As a Fluminist, I continue to challenge human chauvinism underpinning the Anthropocene; reductionism and homogeneity continue to catalyze schisms and death rather than unity and life.

I call for a purposeful expansion of the human moral imagination and creativity to help close the transilience gap, and my own work is a particular inquiry on love and language as agents of, and for, nurturing education and change inseparable from that richer imagination.

The word creative stems from proto-indo-european ker meaning to arise, to grow. I contend it must be part of the Great Turning (Macy), more the decay of economic growth and the rise of ecological growth. With an ecofeminist eye, and using my own body of work as “narrative scholarship,” I hope to actualize Deleuzian aims of creativity and practicality, opening a new opportunity of rhetorical ‘doing.’ (Miller)

All offers to help define the potential of a new era of life in natural accord, a life of organicism; the Symbiocene (Albrecht).

The word ecosystem itself is a human construct, an abstraction. In reality, there are no absolute boundaries within our one biosphere. The biosphere is the ecosystem (Margulis, Lovelock). The idea conveyed by ecosystem is that there are particular types of unities where different types of organisms persist in time and space. What is inside an ecosystem is internally related to all other things within that system (the holistic, ecocentric view of Naess ~ Deep ecology). Beyond Deep Ecology is an emergent symbiotic view of life (Haraway, Morton) that talks about “tentacles” and “entanglements”. Organisms have boundaries that are more distinct at macro level than ecosystems, yet are nested and entwined.

Post-microbiome discoveries, I conclude we should have a much more porous view of the organism than ever before. The human body (like all others) is a holobiont as it shares a common life with trillions of other organisms in the same time/space. Beyond “entanglement” this view needs to capture the essence of a shared life. We need more than “entangled” or “enmeshed” to overcome the residual Cartesian mechanism and atomism.

I contend flow is unequivocally shared and proliferated by and between all species towards life-love and flourishing. We exist and, with true understanding and demonstrable love as care, we may live a good life to the best of our ability.  We do this in symbiosis, both internally and externally, with many other beings, as do they. If the opposite occurs, flow of life-love is stemmed and, therefore, diversity, resilience and vivacity of life is lost, and we are all depleted.

Since I is really we, all being connected in our one, shared biosphere, the concept of Phronesis must evolve to incorporate traits in all life systems; a love-wisdom. This in the spirit of continuing a stream of non-anthropocentric thought via the discipline of Environmental Ethics since the 1970s. To progress, I also propose we now develop a discipline of Symbioethics, as there really is no such thing as an external ‘environment’.

I think the need for neologisms is justified when present conceptualizations fail to give adequate expression to critical features of life in symbiosis revealed through new and exponential scientific study. Ancient and indigenous cultures may already possess this kind of ‘knowing’. Fluminism and many other of my neologisms are an ecolinguistic response to a mass gap in understanding here in industrialized and community-fractured Britain. As Reuther almost put it: New Earth New Humans. As I put it: New Humans Healing Earth.

There must be a radical new assimilation of our complex relationships on the basis of these scientific discoveries, and critically, new and diverse responses embraced across the arts and humanities. Language and literature are an extension of 21st Century humans, though not exclusively. By naming a new or emerging genre, A Literature of Symbiosis (Sym-lit), however, I hope to focus minds.

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