A while ago, I found myself driving through the clouds in the mountains of North Bali. The experience was almost surreal — the light ethereal, the colors impossibly vivid, the air thick with the scent of earth and vegetation. It was the kind of beauty that presses into your chest, forcing you to pause. I pulled over, wanting to soak in the moment, but as I stepped out, the spell was broken by the sight of trash strewn across the mountainside. Amid the debris stood a man, carefully sifting through the rubbish.
Curious, I approached him. He looked frustrated. “I’m trying to find something with a name on it,” he explained, “so I can hold whoever did this accountable.” He was also cleaning up, as he knew that if he didn’t, the trash would only continue to pile up. “It seems that once a place is polluted, people think they might as well use it as a dumpster.” He said.
As I drove on, away from the man I later named “the trash hero,” I thought about our disconnection from nature. The thought of tossing trash into a place of such beauty seems almost absurd — something only possible if you no longer notice the landscape around you, if you have become so utterly disconnected that nature has ceased to exist as anything more than an empty space for human use.
And then I started thinking about Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy. Sartre famously argued that humans are “condemned to be free,” and that we must define ourselves through our actions. His existentialism is centered on individual agency and personal responsibility, but modern existentialism generally ignores the role of nature in shaping our existence. It assumes that our primary relationships are with other people, not with the world that surrounds and sustains us.
But what if existentialism expanded beyond the human sphere? What if freedom wasn’t just about individual agency but about recognizing our place in a vast, interconnected ecosystem? Perhaps a new existentialism is needed (let’s call it neo-existentialism) — one that understands nature not as a passive setting but as an active force in our lives.
I see “the trash hero” as embodying this neo-existentialist philosophy. He recognizes that the natural environment is not something apart from us but something we are deeply entangled with. His actions, though seemingly small, push back against the narrative that human progress must come at nature’s expense — despite living in a culture that shows little regard for the natural world. By holding himself and others accountable, he is not just protecting the environment; he is reclaiming a sense of meaning rooted in connection rather than control.
Embracing this neo-existentialism means recognizing that our well-being is tied to the well-being of the planet. It means shifting from a mindset of control to one of reciprocity. The beauty I experienced that day in the mountains is still there, waiting to be protected and appreciated. We are not separate from it — we are of it.
Sartre may have argued that we are condemned to be free, responsible for everything we do, but perhaps it’s time to consider if it would be more correct to say that we are condemned to be connected — to each other, to the land, to the rhythms of the non-human world. This connectivity might even be the key to our rewilding and freedom. Instead of seeing ourselves as the sole agents of meaning and nature as inert matter, we must acknowledge our symbiosis with the living world.
When nature suffers, we suffer. This truth might sound like a cliché, but it is both ancient and immediate, though modern culture often obscures it. Perhaps it’s time to recognize nature as an active participant in our era, not just an object of human management. Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that repairing the balance between humanity and the wild requires a shift in perception as much as action.
Another existentialist philosopher — my heroine, Simone de Beauvoir — added a crucial dimension to the existentialist plea for freedom that feels relevant to rekindle at this time in relation to neo-existentialism: “To will oneself free is also to will others free.” But perhaps this idea must be extended beyond humanity. Maybe to will ourselves free is also to will nature free — free from exploitation, free from destruction, free to exist in its untamed form. Beauvoir argued that true freedom is not an isolated pursuit but an ethical responsibility; one that is inseparable from the freedom of others. Unless we recognize and uphold others’ right to freedom as fiercely as our own, we remain not truly free, but rather oppressors — experiencing only a freedom from constraint, rather than a freedom to create, connect, and coexist. This echoes Erich Fromm’s previously discussed philosophy, which distinguishes between negative freedom (freedom from external restrictions) and positive freedom (the ability to fully realize oneself in relation to the world). Without this deeper, collective liberation, freedom remains incomplete. It remains an illusion of autonomy built upon domination.
If true freedom is an ethical responsibility, I feel convinced that it must extend beyond humanity. Our liberation is intertwined with the liberation of the natural world. To will nature free is to rewild it — to create the best possible conditions for its thriving and then step back. It also involves preserving wild, native forests rather than reshaping them to fit human desires, protecting coral reefs instead of exploiting the ocean’s resources, and refusing to pollute or take advantage of animals and ecosystems for short-term gain.
Neo-existentialism is a rewilded call for restraint, reverence, and the radical act of letting be.
Yesterday I visited our building project near Ubud. We are in the process of building a house from upcycled wood and river stones. As I drove down the narrow road to the site, something felt different. The light had changed, the sky seemed more exposed. Then I saw why. The enormous tree next to the temple had been felled. It lay on the ground like a fallen giant, its once-mighty crown now a tangle of broken limbs. Dragonflies and butterflies swarmed above it, and resin seeped from its severed trunk like blood from a wound. This tree must have stood there for over a century.
Why was it cut down? I never got a clear answer, but heard that the village feared it might fall on the temple–which seemed unlikely as its trunk was massive, its roots deep, and it had already withstood many earthquakes and tropical storms. And now, in its absence, the temple stands unshaded, and the small songbirds that once nested in its branches are gone.
Trees can live for millennia. And scientists now understand what Indigenous cultures have known for centuries: trees are social, empathetic beings, connected through vast underground networks, communicating, supporting, warning, and protecting one another. The Great Basin bristlecone pine is the oldest tree in the world, and is nearly 5000 years old, and even shorter-lived trees belong to ecosystems that have thrived for thousands of years, woven into intricate relationships that extend far beyond a single human lifetime. Yet we sever these connections so easily, cutting down what took centuries to grow in mere moments, often for reasons as trivial as convenience.
“What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down,” writes Richard Powers in his remarkable eco-novel The Overstory. I don’t know what will become of the remains of this fallen giant, but I doubt it will hold the same quiet magnificence it did in life.
Perhaps rewilding ourselves begins with relearning how to see. If we could truly perceive the world’s complexity and its vast beauty, would we be so quick to destroy it?
In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, English philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–1797) describes the sublime as an overwhelming, sensory-stimulating experience — one that expands both perception and consciousness. The sublime confirms us as both mind and body, offering a glimpse of something boundless and immense, something greater than us yet inseparable from us. It sets the everyday grind into perspective, reminding us of our fleeting needs in the face of the vast and unknowable.
Burke associated the sublime with nature’s raw power: a storm rolling over a mountain, a roaring waterfall, the infinite horizon of the ocean. These encounters strip away our illusions of control, revealing our smallness — not as something diminishing, but rather as something that deepens our belonging.
But the sublime is not solely found in the dramatic and grand. It also exists in the quiet play of light across a wooden floor, the intricate veins of a leaf, the scent of rain-soaked earth. What matters is our capacity to be moved, and not just by the extraordinary, but also by the seemingly ordinary. A flower is never just a flower when we truly see it. Its delicate symmetry, the way it turns toward the sun, the intricate pattern of its petals; sublimity. To recognize this is to remain open to wonder, to resist numbness, and to acknowledge that we are not apart from nature but deeply, irrevocably enmeshed within it.
Pure freedom emerges from harmony rather than dominance, from connection rather than control. If we are condemned to anything, it is not to isolated freedom but to an existence shaped by the wild forces around us. The question is whether we will recognize this before it’s too late.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Ayasha on Unsplash
