From Decentering to Dwelling: Ecopoiesis and the Ethics of Ecological Participation

This paper critically re-examines the dominant environmental-philosophical imperative to overcome anthropocentrism in light of contemporary posthuman and relational turns. While ecological and posthuman discourses have productively challenged human domination and exceptionalism by emphasizing entanglement, relationality, and more-than-human agency, they often retain a residual abstraction. This abstraction lies in treating “the human” as a unified moral and conceptual problem. This paper argues that this framing risks obscuring the differentiated, situated, and reflexive capacities through which responsibility becomes possible and that the attempts to “decenter human” altogether prove both conceptually paradoxical and practically self undermining. To develop an ethic that genuinely cultivates ecological responsibility, recognition of human-situatedness and human capacities of moral discernment are inescapable, since we cannot think, evaluate, or care except from within human modes of experiencing and understanding. Rather than seeking to transcend anthropocentrism through decentering human, this paper proposes a shift from the logic of centrism to that of participation. Drawing on processrelational philosophy and ecological thought, this paper proposes the concept of ecopoiesis—the relational making of a shared dwelling-place or home. Ecopoiesis reframes ethical life in terms of cultivating responsible participation in the ongoing co-creation of ecological relations. In this view, human-situatedness is not an obstacle to ecological ethics but its very condition of possibility. The task is neither to dissolve the human category into undifferentiated networks nor to reinstate human absolute dominance but to reconceptualize human reflexivity, moral discernment, and cultural capacity as modes of ecological participation. By repositioning responsibility within relational processes rather than abstract moral hierarchies, this shift—from centrism to participation, from collective guilt to differentiated responsiveness, from critique to renewal—offers a constructive contribution to posthuman environmental thought and offers a vision of “ecological civilization” grounded in ecopoietic practice.