Composing Ecological Attention: Artistic Interventions into Human Psychology and Peatland Ecosystems

Within the broader theme of artistic research and climate justice, this doctoral project investigates how artistic research may create new ways of attending to, negotiating, and imagining the futures of peatlands. It takes as its starting point the notion of “composing” ecological attention, where attention is not only part of an individual’s cognitive capacities but is something shaped through relationships with environments, technologies, stories, and cultural practices. What gestures, encounters, or narratives enable people to engage with ecosystems in a somatic (and not just an intellectual) sense and to relate to them as living, interdependent entities rather than passive resources? “Composing” is the senseful, ongoing cultivation of these relationships between one’s sensing body and the space one moves through, to shape what becomes perceptible, meaningful, and worthy of care. It is the process of engaging an individual’s embodied sensations and cosmological meaning-making systems toward a greater sense of connectedness with an ecosystem.

This project specifically investigates relationships between humans and peatlands. Peatlands are among the world's most important carbon-storing ecosystems, yet centuries of drainage, extraction, and land conversion have severely degraded them, particularly in the Netherlands. Their restoration is essential for climate mitigation and biodiversity, but it also raises difficult questions about land use, livelihoods, and competing human and more-than-human needs. Who benefits from restoration, who bears its costs, and whose interests are considered in decisions about the future of these landscapes?

By bringing artistic practice into dialogue with peatland science and restoration, this project also investigates how composing ecological attention might contribute to approaches to ecological transitions that take into account the significant transitions in human consciousness and culture that are necessary. However, rather than assuming a stronger sense of connection to an ecosystem will necessarily lead to more just outcomes, this project will also examine the limits of artistic practice in making ecological interdependence felt and personally known, acknowledging the difficulties introduced by conflicting interests and unequal power relations. In this sense, this is where this artistic practice comes into conversation and collaboration with other fields, such as ecological restoration, environmental psychology, and, ideally, policy-making.