Earth Healing Begins With Communities

 

“Earth healing is the process of repairing and renewing the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world.”
— Francisca Okwulehie (2026)

Earth healing means restoring the health of ecosystems while transforming the human relationships, values, and systems that have contributed to environmental harm.

Pope Francis, in Laudato Si’ (2015), emphasises that “everything is connected.” Environmental degradation, therefore, cannot be separated from social inequality, human responsibility, or the ways societies understand and relate to creation. Earth healing calls for more than ecological restoration; it requires us to examine the relationships, values, and systems that shape how we live with the Earth.

In considering the possibilities of Earth healing, Wangari Maathai (2010) connects environmental restoration with social transformation. Her work demonstrates how planting trees, restoring degraded landscapes, empowering women, and strengthening communities can become interconnected forms of healing.

How Can Earth Healing Begin With Communities?

Earth healing can begin with communities in practical and meaningful ways. It does not have to begin in boardrooms, laboratories, or international conferences. It can begin where people live, work, raise families, grow food, collect water, and maintain their everyday relationships with the natural world.

It begins with communities where women protect water sources, farmers care for the soil, young people restore local ecosystems, and families pass environmental knowledge from one generation to another.

Communities are often reservoirs of tradition, memory, and ecological knowledge. They may understand their environments in ways that formal systems sometimes overlook.

They know the seasons.

They know the waterways.

They know the forests, farms, and wetlands.

They know when an ecosystem begins to change.

Women, in particular, often carry generations of ecological knowledge through their everyday relationships with land, water, food, and community. This knowledge is not simply tradition. It can be an important pathway to environmental resilience and ecological restoration.

Communities as Partners in Earth Healing

Earth healing becomes possible when communities are empowered to participate meaningfully in decisions that affect their environments. Communities can contribute to healing the Earth where they live when they are supported to:

• Value Indigenous and local ecological knowledge;
• Protect community access to clean and safe water;
• Support local environmental stewardship;
• Recognise and strengthen women's environmental leadership;
• Protect local ecosystems and livelihoods; and
• Build environmental solutions with communities, rather than simply for them.

Earth healing is therefore not only about repairing damaged ecosystems. It is also about restoring relationships, recognising knowledge, strengthening communities, and cultivating practices of care and reciprocity between humans and the more-than-human world.

The work of healing the Earth is both ecological and social. It requires collective responsibility and meaningful participation from the people who live closest to the environments we seek to protect.

Earth healing is a collective responsibility and it should begin with our communities.

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Drawing on Francisca Okwulehie’s doctoral research in progress, Earth Healing in African Women’s Environmental Narratives (2026), this reflection understands African women’s environmental stories as important sites of ecological knowledge, resistance, and healing.

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References:

Francis, Pope. Laudato si’: On Care for Our Common Home. 2015. Official Vatican text.

Maathai, Wangari. Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World. Doubleday, 2010.

Okwulehie, Francisca. Earth Healing in African Women’s Environmental Narratives. Doctoral research in progress, 2026.