Landscape as Lover: Ecosexuality

Entangled with the words of Sophie Strand, whose chapter “Landscape as Lover: Ecosexuality and Queer Ecology” from The Body is a Doorway (2025) laid the roots for this reflection.

Fraught relationships. Unmet desires. Love and romance laced with pain. I’ve known all of it.

After graduating as a psychologist over a decade ago, I threw myself into addiction treatment work. Burnout came quickly. My personal life unravelled alongside it, culminating in a difficult hospitalisation in 2019. In the fallout, I left my home, my relationship, and a conventional life path. I moved into the van I’d been slowly converting — and began a journey into vanlife.

Life on the road is not glamorous. It's challenging, lonely at times, relentlessly real. But it brought me closer to the earth, and eventually to myself. I stopped seeking fulfilment through human romance and turned instead toward wild places — landscapes that received all of me without judgment.

Each hour spent alone in nature felt vital. I began to feel courted by the more-than-human world.

Ecosexuality helped me name this shift: Rather than seeing nature as backdrop or resource, ecosexuality invites us to experience the Earth as a lover — a living, breathing being with whom we are in intimate, erotic relationship. It’s not about literal sex with trees or rivers. It’s about a radical re-imagining of intimacy: a love affair with wind, rain, mountains, moss.

As I let go of societal scripts about how love "should" look, a deeper, queerer form of connection began to emerge — a union not based in ownership or exclusivity, but in presence, gratitude, and mutual becoming.

Part two will explore how this led me to queer ecology, and why it matters for healing.