Geoempathy

José Ibarra

Related terms: architectural practice, becoming-with, deep time, design ethics, empathy, geontology, geologic time, interscalarity, more-than-human, planetary sensing

In the highlands of the Atacama Desert in Chile, lithium mining draws down aquifers, leaving behind desiccated salt flats and destabilized ecologies. In these extractive zones, the ground is treated as an inert substrate, its temporalities flattened to meet the urgency of industrial demand. The result is a cascade of unlivable conditions: wetlands dry up, plants wither, animals vanish, and communities that depend on these ecosystems face displacement and cultural erosion. Thousands of miles away, in the tidal waters off the Isle of Skye in Scotland, a submerged steel structure filters the coast with oysters and seaweeds by high tide, then emerges by low tide to host a meal. The installation becomes both habitat and dining table, emerging and submerging with the tides. CLIMAVORE: On Tidal Zones (2017–ongoing), by the London-based duo Cooking Sections, choreographs this daily breathing of Earth into a shared act of metabolic reciprocity. Together, these sites illustrate the ethical and aesthetic gap between extractive modernity and care for the more-than-human world. They invite a question: how might we learn to design with, rather than against, the deep and layered body of the planet?

‘Geoempathy’ offers one response – an emergent concept and proposed practice that rethinks how we relate to Earth’s processes across time, scale, and form. It is the cultivated capacity to feel-with, think-with, and become-with geological processes. The term hints at an embodied, affective, and speculative mode of attention to the temporal, material, and systemic dimensions of Earth. The timescales of geology allow us to extend empathy from the human to the geological and everything in between: to recognize Earth not as a static backdrop, but as an active constellation of relations among life and nonlife. ‘Geoempathy’ concerns an aesthetic and ethical orientation attuned to deep time, more-than-human scales, and planetary vulnerabilities, particularly in the context of environmental degradation and extractive violence. ‘Geoempathy’ unsettles human exceptionalism by repositioning empathy not solely as a human-to-human gesture but as a geosocial relation, or a politics of interscalar sensitivity. Development of the term started with questions raised within architectural theory and practice, yet defining it means to seek answers (and often more questions) through dialogue with fields across the environmental humanities, such as anthropology, philosophy, art, and literature. It poses an imperative for world-builders, such as designers, artists, and scientists, to respond to massive scales and temporalities, and to consider living and nonliving entities on Earth – rocks, plants, atmospheres, animals, and peoples – to be an enmeshed “hyperobject,” instead of singular and static elements (Morton 2013).

‘Geoempathy’ troubles the assumption of human exceptionalism, a persistent philosophical obstacle across much of human history and still deeply embedded in the environmental humanities and other disciplines. Architecture, in particular, has long modeled itself after biological beings and their behaviors, narrowing its scope around an idealized image of ‘man.’ This has contributed to an exclusionary outlook that has marginalized people and more-than-human agents – the living and nonliving constituencies who bear the consequences of human actions and should have a say in the design of Earth itself – from conversations that have shaped the world, literally and figuratively. It is no coincidence that animals, plants, grounds, and atmospheres have long been excluded from these conversations. Just like living beings, buildings have a ‘lifespan’ and a time of expiration. Yet, as technology and capital advance at unprecedented rates, humans live longer, while buildings die faster and sooner.

This accelerated obsolescence of the built environment is not incidental. It is the product of a wasteful practice of architectural production: an industrialized, extractive mode of building that consumes vast material and energetic resources only to produce structures with limited lifespans. The built environment now accounts for nearly 40% of global carbon emissions, driven by concrete and steel production, energy consumption, and the demolition and reconstruction cycles of contemporary development (World Green Building Council 2019). This architecture of speed, spectacle, and disposability exacerbates ecological collapse while reinforcing systems of exclusion and precarity. Geoempathy, by contrast, proposes that architecture in the Anthropocene remodel itself after geological processes – slow, iterative, and long-lasting – and that it consider its uses and users as distributed across the arc of deep time.

