From Spiritual Ecology
to Spirituals Ecology
Part I: The Call (Kendra Hamilton’s manifesto)
“Spiritual(s) ecology as a form of writing? Or as a way of being?” I wondered in contemplating how to build on Kendra Hamilton’s March 10, 2026 manifesto, “From Spiritual Ecology to Spirituals Ecology.”
My quick answer to this query: It’s not “or” but “and” as a way of being. That’s our theme: spiritual(s) ecology as a form of writing and as a way of being. The plural (“spirituals”) form of the “spiritual ecology” term is awkward but represents a strong form of grace.
The building format can be call (her essay) and response (this essay) as part of our exploration of ecospirituality on the Ecollective platform.
Kendra Hamilton was disappointed when she didn’t get the fellowship to travel to the Devonshire monastery and soak up the illustrious UK countryside ambiance. She submitted with her fellowship application, “Second Summer,” a both lilting and brooding essay on the social and environmental climate of the small college town in South Carolina where she works and the nearby “farmette” where she lives with her horticulturist husband. For this interracial couple, the social climate of the place is occluded by its racist past and the environment is warming because of man’s inhumanity to earth and fellow humankind.
Hamilton is a very gifted (imaginative and skilled) writer whose reflections on these climatic circumstances stem from a distinctively genuine voice (her own) and a high-minded sensibility shaped by extensive study (PhD in English). But her familiarity with the ecospirituality writing genre has been acquired more recently on her own. She finds it lofty although of course she’s erudite herself and could write that way. But she’s more like what Alice Walker called Zora Neale Hurston: “A genius of the South.”
In “From Spiritual Ecology to Spirituals Ecology: a manifesto for thinking global, but writing local on the trail of Sherman's March,” Hamilton reflects on her rejection from that "spiritual ecology" fellowship, with the upshot being a clearer conception of what “spiritual ecology” means for her as a Southern black woman in a green world.
The conception develops as Hamilton drives along the route of Sherman’s March to present a talk in a Southern gothic lecture series on vodun/voodoo, hoodoo, and the film Sinners and to visit other sites. Along the way, she encounters ghosts of her ancestors and other spirits and becomes so overwhelmed that she “sobbed until I had no more tears to give.”
By journey’s end, she realizes that, for her own self, a genuine spiritual connection to the land cannot exist if it ignores these ancestral spirits and the painful history of a land where Confederate statues still rise from town squares.
So Hamilton proposes her own manifesto: a “spirituals ecology,” not a “spiritual ecology”—one that not only recognizes the songs of her Gullah Geechee heritage but is radical in its inclusivity and aims:
"That’s not to say that spirituals ecology doesn’t have a lot in common with the other kind. It does. Both, for example, consider all creation possessed of the spark of divinity. But spirituals ecology is distinguished by its determination to decolonize the spiritual, embrace the wisdom of Kongo, indigenous, Euro-pagan peoples and more, while specifically dedicating itself to healing 'the hidden wounds' of the Columbian Encounter and all the crimes of invasion, conquest, and extraction that followed in its wake."
Part 2: The Response (Ecollective reflections on Hamilton’s manifesto)
On June 26, 2015, the church was packed and deeply mourning when Barack Obama stood at the pulpit and began to sing "Amazing Grace." The moment occurred during his eulogy for the nine victims of the racially motivated shooting at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, a site steeped in the Gullah Geechee history Hamilton explores in herRomancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bessbook.
The hymn, composed by a former slave trader transformed by grace, exemplifies the vast synthesis of cultures that Hamilton calls for as the manifesto of her “From Spiritual Ecology to Spirituals Ecology.” Amazing Grace, composed by a former slave trader transformed by grace. The cultural blending of European and African (specifically Gullah) influences birthed the "spirituals" that form the cornerstone of Hamilton's ecological framework.
Obama's rendition utilized the distinct conventions of black gospel music, the syncopation of reaching for notes beyond the original composition and elongating lyrical syllables. Such expressions manifest the black church’s "spiritual technology" of "gettin' happy": the capacity to channel the spirit's triumphant joy even when surrounded by the most heartbreaking and dire circumstances.
In the context of spirituals ecology, the historical experience of enslaved people involved a relative absence of personal ego. This empowering absence was evident in the communal nature of tradition African cultures and deepened by the depravations of personal agency in the enslavers’ abusive treatment of black people as property.
This shared state of existence informed a heightened sense of unity consciousness, grounding the individual in the collective.
A lack of formal academic resources allowed for a visceral, brilliant creativity to flourish in the creation of the “Negro spirituals” and sorrow songs. This "creative simplicity" maximized limited resources to deliver a powerful emotional impact through highly complex, rhythmic, and sonic innovations and verbal poetic expressions that, while appearing "naive" to some outsiders, pierce directly to the heart of the human experience.
