Eco-Spirituality in the 21st Century: ReVisioning Nature, Community, and Connection for a Better Tomorrow

by Dana O'Driscoll, Nate Summers

Eco-Spirituality offers a new vision for nature spirituality both by drawing upon ancient, ancestral connections and by visioning human-nature-spirit connections for a brighter future. The authors combine their collective skill sets in druidry, wilderness survival skills, permaculture, and more, to create this new framework for engaging in an eco-centric spiritual practice and lifestyle in the 21st century.
This in-depth guide explores seven principles for reenvisioning humans' relationship with the living Reconnection, Respect, Rewilding, Regeneration, Resilience, Reenchantment, and Revisioning. Each principle is introduced through storytelling and then discovered through the Bard, Ovate, and Druid framework, detailing exercises the reader can engage in to experience the principle through creative, explorative, interpersonal, and spiritual actions.
Readers will explore how to
• build community around nature-based ceremony, cultural sharing, and experiences in the wild;
• develop meaningful skill sets such as permaculture, survival, and ancestral skills;
• tap into the primordial energy of the Earth and nature through ceremony and meditation;
• use ceremony to rejuvenate and regenerate the natural world;
• reconnect with nature in meaningful ways, including building ecological knowledge;
• rewild their lives with wild movement and creativity, and connecting to nature's rhythms; and
• tend and regenerate their local ecosystems and communities.
With Eco-Spirituality, discover a guide to a more meaningful, connected, and future-oriented nature spirituality.

208 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 28, 2025

About the author

Dana O’Driscoll spent most of her childhood in the wooded hills of the Laurel Highlands region of Pennsylvania, making mud pies, building brush cabins, and eating berries. Thankfully, little has changed, and she can still be found searching out tasty mushrooms, gathering herbs, and playing her panflute for the trees. Dana enjoys various kinds of wildcrafting, earth skills, and natural arts and is often covered with paint, dirt, or both. She is a certified permaculture designer and is working towards a more resilient, self-sufficient lifestyle through beekeeping, perennial agriculture, animal husbandry, food preservation, herbalism, and natural building. She also serves as a community organizer to promote ethical wild food foraging, food security, and community empowerment using permaculture methods.

Dana has published Sacred Actions: Living the Wheel of the Year through Earth-Centered Sustainable Practices with Red Feather 2021, as well as the Tarot of Trees and Plant Spirit Oracle. She is an Ollave Adept and currently serves as the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. Through AODA, she edits Trilithon: The Journal of the Ancient Order of Druids in America and the Druid’s Book of Songs, Ceremonies, and Prayers. She blogs at www.thedruidsgarden.com.

Reviews

[Karen Elias · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would give Eco-Spirituality in the 21st Century ten stars if I could.

At a time when the state of the world is felt by many to be out of sync with our deepest longings, the authors, Dana O'Driscoll and Nate Summers, acknowledge this frustration and provide us with what they call a “visionary road map” designed to help us co-create, with the more-than-human world, a balanced and hopeful future. Combining text with Dana's inspired artwork, the book offers steps we can take today to reconnect with the natural world, moving us past our current state of personal disconnection and global environmental degradation to make possible a much-needed transformation.

Many of us feel stuck because we find it difficult to imagine the kind of positive future that would allow humans and more-than-humans to flourish while acknowledging and respecting our planetary limitations. This inability to imagine outside the bounds of the given, the authors insist, favors the status quo. It permits the continuation of a consumerist mentality that feeds an empty lifestyle and locks us into an extractionist economy that is doing increasing damage to the Earth.

The book takes time to undermine many of the beliefs that keep us entrenched in this destructive mindset. One of these is anthropomorphism, the often deeply unconscious presumption that human beings are a superior species with rights to dominion over the Earth. The concomitant idea that the natural world has lesser intrinsic value makes possible the damaging insistence that Earth is merely an inert resource from which we can extract, with impunity, whatever we need. This set of ideas has helped foster the loneliness and tragic disconnection from the living natural order that human beings are experiencing today in ever greater numbers.

The authors insist that the necessary shift away from this pervasive mindset is possible, and they offer a joyful process that includes powerful tools, practical, ceremonial, and visionary, to facilitate what they see as both a personal and global transformation. With a nod to the 3 R's that represent for many of us the basic foundation of an essential education, their proposed journey includes seven steps, each involving a return to what might be called our original relationship with the Earth: Reconnection, Respect, Rewilding, Regeneration, Resilience, Reenchantment, and Revisioning. In the book's overview, the authors state: “We recognize that if humanity is to survive and thrive in the future, we need to re-envision our entire approach to human life, and eco-spirituality is at the core of that approach. Thus, we offer a grand vision of seven principles – what we call the 7 R's – for re-envisioning humans' relationship with the living earth.”

I am currently on my third reading of this inspiring and necessary book, purposely slowing down this time around to better absorb, and practice, its teachings. My suggestion? Purchase this book at your earliest convenience and then take all the time you need to savor its wisdom. We need to start, yesterday, on the path toward personal and planetary healing. This book offers a compelling vision of what such a path might look like, and in what magical, momentous directions our journey could go.