In 2011, several architects looked at geology in an attempt to slow the field down and substitute the vertical with the horizontal. The Landform Building, which originated as a 2009 conference at Princeton and was later documented by Allen and McQuade (2011), emerged as a series of provocations that explored the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism, aiming to synthesize buildings with nature by drawing on the geological rather than the biological. However, the promise of this turn to landscape was limited by a predominant focus on artifice and form. Even when buildings began to perform more like landscape, a clear disconnect still existed in architecture between exploitation of site, its degree of ‘completion,’ and its ability to endure or change through time. Today, architecture requires deep systemic changes that realign design with long-term ecological and geosocial commitments.

A project like CLIMAVORE illustrates one such recalibration. Rather than monumentalizing form, it temporalizes design, transforming the intertidal zone into a site of metabolic and spatial negotiation. The project refuses a fixed boundary between land and sea, nature and culture. Its tidal choreography exemplifies a new model for architectural responsiveness. It presents a ‘multispecies table’ for eating, breathing, cleaning, growing, harvesting, and more. CLIMAVORE offers a situated proposition: that design might learn to act with, rather than on, the ground. In an article addressing this project, anthropologist Anna Löwenhaupt Tsing explains:

Eating each other does not destroy the tidal zone, in this conception; instead, it reaffirms the necessity of living together. Eating with becomes a practice to be contrasted with eating against. In the latter, the planetary environment suffers every time we take a bite. In the former, we reaffirm our residence in a common zone of more-than-human livability. Eating oysters and seaweed immerses our senses in the tidal zone, reminding us where we are and what we have to lose (Tsing 2019).

Geontology, Empathy, and the Ethics of Attunement

Seeking to unsettle dominant paradigms within architecture and related disciplines, the notion of ‘geoempathy’ emerges in response to two genealogies: the ontopolitical critique of life and nonlife in Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of geontology, and the philosophical tradition of empathy as first articulated by Robert Vischer. Together, these genealogies set the stage for a form of environmental attunement that is affective and critical.

Anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli highlights the biotic enclosures of existence and reminds the reader that, from a geological stance, planet Earth began without life. In other words, all sorts of life inherited a world animated and produced by nonlife (Povinelli 2016, 11). Povinelli critiques a modern distinction in Western culture that underpins settler colonial governance, extractive capitalism, and ecological collapse. She proposes that we turn our attention to the governance of ‘nonliving’ matter: rocks and minerals, the ground itself. Geoempathy as an approach takes up this call not only to think with nonlife, but to feel with it. Where Povinelli focuses on the regulatory regimes that uphold the life/nonlife binary, geoempathy enacts a fugitive response, a felt relation to those very substances and timescales rendered inert or outside of political concern.

Robert Vischer’s notion of ‘empathy’ provides another crucial axis. In the nineteenth-century essay, “On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics,” Vischer introduced Einfühlung – literally meaning ‘feeling into’ and referring to an act of projecting oneself into another body or environment, though first translated as “aesthetic sympathy” and later as “empathy.” Through this term, he describes how a viewer projects feelings into forms, particularly in the contemplation of art or architecture. ‘Empathy,’ for Vischer, was not merely interpersonal; it was a perceptual-sensory identification with the inanimate, or nonhuman, world. ‘Geoempathy’ recalls this early notion but expands it across planetary and temporal registers. While Vischer conceived of this feeling as a projection of the self into a form, geoempathy, as an approach, questions what it means to receive feeling from geologic forms, rhythms, and residues. This shift marks a move from empathy as imaginative identification to empathy as relational sensitivity, asking: What kinds of feelings form when we linger with Earth’s deep rhythms, when we attend to the affective residue of extraction, erosion, and entropy? What new aesthetics and ethics arise when empathy itself is stretched across geologic time?

