"Mihnea Tănăsescu's “Ecocene” framing (you can read his open-source book here) fruitfully invites us beyond the stale anthropocentrisms inherited from the industrial logic of modernity—logics rooted in the Cartesian fantasy of a human subject standing above and apart from a mute, mechanistic nature. But he also warns against the opposite extreme—what could be called misanthropocentrism—a reversal in which the human remains at the center, now as a uniquely malignant disruptor of an otherwise perfect planet. This is a familiar trope in some strands of environmental discourse: “if only humans didn’t interfere, nature would remain in harmonious balance.” Yet as Tănăsescu argues, this too reinstates the human as exceptional—not as steward but as saboteur—reinscribing the very wound it seeks to heal.

Such views not only essentialize Nature as a timeless steady-state, but cast the human as somehow unnatural, a fall from ecological grace rather than a Gaian creature emergent from earth evolution. From the perspective of autopoietic biology and enactive cognition, there is no pre-given, pristine world out there awaiting our retreat or restoration. Rather, organisms—including humans—are co-creators of their worlds through dynamic structural coupling. Gaia, as Lovelock and Margulis have shown, is not a passive backdrop but a co-evolving semiotic field of reciprocal influence, an “ecopoietic” network within which the human is always already entangled.

Tănăsescu’s critique of ecotheology is instructive. He warns against the tendency to exalt humanity as either nature’s guardian or her consciousness incarnate—roles that, however sanctified, still unduly pedestalize the human. But there is an alternative to both dominion and disavowal. Process theology offers a way to affirm our unique capacities without imposing a hierarchy upon the rest of life. It invites us to think of the human not as a fixed type, but as a relational becoming whose meaning is not given in advance but co-created through our participatory knowing and doing.

There is a difference, then, between anthropomorphism—the projection of ourselves onto the nonhuman, rendering the whole cosmos our vanity mirror—and what I’ll call anthropometamorphism: a recognition of our capacity to be transformed by the more-than-human, to become with and through what is beyond us. We need not shatter the mirror but must step through it into alchemical mixture. The human, in this reframing, is not a detached prospector measuring matter by application of a universal grid, but a protean participant in the plural meshworks of Momma Mundi—a creative creature whose language and consciousness may become Gaia’s way of telling her own story.

Anthropometamorphism resonates with Tănăsescu's reframing of vulnerability as a source of power (EP 77-78):

“…vulnerability is a feature of lively existence in the same way that multiplicity and variability are. In this sense, vulnerability cannot be construed as merely a lack, which has been the usual way of presenting it in political thinking. The vulnerable is not lacking something, but rather any being participates in the fact of vulnerability as an openness to change. This is what I call constitutive vulnerability, which is a power, the power to be changed and therefore to endure through change. Adaptability in general is not a willful process, but rather a blind search whose very condition is vulnerability, that is to say creaturely openness towards the tribulations of the world.

Vulnerability is too often associated with powerlessness of some kind, and therefore is investigated through either passivity or harm. I don’t mean to deny those senses of the word. However, they do not exhaust the concept. An ecological view of vulnerability reveals it as the condition of possibility of change and successful adaptation. In this sense, the vulnerable are the more powerful because, in being open to new relationships, they can also survive changing environments. The idea of an ideal fit between organism and world (nativism) infects thinking to the point where it becomes hard to recognize that being slightly out-of-synch is what has allowed, and continues to allow, a multiplicity of forms of life to flourish. The opposite of vulnerability is not power or strength; it is rigidity. In this ontological sense, the chances of creaturely endurance are directly proportional to how vulnerable the creature is, in the sense of how structurally open towards new possibilities that natural variability may offer.”

Tănăsescu's reframing of vulnerability as power is probably my favorite idea from his book. It allows us to feel the world's pain, and our own pain, as the outer and inner folds of the very evolutionary process that created us.

Vulnerability as power is a key reconceptualization stemming from a process-relational re-orientation. The modern mindset has reified power into an uninvolved spectator's domination of what is known only in abstraction, whether nature reduced to inert particles and fixed laws or politics reduced to docile voters electing distant representatives. So afraid of failure, we tried to make ourselves invulnerable to it by our insulation from the concrete consequences of one-size fits all "solutions." So long as the metrics used to gauge success remain as abstract as the means imposed to achieve it, the gap between idea and reality remains unnoticed (at least by those lucky enough to be insulated from the concrete consequences).

May our wounds open us to other ways of worlding".

M.Segall