Dear Friends and all who believe in sharing knowledge for the common good,

I am reaching out to ask for your support in making my upcoming article freely accessible to everyone. The paper, "Feeling the Ache of Earth in Our Bones: the Role of Mammalsensing and Sensory Anamnesis in Sustaining Planetary and Human Health" explores how our innate mammalian senses can help us reconnect with the living world and inspire meaningful action to stem escalating ecological and climate disruptions.

It was accepted for publication in the SAGE publications journal Ecopsychology. (A description of the paper's proposal for a new and readily available way to address human-caused climate and ecological destruction is below. )

I was flabbergasted to learn that in order to make this work freely available to everyone under a Creative Commons license, SAGE requires the author (me) to pay an open access publication fee of $3600. Without paying it, the paper will be hidden behind a pay wall of $40-$60 per single digital read and the publisher will retain the copyright, limiting where, when, and how I can share the ideas and restricting public access and use of the ideas and practices without a fee.

I believe that research addressing Planetary Health and climate and ecological crises must belong to everyone. Ideas should circulate freely and inspire action, not be hidden behind corporate paywalls.

As an independent scholar and practitioner, this $3600 fee is beyond my means.

Each and every contribution will help make this work open to all.

Let's keep knowledge a commons, not a commodity.

With gratitude,

Robin Rose Saltonstall, PhD

Full Description of "Feeling the Ache of Earth in Our Bones."

As many of you know, for years I’ve been exploring and teaching about what it means to be alive as one of many togethering on a living planet—to sense ourselves not as separate from Earth, but as participants in the ongoing alchemy of life. Through this work, which I call Living Gaia’s Alchemy, I invite people to remember the intelligence of our senses—to reawaken, and crucially, to trust our "mammalsensing" -- my word for our on-board, innate capacity as human mammal to feel and respond to the living world.

"Feeling the Ache f Earth in Our Bones" proposes an unexplored avenue for addressing human-caused climate and ecological crises; namely, reawakening our full innate human mammalian capacity to sense the multidimensionality and complexity of the living world directly. Our mammalian senses, what I call our "mammalsensing," have developed over millennia in concert with other living beings; they are our first and most intimate way of knowing our world. They constitute our evolved capacity to detect, interpret, act and respond as a living being to the living world around us. It is through mammalsensing that we know when to linger and bask in safe situations and when to exit unsafe ones, to move away from a snarling dog or toward the arms of an approaching loved one, and to eschew the fumes of chemical cleaners or move toward the scent of a flower. Our senses provide the "data" which our cognition uses to 'make sense' of our world. It is well-known now that human mammals sense before “knowing” cognitively. Our sensing is far more than simple instinct, it is the ground upon which we imagine and build our meanings and actions in the living world. I contend that this relationship between sensing and cognitive knowing is both a cause of and a remedy for climate issues. Here's why and how:

In the industrialized west, we've learned to rely almost entirely on sight to know the world. We value "evidence based" data -- namely, information which can be seen, measured, and reported. We commonly say "I see" to indicate "I understand." We have developed myriad technologies to improve our seeing: screens, microscopes, telescopes, and cameras, to name only a few, while simultaneously losing other sensory capacities such as our ability to smell; such that we are now considered "noseblind" to the infochemicals that alert us as mammals to safe or dangerous situations. (The paper provides other examples of our increasing sensory amnesia and outlines how this privileging of sight over our other senses came to be in the West.) We discount information from our non-sighted senses as less reliable and somehow not deserving of the same degree of attention as those things which we observe. How often have you dismissed your felt-sense of something being awry when you taste the dull flavor of an industrially-grown strawberry or hear the silence of vanished birds in the sky and insect-hum in the apple tree in the parking lot? Our over reliance on visual observation has numbed us to our other senses and the information they provide about our surroundment. We have become detached observers within the very ecosystems that provide our sustenance, shelter, sister and brotherhoods. No wonder anxiety is at an all time high. Perhaps this anxiety is a healthy mammalian response to habitat destruction and a felt-sense of UNbelonging? We have learned to discount the very sources of intelligence that evolved to keep us and the ecosystems in which we are embedded alive and thriving.

I argue that we can reclaim this innate diverse sensory intelligence by intentional practices of sensory “anamnesis” — a Greek word for unforgetting, for “remembering what we have forgotten.” (The full paper outlines these practices.) Our mammalsensing has evolved to allow us to fully sense, rather than merely see, Earth’s signals of distress or healthiness. For example, mechanoreceptors in our skin sense the low-frequency tremors of distant machinery, or the stillness that signals ecological quiet; our foot or hand touches the damp sponginess of soil and recognizes it as healthy as opposed to feeling the dis-ease conveyed by brittle drought stricken earth or slick films of chemical residues. Given sensing precedes knowing, mammalsensing provides our cognitive and creative capacities information about the world around us that is far more multifaceted than that provided by sight alone. Through mammalsensing we offer ourselves a far more extensive and complex array of raw data with which to imagine and construct responses to the diversity and intricacy of climate and ecological change. To continue addressing the multifactorial and multidimensional elements of climate issues with sight-based solutions alone is, quite literally, myopic. Effective climate responses require a renewed reliance on our fullest sense of things. Each of our senses offers a unique and particular way of knowing the lived world. It is time to harness all of these onboard intelligences to meet the challenges of human-caused climate and ecological disruption. Will you join me in this effort?