Geoempathy is not a passive sentimentality but a minor epistemology – “minor” in the Deleuzian sense: a mode of thought that operates from the margins, deterritorializes dominant structures, and privileges relational and situated knowledge (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). It is an insurgent way of knowing through affect, relation, and time. It moves through the cracks of deep time, attending to what Elizabeth Grosz might call “geopower,” or the power of the earth itself, “a differentially spread out yet overlapping series of forces, materials, pressures, intensities, operating at different locations, speeds, and densities throughout and across the earth” (Grosz 2023). It refuses the aesthetic of mastery, replacing it with an ethic of suspension and listening. It imagines empathy not as mirroring, but as misalignment – an encounter across discontinuities of scale, agency, and time. Geoempathy is also a provocation: how does one feel deep time? Can one care across eons? These provocations challenge the limitations of inheriting empathy from liberal humanist thought, which centers on individual feeling and mirrors human experience. Geoempathy, by contrast, operates relationally and speculatively. It moves sideways toward ruins, thresholds, broken infrastructures, and composting futures. It registers loss and transformation not as finalities but as temporal crossings. Geoempathy demands slowness and patience. It asks for modes of knowing that are embodied rather than extractive, poetic rather than positivist. It affirms that environmental care cannot be separated from epistemic justice: how we learn to know and feel the Earth is inseparable from the systems we reproduce.

The potential of geoempathetic art, architecture, and design lies in its invitation to remake both form and practice. It asks designers to register trauma as well as resource, to foreground process over product, to be responsive to the slow, breathing shifts of the world. It favors the provisional over the permanent, the attentive over the extractive. CLIMAVORE's geoempathetic gestures lie not in scale or permanence, but in resonance. The project listens to the existing metabolic processes of a site, collaborates with more-than-human agents, and builds a public culture around cyclical and provisional inhabitation. It does not offer a model for cities or a blueprint for universal design. Rather, it offers a proposition: that design might learn to act with, rather than on, the ground. Geoempathetic design does not merely respond to ecological crisis. It situates design within the politics of environmental interdependence – in CLIMAVORE’s case, among mollusks, humans, algae, and tidal cycles – where more-than-human actors co-compose space and meaning. If architectural time is to operate on a geological register, then perhaps buildings too must breathe, recede, and regenerate with their grounds, accepting a kind of productive obsolescence that furthers life. To act geoempathetically is to recognize that we already live within the Earth’s body. What CLIMAVORE helps illuminate is that reciprocity – eating with rather than eating against – is not just an ethic, but a method for remaking worlds.

This ethic of situated, multispecies reciprocity resonates with what might be called another geoempathetic act: Agnes Denes’ Tree Mountain: A Living Time Capsule (1992-1996). Commissioned by Finland’s Ministry of the Environment and supported by the United Nations Environment Programme, the work rehabilitates a former gravel pit near Ylöjärvi, Finland. There, Denes orchestrated the planting of 11,000 pine trees by 11,000 people, each tree legally assigned to its planter and protected by deed for 400 years (Denes 1996). The trees form a precise mathematical pattern, a spiral geometry based on the golden ratio, turning the site into a living monument that will slowly evolve into a forest, shaped both by environmental forces and human intentionality. Unlike conventional monuments that impose permanence, Tree Mountain embraces succession, entropy, and intergenerational caretaking. It stages a collaboration between planetary rhythms and cultural memory, asking not only what we leave behind, but also for whom. The project is not merely symbolic; it is ecological engineering as an aesthetic form, an act of design with implications for climate, ecology, and cultural heritage. It mobilizes human and nonhuman agencies across temporal scales typically invisible to architectural thought.

