Willow Defebaugh’s debut book The Overview began as a series of meditations on the world around us. In a weekly newsletter, the Atmos editor-in-chief penned a series of intimate meditations on spiritual ecology, transness, the climate crisis, and more.
“Each week, I take a different aspect of the natural world, whether it’s a specific species, family, or a natural process, or an ecosystem, and I learn as much as I can about it — and then I do my very best to attempt to pull some human insights from it,” the author says of her process.
One hundred of those essays are now collected in an anthology featuring stunning nature photography from a variety of artists. Arranged around four core themes of reverence, balance, evolution, and healing, the book is a gorgeous work of art all its own. It is also a testament to the vital contributions of Atmos, a nonprofit publication which Defebaugh co-founded in 2019 after leaving a career in the glossy magazine world. Described as “a cross between National Geographic and Vogue,” Atmos features rich visual art and deep explorational writing about the ways in which humans and nature are inextricably intertwined. Like Atmos itself, The Overview encourages connection with the earth in the face of ecocide.
“Cultivating a sense of reverence and reinvestment with this planet is the core of this work,” Defebaugh tells me. “Otherwise, we’re just really treating the symptom instead of the actual disease, which is our sense of separation from everything else.”
To mark the book’s release, Defebaugh spoke with Them over Zoom about reverence, becoming your own home, and the queerness of bodies.
Can you talk about what you call the core principles of spiritual ecology — reverence, balance, evolution, healing — and how you divided the book around those themes? What do those words mean to you as a writer, as a trans person, as an ecologist, and all of those things at once?
Spiritual ecology is a vast and very loose framework. It’s looking at the natural world through a spiritual lens. Different people have interpreted it in different ways throughout time. For me, I focus on these four words because they were really the themes that I found emerge most in my work and in my writing.
The first chapter of the book is “Reverence,” which I had to start with because that’s really what it all comes down to for me and why I specifically wanted to take this approach — not just with The Overview, but also with Atmos. Reverence is about beholding something with wonder. I think that looking at the natural world purely through a scientific lens as something that we’re trying to analyze and break down and understand, can sometimes remove that degree of wonder or awe. Baked into the idea of reverence is also an inherent sense of respect and humbling oneself. If we’re really going to repair our relationship with the environment, we need to humble ourselves before this vast interrelated system that we’re a part of called the earth.
From there, the next theme pillar is “Balance.” We have an entirely anthropocentric worldview which places human beings at the top. We think of ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution and intelligence. We are incredibly intelligent in some ways, but at the same time, we are also the only species that’s really committed ecocide. The natural history of the earth is just contraction and expansion. We’re in this expansion point for our species and it’s inevitable that there will be a contraction point if we don’t step in and create some kind of balance ourselves.
Which brings us to chapter three, which is “Evolution.” Transformation is the lens through which I see everything. It’s also what our species needs now more than ever. The areas in which I talk about my own transition within the book are really meant to highlight that transformation is possible. It’s a messy experience, and it’s a reminder that people can change. Evolution doesn’t have to be scary; it’s also incredible.
The last section is “Healing,” which speaks to the idea of: What is a wound if not a separation? It’s something that has split apart. It’s a schism. The core wound is our sense of separation from the rest of life on Earth. The climate crisis, I believe, is a human crisis and it’s something we have to heal within ourselves and with everything else that we share this planet with.
You also touch on the idea of home. You write about coming home to the self and “becoming home” as a natural process. Can you talk about that idea of home and how it intersects with nature, ecology, and evolution for you?
It’s really apt because the root of eco comes from the Greek word meaning “house” or “home.” So when we talk about ecocide, we’re talking about the destruction of our home. When we talk about ecology, we’re talking about the study of the homes that we are a part of. And what a beautiful understanding that the ecological self that we’re trying to return to is a sense of home within ourselves. I spent a lot of time thinking that my journey of personal discovery and transformation was totally separate from my work, and it was really through writing this book that I understood that they were very much the same thing. Something that’s so special about being queer is that our journey of coming home to ourselves is so integral. I mean, what is coming out if not coming home to ourselves?
It’s fascinating to me that queer people, and especially trans people, are so much the subject of public discourse and debate because I think there is such a resistance. When you watch someone really come home to themselves, you sort of have two responses: You either see that and become inspired to do the same, or that concept is too frightening to you and you run away. I think there’s a parallel with environmentalism, where people are almost afraid to confront the level of separation that we have from our true ecological selves, which is being part of this large natural world. The same political parties who want to stop queer people from becoming themselves authentically — especially thinking about all of the anti-trans legislation and healthcare bans — are the same parties that are keeping us on this path towards ecocide. The parallels are just so obvious.
In the foreword, ANOHNI writes, “The erasure of trans bodies has been a crucial step in decimating the trail of breadcrumbs that might lead humanity back to its source: wilderness.” Can you share some thoughts on wilderness as humanity’s source and how trans joy and beauty are at the center of that source?
Everything ANOHNI writes just speaks to my soul so much. Over the years, she and I have talked about this notion of transferability. And this idea that being trans — or being queer, largely, but I’ll just talk about it from my own experience being trans — is about returning to your own wilderness and reclaiming that sense of wildness. I can only speak from my experience, but I knew who I was from a very young age and so much of my life has been about coming back to that, and allowing that inner sense of self to bloom and come to the surface. What is that if not a return to our own nature? That’s why I always think that these bio-essentialist narratives that trans people are unnatural or queer people are unnatural are almost laughable to me. Because what is it if not nature that is speaking through us? It’s so much a returning to who we are. I think queer people are connected to nature in a way that is so special.
There are a lot of different kinds of bodies — physical, metaphorical, allegorical — that you explore in the book. How were you thinking about the body as you were writing these essays?
I think of a body as being a whole. Something so beautiful that we can learn from bodies, whether it’s my body or in the terms we use like “a body of water.” We’re referring to it as something singular, but in actuality it’s a totality of many different beings and identities and organisms. I myself am made up of thousands of different species of bacteria and fungi that keep me alive. I call myself Willow and I refer to myself as a singular being, but our very selves are ecosystems. We are a body, but we are also a body of bodies. To me, that understanding of body is so inherently queer because it’s questioning what identity really is. We hold contradictions, we evolve and change, and there are so many different parts of ourselves that we are attempting to integrate.
[That concept] also speaks to another integral aspect of queerness, which is community. Given the ways queer people have been oppressed and continue to be oppressed, I think that has forced us to form strong bonds. Queer people are a body: this beautiful body of all these different diverse parts and identities, much like a human body or the body of nature. So much of what healing is is a sense of embodiment. It’s understanding how to be in your body.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The Overview is available now via Atmos.
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