This response to Kendra Hamilton’s manifesto has been in the making for some time because Hamilton is a member of the Ecollective team and has been contributing to our conception of ecospirituality. During a 2024 conversation, Kendra (who now will be referred to by first name) told us that Gullah Geechee land-and-waterscapes were the inspiration for water-themed spirituals such as “Down by the Riverside,” “Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore,” “Deep River” and “Roll Jordan Roll.”
The Bible employs rich imagery from the natural world and this imagery complements the Orishas and other concepts based on natural phenomenon in West African cosmology and the cultures of enslaved black people in the U.S. and Americas. For example, in the African diaspora animals like Brer Rabbit and insects like Anansi are sources of wisdom and other admirable traits.
Rural black communities resonated with nature-based Biblical teachings because the scriptures mirrored their own observations of the earth. Their folk philosophy, drawn directly from the natural world and the Bible evolved into a powerful political philosophy. For example, a 19th-century African-American spiritual evolved into the rallying protest song of the Civil Rights movement, "(Like a tree standing by the water/We Shall Not Be Moved." The song draws its central, tree and river metaphor from two scriptures:
"Blessed is the man that trusteth in the LORD, and whose hope the LORD is. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit." — Jeremiah 17:7–8.
"And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper." — Psalm 1:3.
In other words, a tree planted by the water has an unlimited source of sustenance.
Insights for our evolving thesis of ecospirituality also can be developed from the chapter on George Washington Carver mystical views in Peter Thomkins’ book,The Secret Life of Plants. (A full PDF of the book can be read here.)
Carver’s lifelong bond with the natural world, began as a child when he was known as a miracle worker who intuitively healed his neighbors' ailing houseplants. At Tuskegee, this deep listening yielded an astonishing array of products, from dyes to petroleum substitutes. Yet, he refused to patent these discoveries or profit from them, insisting that because God did not charge for making the plants, humans had no right to commodify their secrets.
Carver believed the secrets of nature are revealed only to those who love the natural world enough. He taught that biblical promises were the ultimate reality, far more solid and substantial than the material world most people believed in.
Near the end of his life. Reaching out to a small flower on his workbench, Carver expressed the absolute core of spirituals ecology:
"When I touch that flower, I am touching infinity. It existed long before they were human beings on this earth and will continue to exist for millions of years to come…. It is that still small voice that calls up the fairies.”
(insert here: a note about the relation of Stevie Wonder’s album, The Secret Life of Plants, to our evolving conception of ecospirituality.)
Nature-based African American folk philosophy has a contemporary ecological counterpart in the recognition of biomimicry. Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s serviceberry example of biomimicry shows how indigenous wisdom mirrors the lessons of the natural world, aligning perfectly with the political aspect of Kendra’s manifesto: Kimmerer’s 2024 book The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, argues for replacing capitalist, scarcity-driven consumption with a "gift economy" modeled on nature. She believes that, like serviceberries, resources should be treated as shared gifts creating reciprocal obligations rather than commodities to be accumulated. (Kimmerer’s full essay based on the book can be read here.)
(more points to be added)
Encourage readers to savor more from “Escaped from Cultivation,” her multifarious garden journal ( “Food, flowers, feminism. Poet. Professor. Birder. Woman of many aprons. Have hoe will garden. But don’t touch my chef’s knife”), and to subscribe: https://substack.com/@goddessofgumbo
Invite other members of our group to share their conceptions.
It will be an open-ended piece, growing like contra
ry Mary’s garden, because we’ll need to post the piece before other people may have a chance to respond. The piece will be dated and posted at the top of the editorial section. It will not be a conventional editorial in that it will be more creative in style and format
The autumnal beauty was foreboding.
Your green day in spring-come-too-soon was preceded by the blossoming rose bush in my summer-stayed-too-long day. On November 19, 2025, this bush’s Thanksgiving week blooming was a recent annual occurence. The bush had bloomed late the previous year, but not before.
So, in that respect, I feel your blues, Kendra. From close. personal observation, we know that climate change is real. But you don’t have to go a retreat in England to allow your already-intuited comprehension of spiritual ecology to emerge. The ancestors evoked by the ecotone of your recent sojourn through South Carolina and Georgia can be your guides, along with plants, animals, land and water scapes of your southern homeland and a growing intimacy with Presence.
thought you shone brightly as an eco-lit memoirist in the “Second Summer” essay you submitted with the fellowship application but not particularly as a spiritually oriented writer.
The great potential for your eco-spirituality to be expressed in your writing was evident in that essay, however. And had your black identity been more apparent in your submission, the competition sponsors, as dedicated environmentalists, would have loved to have facilitated that aspect of diversity among the fellows. A favorable meaning of “woke” is recognizing existing talent, its potential development for excellence, as well as balanced racial and gender representation.
If the competition is held again next year, you should submit this March 2026 Substack as evidence of your intensifying quest for what, by the end of the essay, you realize you already know as “spirituals ecology.”
the peace of all-pervasive presence as refuge from writer’s dread and being her perfect reader.
very competitive: a writing friend