Both CLIMAVORE and Tree Mountain refuse the notion that architecture must be fixed, human-centric, or monumental in the traditional sense. They instead frame design as a series of open-ended gestures across time, offering us models for ‘geoempathy’ that are modest in scale yet radical in implication. Rather than simply solving problems, they create platforms for attunement, memory, and planetary listening. Geoempathetic design is not only about remediating damage, but also about co-composing futures, imagining grounds as agents, and expanding design’s temporal vocabulary. In doing so, it invites a reframing of design outputs not as objects of mastery, but as processes of relation.

Taking Geoempathetic Stances

To develop geoempathetic stances is to engage with a plurality of practices that reorient design toward Earth’s layered rhythms. Among them, many Indigenous and decolonial traditions offer grounded, situated forms of Earth knowledge that contrast sharply with Western geologic imaginaries that erase, extract, and flatten lived ecologies. ‘Geoempathy’ might be understood not as a single ethos, but as a constellation of counter-practices: affective geologies, poetics of listening to rocks, waters, and atmospheres, and design methods that center relationality over mastery. In each case, geoempathetic design entails a practice that listens before it shapes, that maps not only resources but traumas, that builds less for permanence than for transitional inhabitation. It is a conceptual tool and speculative practice that reorients us toward the more-than-human and the more-than-now. Geoempathy reframes shelter as negotiation with landscape, or as situated cohabitation. As such, ‘geoempathy’ is a term not just for critique, but for formation; a way to name the half-formed feelings of kinship with deep Earth, and a call to act from them.

At stake in this reorientation is a critical reckoning with modernity’s failures, particularly its disavowal of geological consequence, systemic extractivism, and ecological collapse. Geoempathy does not claim that geology ‘cares,’ but rather asks whether design can cultivate modes of care that align with Earth’s longer rhythms. This is a strategic shift toward temporal and material registers that exceed the human while still including us. This stance is not opposed to progress and technology, but it resists progress that equates growth with extraction and permanence with success. A case in point is Moray, an Incan agricultural site in the Andean highlands of Peru, where terraced concentric depressions create nested microclimates. This infrastructural form harnesses thermal gradients to enable ecological experimentation and adaptation. Rather than dominating terrain, Moray responds to it with precision and care, offering a prototype for climate-responsive design attuned to Earth’s material agency. In this way, geoempathy does not seek to romanticize the geologic past, but rather to recover ways of worlding otherwise – ways that are already known, practiced, and obscured by dominant systems.

As a design and art method, geoempathy becomes a framework for making that foregrounds long durations, material memory, and slow processes. It invites design methods that decenter speed, optimization, and control in favor of maintenance and negotiated growth. Yet these long durations are not to be confused with permanence. Rather, geoempathetic design is defined processually: it values continuity through transformation, resilience without rigidity, and presence without fixity. This contrasts with dominant discourses of “sustainability” in architecture, which often prioritize efficiency and quantifiable performance metrics, yet remain entangled with extractive economies and techno-optimism. Geoempathy asks us to go further: to imagine design as ongoing reciprocity.

Geological processes offer a potent material and conceptual framework. Earth’s crust holds practices of co-formation that stretch our imagination of design beyond intention, toward long, recursive rhythms. One need look no further than the continuous and transformative nature of geological processes. Geological processes work in a continuum, involving the reuse and recycling of the same geological matter that concocts them, along with other accumulated substances. Rocks exhibit patterns of self-organization shaped by cooling, compression, erosion, and reconstitution. They came into existence at some point when the gaseous Earth began to cool down and condense into hard matter (Schuchert and Dunbar 1955, 58–59). As perhaps the earliest form of power and culture in the universe, rocks can develop and reconstruct territories. They have done so both during the deep geological history of the Earth, when slow and gradual shifts formed mountain ranges and oceans, and during the Anthropocene, when tectonic shifts are caused by human forces. Geological change is both very slow and very drastic: it is an act of power that reorganizes life and nonlife through a gradual process of transformation. This vision asks that human needs be recontextualized, suggesting that other means of being ecological, such as resilience and sustainability, not be measured by stability or preservation, but by a system’s ability to metabolize change, to transform without erasure. This includes practices of care that are adaptive, transformative, and at times necessarily entropic.

