collective responses and capacities for coping with environmental hazards.

This does not mean such a relationship could have predicted every catastrophe. The recent disaster on Nepal’s northern frontier is testament to that. In August 2026, a catastrophic collapse near Langtang Lirung sent a devastating flood through Himalayan settlements, killing hundreds and leaving well over a thousand people missing. It was an event whose precise occurrence could not simply be foretold through either ancestral knowledge or scientific prediction.

But this is precisely why powerful institutions should resist epistemic arrogance. In conditions of increasing ecological uncertainty, we cannot afford to decide in advance which systems of knowledge are worthy of attention and which are not. Nor can we continue subscribing unquestioningly to the same ontologies and ways of thinking that helped produce the environmental catastrophe in which we now find ourselves.

Modernity’s separation of human beings from the rest of the living world, its reduction of land to property and resource, and its faith in endless extraction and accumulation cannot simply remain the unquestioned ground from which we imagine our solutions. If these ways of seeing helped produce the crisis, then surely we must be willing to look beyond them for ways of understanding—and repairing—our relationship with the earth. If we are serious, if we are genuinely and materially serious about ecological and social repair, and not simply performing the aesthetics of care for oppressed peoples and a dying planet, we will need to risk taking seriously the parts of these knowledge systems that make us uncomfortable.