There was always a world beyond the one we inhabited, a realm beyond the human, and it was always possible to bring new worlds into being. Water reminds me of this in the most eloquent way. For as many billions of years as water has rebuilt the world—slow or fast, vast or slight, rising from below or descending from above, hidden or exposed—it has shaped everything it touches and been reshaped just as profoundly. Finding new paths one way or another, water reaches the most fluid recesses of the human mind; it gathers the human body in its current and carries it toward other worlds. The gift of water that most soothes me lies in its fluidity.

To reshape all kinds of formations, to allow itself to be shaped by all kinds of formations, to offer space for rethinking... In this sense, water carved a path into my body through a small hollow, “pouring coolness into my heart.” Guided by this reminder, I shape and am shaped in return. The transformative force I find in water’s fluidity becomes a way to imagine other worlds, a way to give them voice.

The Anthropocene holds up a mirror to a world carved by the thick lines of human-centered myths and binaries. It names a narrative in which nature and culture are set apart, where the human and the more-than-human are arranged hierarchically. Yet this narrative is now being unsettled, for so many recent works show us another kind of world-building, one that questions human exceptionalism. This emerging world imagines a terrain of co-becoming, of plural existences.

For centuries, every kind of non-human—or every human deemed not “human enough” by the system—was marked, examined, categorized, and objectified as “other.” This construction of otherness has sat at the core of gender studies or the environmental humanities. As Greta Gaard notes, the patriarchal gaze erected sharp walls between subject and other: it feminized or animalized “the others,” rendering their subordination “natural.”1

Ecofeminism, however, opens another doorway for me. It makes visible the unseen ties between the human and the more-than-human, pointing to the unbreakable textures of relationality, interdependence, and entanglement. Its greatest legacy lies in extending this relational thinking to systems of domination. Those who bear the weight of racial, gendered, and class-based inequalities suffer far deeper harm from environmental crises, because the structures of domination grow from the same root: the logic of “conquering” nature proceeds hand in hand with the logic of subjugating bodies, ideologies, and communities. It is for this reason that the pursuit of justice cannot be thought apart from ecology.

Ecofeminist thinking reminds us, through the historical experiences of women and through the wisdom carried by Indigenous communities, that these inequalities, hierarchies, and modes of knowledge production must be questioned. Knowledge forms cast “outside” the accepted canon have contributed immensely to environmental thinking, even if often pushed into the background. Ecofeminism makes clear how vital it is—both theoretically and ethically—not to overlook this inheritance.

As these bonds come into view, the human–nature binary starts to fracture. Water flows through the cracks, and the truth emerges, in all its weight, that every human act transforms not only the environment but one another.

At this point, I lean into ecofeminism and encounter “multispecies studies.”2 The idea of relationality finds another grounding here. Animals, plants, fungi, and microorganisms are no longer the backdrop of human history; they emerge as world-making agents in their own right. In this way, the fluid bonds between human, animal, plant, and countless others gain renewed recognition and value. The human ceases to be a singular center, becoming instead a knot within plural relations. The possibility of other kinds of worlds—coexisting, co-transforming—deepens.

The Chthulucene is precisely the threshold opening onto such worlds. Against the Anthropocene’s familiar narratives of catastrophe, it proposes the possibility of “a world not yet finished.” As Donna Haraway reminds us, the sky has not yet fallen; stories of plural existences and co-becomings are still being woven. The Chthulucene softens the lines that place the human at the center, pointing instead to a mesh in which human and animal, plant and fungus, technology and soil are intricately entangled.3

In contrast to the Anthropocene’s threatening and bleak stories, the Chthulucene makes shared life possible, drawing water from the soil and allowing us to flourish together. Relations between human and more-than-human cease to be defined by domination; they become practices of mutual transformation, of living side by side. As ecofeminism sensed long ago, no being exists in isolation; each survives through the breath and the water of others.

Haraway leaves before us a quiet possibility: “to be otherwise.” This also hints at a way of being that comes into contact with multispecies others; it gestures toward forms of justice imagined not only for humans but for all earthly beings. The Chthulucene’s strength lies in dethroning the human as a singular subject and turning them into a knot of interspecies relations. In this way, not only “nature” transforms, we do too, and worlds sustained together become possible.

I pass through the sieve of Indigenous knowledge, ecofeminism, posthumanism, multispecies thinking in the Anthropocene, and every perspective that unsettles my sense of place in the world. The revolutions in our understandings of human and more-than-human relations, and the worlds they bring into being, set me in motion.

A multispecies ecofeminist perspective loosens the rigid boundaries drawn between human and more-than-human. Recognizing other species as subjects calls us not to dominate nature but to live with it. This call reshapes our understanding of responsibility from its very foundations. Responsibility is no longer tied solely to human decisions and actions; instead, it becomes a flow that arises from within interspecies relations.

The “ethnographic storytelling” developed by Van Dooren and Rose situates itself within this flow as a method in which narrative intertwines with witnessing. Story becomes an invitation to hear every being’s response and, together with those responses, to build new worlds. The term they use, “response-ability,” signals not only the capacity to respond, but also a sensitivity that opens space for every voice and every breath to reweave the world. Responsibility then becomes entwined with the ability to respond, no longer a one-directional, human-centered obligation but a shared practice of living alongside one another.4

As Van Dooren and Rose remind us, storytelling itself is an art of witnessing: listening to the life we share with other species, giving voice to that experience, and opening it in ways that allow others to feel it too. When witnessing is understood not as a passive stance but as an active practice—one that calls others into witnessing and draws them into the world of co-becoming—every narrative becomes a bridge that expands our capacity to respond.5

I draw on this practice whenever I observe my surroundings and find myself in a state of witnessing. I search for connections that recompose the sounds, textures, and images that emerge from these acts of witnessing. I quietly reconstruct for myself the stones carved over centuries, the mountains whose paths I learned by walking, the river flowing quietly, the sheep drinking water, the goats rushing past me, the stork whose wingspan I noticed for the first time, the tiny rabbit hopping on two legs with its reddish-brown fur, the puffball mushroom scattering its spores, and all the other beings that surface in my mind. In this sense, response-ability becomes both a search and an answer for me. While it recalls responsibility, it also mobilizes my capacity to respond. It shows my body, so often defeated by climate anxiety, that another world is always possible, simply by bearing witness.

***

Hold me accountable for the cruel world
and I hold a glimpse of you
Long enough to bend the smooth extensions of my knuckles
Chemical, used to be sunburnt, plastic-covered papers
Your voices echoing on the bones of the unknown
and the warmth of your hearts in my hand
Once I deemed it inhuman
and very much human
Touching on my feelings
A lover to my poor perception
and I am in despair
Hold me accountable for the cruel world
and I will tell you many stories
and your stories to
a stranger I met

Time passes by
faint to my ears
Having to love at a distance and
loving to have you in distance
Hold me accountable for the cruel world
and I will sit by your side
to tell you stories
and your stories to
myself over and over again