The worldview that made all of this possible

Anthropocentrism is the philosophical position that places human beings at the center of value — that humans are the measure of all things, that nature has worth insofar as it serves human needs, and that the natural world is, at its core, a resource to be managed, extracted from, and optimized for human prosperity.

This is the dominant operating framework of modern Western civilization embedded in our economic systems, our legal structures, our medical models, our agricultural practices, and our relationship with the living world. Kopnina and colleagues, writing in the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, describe anthropocentrism as “the belief that value is human-centred and that all other beings are means to human ends.”1

It is worth sitting with how completely this worldview has shaped medicine specifically. The body is treated as a machine with components that can be isolated, targeted, and repaired or replaced. Disease is an enemy to be defeated. Microbes are threats to be eliminated. The patient’s relationship to their food, their land, their ancestors, their community, their sense of purpose — are considered soft variables, if they are considered at all. The hard variables are the biomarkers, the pathogen, the pharmaceutical response.

I am not arguing against medicine. I am naming the philosophy embedded inside it, which has produced extraordinary capability in certain domains and profound blindness in others.

When you treat the body as a machine separate from its ecology, you will always be treating downstream. The terrain keeps producing the same conditions because the conditions that created the terrain remain untouched.

What ecocentrism actually means

Ecocentrism is the alternative philosophical framework. Where anthropocentrism places humans at the center, ecocentrism places the ecosystem, and recognizes humans as one participant in a living community, not its apex or its owner. Ecocentrism holds that species, ecosystems, and the processes that sustain them have intrinsic worth: value that exists independent of their utility to human beings.2

The idea of this predates the term. Indigenous knowledge systems around the world have held versions of this understanding for thousands of years. They believed that the human being is not the master of the natural world but a member of it, with responsibilities that extend beyond individual or species benefit to the wellbeing of the whole living community.

The philosophical shift from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism is not, primarily, a policy question or an environmental activism position. It is a change in the fundamental story we tell about what we are and what our relationship to the living world is. And that change has direct implications for how we understand health, how we practice medicine, how we grow food, and how we relate to the bodies we inhabit.

A body is not a machine separate from nature. It is a node in an ecological network, shaped by the quality of the soil that grew its food, the diversity of the microbiome it carries, the chemical environment it moves through, the relationships that hold it, the meaning that animates it. When we treat it as a machine, we miss most of what is actually happening.

Seven generations: the oldest systems thinking available

The Seventh Generation Principle comes from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (also known as the Iroquois Confederacy), one of the oldest participatory democracies on Earth. Its first written expression traces to the Great Law of Peace, with origins placed between 1142 and 1500 CE. The principle holds that decisions made today should be evaluated by their impact on the seventh generation to come, approximately 150 years into the future.3

As described on the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s own website, the Seventh Generation value “takes into consideration those who are not yet born but who will inherit the world. In their decision making, Chiefs consider how present day decisions will impact their descendants. Nations are taught to respect the world in which they live as they are borrowing it from future generations.”4

Consider that framing against the one we currently use. Our economic and political decision-making operates on quarterly cycles, electoral cycles, five-year plans at most. Our regulatory frameworks approve compounds based on acute toxicity data without requiring multigenerational safety assessment. Our agricultural model extracts from the soil without accounting for the microbial and mineral capital it depletes across decades.

The Seventh Generation Principle is the most rigorous long-term systems thinking available to us. It is what a genuinely functional risk assessment looks like. And it is what we have largely abandoned in favor of models that cannot see past the next earnings report.

We are not the owners of this earth. We are its borrowers. Indigenous wisdom has been saying this for a thousand years. The climate data is now saying it too.

Robin Wall Kimmerer and the grammar of animacy

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology at SUNY. In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2013), she wove together scientific ecology and indigenous plant knowledge to articulate something that neither system alone had quite managed to say.5

Her central argument is this: the awakening of ecological consciousness requires acknowledging and celebrating our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. Not our management of it. Not our stewardship of it as an asset. Our reciprocal relationship with it, the understanding that the living world is not only giving to us but that we have responsibilities in return. That we are participants in a web of mutual care that has been operating long before humans arrived and that will continue long after we are gone.

One of the most striking dimensions of Kimmerer’s work is her exploration of language as a carrier of worldview. In the Potawatomi language, plants, animals, rivers, and stones are referred to with animate pronouns, the grammatical equivalent of “he” or “she.” English, by contrast, renders the non-human world as objects: “it”. 

The grammar of our dominant language encodes the philosophy of our dominant civilization. What is “it” can be used, extracted, owned, or discarded. What has a name and a pronoun is a being, with which we are in relationship.

The way we speak about the living world determines whether we can be in right relationship with it. Language is not neutral. It carries the philosophy of the culture that built it.

This linguistic observation carries over into a clinical and ecological one. A patient who lives in a body that is “it” — an object to be managed and optimized — will relate to that body differently than one who lives in a body that is a living system in continuous conversation with the world around it. The therapeutic relationship changes. The healing relationship changes. The very category of “health” changes.