Consider the Vishnu schist, which is the oldest exposure of Precambrian rocks in the Grand Canyon system. This 12,000 ft. thick stretch of crystalline basement rocks has seen innumerable formal, programmatic, and performative configurations throughout its long history of folding and metamorphism. First, gases millennia old solidified and created mountain ranges in the region, after which the rock formations eroded until reaching an almost perfectly level surface. This peneplain was followed by a major subsidence event in which the area was intermittently covered by an inland sea. For the next several million years, the region was uplifted, folded, and broken by a fault that created mountains, which then eroded (Schuchert and Dunbar 1955, 63–64). The same geological formation has seen hundreds of different states and has been a medium for hundreds of different forms of existence. Sometimes an ocean, other times a mountain, and today a steep-sided gorge. Humanity has only been part of a tiny fraction in a series of events that make up the impressive Grand Canyon.

Geological formations are productive for their lessons on process, but they can also be generative in their approach to form-making. Consider the process of fossilization. Fossils are absences turned into form – traces of organic life embedded in stone, where life leaves behind a negative imprint in the body of the Earth (Schuchert and Dunbar 1955, 39). Typically, fossils occur when organic matter hardens into stone, whereby the organisms themselves tend to get dissolved, and their absence leaves behind a spatial trail akin to a mold. These layered impressions offer a nonhuman archive of co-presence: evidence that life and nonlife occupied the same space, and continue to co-compose its forms. The establishment of such a relationship in which nonlife accepts the living as a constituent in its own formal logic and spatial composition is an important departure from the typical process of architectural production. Instead of purity, intention, or completion, the fossil expresses survival through contingency. In this speculative inversion of design authorship, the fossil becomes a model of co-formation, shaped through decay, interdependence, and material memory. In this sense, what earlier or more primordial form of architecture might there exist than this one?

The lesson from geology is that form itself adapts to and is adapted by its contexts and users. In other words, there is no fossil without fossilization. Importantly, this formal change occurs accidentally: the organisms themselves never intended to be fossilized. On the one hand, an inherent logic of an organism’s shape dictates the formal qualities of a first mold. On the other hand, the disturbances of the ground and other geological processes (such as erosion, crustal movements, and so on) can modify the formal qualities of a negative (the mold) until it becomes unrecognizable from its original positive (the organism). Put differently, the accident does not dictate the fossil, but it does modify it. In this sense, fossils might be understood as the most primordial ancestor of architecture – form shaped not by intent, but by entanglement with time, death, and Earth itself.

To take geoempathetic stances is to feel with the Earth, to design within its durations. It is to learn from forms shaped by erosion, to build not as dominators but as inheritors, collaborators, and future ancestors. As extractive systems falter and the climate’s rhythms intensify, ‘geoempathy’ names a commitment to staying with the trouble of more-than-human life, of deep time, of planetary entanglement. It calls on art and architecture to reflect the world and regenerate its relations. In this vision, design becomes less a matter of heroic innovation than of careful listening. The work ahead is neither nostalgic nor utopian, but world-remaking in its most literal sense: the slow, difficult, collective labor of building with Earth, not against it. ‘Geoempathy’ offers a vocabulary for this labor – a means of sensing otherwise, designing otherwise, and living otherwise. To design geoempathetically is to surrender the fantasy of mastery and begin again in conversation with planetary time. It asks us to live and build as if entanglement were not a threat, but a condition of life. In this gesture, geoempathy becomes more than a concept; it becomes a practice of care, a poetics of endurance, and a refusal to turn away.

References

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Denes, Agnes. 1996. Tree Mountain – A Living Time Capsule: 11,000 Trees, 11,000 People, 400 Years. Accessed June 1, 2025. http://www.agnesdenesstudio.com/works4.html

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