Vandana Shiva and the violence of monoculture

Vandana Shiva is a physicist, philosopher, environmental activist, and the founder of Navdanya, a movement dedicated to seed sovereignty, biodiversity conservation, and organic farming based in India. Her work has consistently named what she calls “monoculture of the mind.” This refers to the reduction of living diversity — biological, cultural, epistemic — to a single dominant model, imposed globally through corporate power and the logic of industrial efficiency.6

According to research examining her advocacy, over 75% of the world’s crop diversity has been lost in the last century, largely due to the spread of industrial monocultures. Corporations have patented thousands of seed varieties, making it illegal for farmers to save seeds their families grew for generations. Shiva calls this practice biopiracy: the privatization of life itself, encoded in patent law.7

The implications for health are direct. Dietary diversity maps to microbiome diversity maps to immune resilience. We have reduced the genetic diversity of our food supply to a handful of commodity crops, such as corn, soy, wheat, canola. This practice has directly reduced the range of phytochemical inputs the human gut microbiome co-evolved to receive. We have narrowed the chemical conversation between the plant kingdom and the human body that has been running for hundreds of millions of years.

Shiva’s Navdanya movement has established over 100 community seed banks across India, preserving more than 2,000 crop varieties as a living practice of food sovereignty and ecological reciprocity. It is, among other things, a healthcare intervention. The diversity of the seed is the diversity of the food is the diversity of the microbiome is the resilience of the body.

Seed sovereignty is not only a farmers’ rights issue. It is a public health issue. The diversity of what we grow determines the diversity of what we carry inside us.

What this means for health and for medicine

I want to bring these threads together into something practical, because the paradigm question can feel abstract until you ask what it looks like in the body, in the clinic, in the daily practice of being alive.

An anthropocentric approach to health asks: what is wrong with this body, and what intervention will correct it? The body is the object of treatment. The goal is normalization of biomarkers, suppression of symptoms, restoration of function.

An ecocentric approach to health asks: what is this body in relationship with, and where has that relationship been disrupted? The body is not an object of treatment but an intricate part of a living network of food, microbiome, community, meaning, ancestral inheritance, and ecological belonging. The goal is not normalization but restoration of ecology.

These philosophies produce entirely different clinical questions, different interventions, and different outcomes — especially for the chronic, complex, multisystem presentations that conventional medicine most struggles to address.

Ecocentrism in clinical practice looks like: asking what in this person’s environment is shaping how their genome speaks. Assessing gut microbiome diversity as a reflection of dietary and ecological exposure. Treating social isolation as a clinical variable. Recognizing that a patient’s disconnection from nature, from community, from meaning, and from their own body’s signals is part of the clinical picture, not a soft extra. Understanding that plant medicine is not an alternative to evidence-based care but an expression of the co-evolutionary relationship on which much of human physiology was built.

And it looks like something even simpler: asking patients what they love. What brings them back to themselves. What they feel in their body when they are near the ocean, or in a garden, or in a room full of people they trust. That data is the body reporting on the quality of its ecological relationships.

The paradigm shift is a more honest reading of what science is pointing toward. The body is ecological. Health is relational. Healing is a return to right relationship.

The invitation inside the critique

This post, and this entire series, is not simply a systems critique, as necessary as I believe that critique to be. It is an invitation.

An invitation to look at the worldview you have inherited and ask whether it is serving you. To notice where you have been treating your own body as a machine to be managed rather than a living system to be tended. To ask what relationships — with food, with land, with community, with the plant kingdom, with your own biological intelligence — have been disrupted or abandoned, and what it might mean to begin restoring them.

The Haudenosaunee principle asks us to think seven generations ahead. I would also ask you to think seven generations back. The bodies of your ancestors, their relationship with the living world, the foods they grew, the plants they worked with, the land they belonged to — all of that lives in you. It shaped your epigenome, your microbiome, your nervous system, your immune baseline.

You do not need to romanticize the past to draw from it. You do not need to abandon modern medicine to practice ecological health. You need, I think, only to expand the frame by holding the both/and of the scientific and the ancestral, the clinical and the earth-rooted, the pharmacist and the herbalist.

That is what I have been trying to do for years. It is why I am still here, writing this, pulling these threads together.

The final post in this series is about what that practice actually looks like, not just in theory but IRL.

If this is landing for you, let’s talk.
Book a Discovery Tea Chat and let’s explore what reclaiming your ecological place actually looks like.

Roots and reverence,

Marina

Marina Buksov, PharmD | Holistic Health Coach | Clinical Herbalist | marinabuksov.com

Works Cited

1. Kopnina H, Washington H, Taylor B, Piccolo J. Anthropocentrism: More than just a misunderstood problem. J Agric Environ Ethics. 2018;31(1):109-127. doi:10.1007/s10806-018-9711-1.
2. Eckersley R. Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press; 1992. See also: Kortenkamp KV, Moore CF. Ecocentrism and anthropocentrism: moral reasoning about ecological commons dilemmas. J Environ Psychol. 2001;21(3):261-272.
3. Indigenous Corporate Training Inc. What is the Seventh Generation Principle? https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/seventh-generation-principle. Published 2019. See also: The Indigenous Foundation. Seven Generations Principle: Healing the Past & Shaping the Future. https://www.theindigenousfoundation.org/articles/seven-generations-principle-healing-the-past-amp-shaping-the-future.
4. Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Values. https://www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/values/. Accessed 2025.
5. Kimmerer RW. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions; 2013.
6. Shiva V. Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology. London: Zed Books; 1993.
7. Grow Billion Trees. Vandana Shiva: Seed Sovereignty and Farmers’ Rights. https://growbilliontrees.com/blogs/inspirational-stories/vandana-shiva-the-seed-sovereignty-warrior-fighting-for-farmers-rights. Published 2026. See also: Navdanya International. https://navdanyainternational.org.