2Ecosexuality is a movement, a sexual identity, a philosophy, a field of study and an expanded notion of human sexuality, highlighting what Michael J. Morris calls “the ecological entanglements of sexuality” (qtd. in Stephens and Sprinkle, “Ecosexuality” 315). Two leading proponents of the movement, the artists and activists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, note that the term “ecosexual” has multiple potential meanings and has undergone a change of use in the past two decades. It emerged, they explain, “around the beginning of the new millennium, first as a dating term to describe a person who was perhaps interested in vegetarianism and/or environmental causes, or someone who did not use leather, enjoyed nudism, or evoked whatever the prefix eco (from Latin oeco, meaning home, household) brought to mind” (“Ecosexuality” 315). In 2016, Stephens and Sprinkle estimated that between 12,000 and 15,000 people worldwide identified as “ecosexual” (“Ecosexuality” 314). Though a diverse and by no means singular movement and identity, ecosexuality – where it has been afforded media attention – has tended to elicit images of naked hippies rolling in mud and tree-hugging taken to the extreme. The ecosexuals themselves have most often been portrayed as somewhat comical, eccentric figures.

3This is in some ways an image and a reputation promoted and celebrated by Stephens and Sprinkle, who have popularised ecosexuality since their “wedding to the Earth” in 2008. For two of the movement’s most prominent and vocal advocates, one of its main aims is to make the environmentalist movement more accessible, fun, diverse and (of course) sexy through humour, performance art and interactive events. Thus, far from the sober and solemn messages and the virtuous self-deprivation often associated with environmentalism, ecosexuals combine playfulness and pleasure with their more serious goals and beliefs. As Stephens and Sprinkle explain, “[s]imilar to ecofeminism’s concern with the destruction of the natural world in the context of unequal gender relations […] ecosexuality considers the complex interconnectedness of ecological relations in terms of sexuality, and sexuality in terms of ecological relations” (“Ecosexuality” 317). Crucially, ecosexuality encourages a re-envisioning of the Earth as “Lover” rather than “Mother.” This metaphorical shift aims to foster a more mutual, less destructive relationship between human and non-human, whilst also opening up new possibilities for sexual experience and expression. “Generally,” according to Stephens and Sprinkle, “in Western culture, people imagine the Earth in two related ways: (1) as a generous ‘mother’ [who] takes care of us continuously or (2) as a resource that can be endlessly exploited, dominated, and controlled” (“Ecosexuality” 314). “The lover archetype,” they argue, “is potentially more sustainable, more equal, and […] one in which humans might desire to give as well as receive both love and support to and from the Earth” (“Ecosexuality” 314).

4Ecosexuality, then, as SerenaGaia Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Lindsay Hagamen explain, spins on the idea that “Eros holds the hope for the future of humankind”; the movement thus arises, Hagamen elsewhere affirms, “out of a deep understanding that the ecological crises and the erotic crises that alienate humans from their own sexuality, share a common root—disconnection—and that to heal our relationship with the ecosystems that sustain us, we are called to heal our relationship with our bodies, sexuality and erotic lives” (qtd. in Stephens and Sprinkle, “Ecosexuality” 324). Hagamen’s explanation speaks to some of the most fundamental concerns Lawrence expressed in his work; it aligns with both his desire to heal or at least highlight man’s broken and unhealthy relation to his body and to sex and his belief, as he put it in “Pan in America,” that “[w]e need the universe to live again, so that we can live with it” (MM 162).

5This article thus considers Lawrence as an early proponent of a certain brand of ecosexuality: one which anticipates Stephens and Sprinkle’s entreaty to consider the Earth as lover. We know, of course, that Lawrence had a passion for nature nurtured since childhood and an uncommon sensitivity to the natural world. As David Ellis affirms in Love and Sex in D.H. Lawrence (2015), however, “Lawrence gives to the Wordsworthian expression ‘a lover of nature’ meanings which that poet could have hardly dreamt of” (116). In this article I will analyse key passages from Women in Love, Kangaroo and Lady Chatterley’s Lover in relation to recent writings on ecosexuality, especially those of Stephens and Sprinkle. I examine instances of what might be identified as “ecosexual practice” in Lawrence’s works, suggesting that the fullest expression of the ecosexual theme in Lawrence is to be found in his writings of the late 1920s. Ultimately, I propose that reading Lawrence through the lens of contemporary ecosexual thought reveals the ways in which he anticipates not only the environmental crises we face today, but also a potential and practical way forward.

6An ecosexual reading of Lawrence illuminates his striving for the “perfected relation between man and his circumambient universe” which, he explains in “Morality and the Novel” “is life itself, for mankind” (STH 171). The shift to Earth as “lover” facilitates such a relation – what Jack Stewart calls “horizontal” interspecies relations, rather than “vertical” structures of dominance (Stewart 97). Lawrence expressed almost a century ago what the ecosexual movement today preaches: that the forces and conditions that harm the planet, which today we know are among the causes of climate change, are the same that damage man’s ability to live in tune with the Earth’s rhythms, to connect to the cosmos and thus, in sex, to truly connect to another in what Lawrence called “blood-sympathy” and “blood-contact.” Eros, then, really might save mankind.

7In their “Ecosex Manifesto,” Stephens and Sprinkle set out the basic tenets of the ecosex philosophy. Point 1 affirms the ecosexual commitment to the Earth as lover, while Point 2 explicates the kinds of activities this might entail:

WE MAKE LOVE WITH THE EARTH. We are aquaphiles, teraphiles, pyrophiles and aerophiles. We shamelessly hug trees, massage the Earth with our feet, and talk erotically to plants. We are skinny dippers, sun worshippers, and stargazers. We caress rocks, are pleasured by waterfalls, and admire the Earth’s curves often. We make love with the Earth through our senses. We celebrate our E-spots. We are very dirty. (Stephens and Sprinkle, “Ecosex Manifesto”)

Stephens and Sprinkle elsewhere further expound the variety of practices in which ecosexuals might engage. They range from the fairly unremarkable – “rubbing a velvety sage leaf and inhaling its scent, hugging a tree, or enjoying the feel and taste of a sweet, juicy strawberry” – to more extreme and even dangerous activities including “running naked through a field of stinging nettles, getting pounded and submerged by big ocean waves, […] swimming with whales, or tornado chasing” (Stephens and Sprinkle, “Ecosexuality” 319-320). Furthermore, “[e]cosexual practices can be quite innocent, such as squishing wet clay between your toes, and also quite taboo, such as ‘getting off’ on the grain of a wooden conference table during a faculty meeting” (Stephens and Sprinkle, “Ecosexuality” 320). Importantly, sex with humans is also part of ecosexuality, as humans are part of, not separate from, nature.

8We find many examples of what Stephens and Sprinkle would consider “ecosexual practice” in Lawrence. In the “Breadalby” chapter of Women in Love, Birkin, barely conscious, having been attacked by a lapis lazuli-wielding Hermione, escapes into nature, fleeing “to the open country, to the hills”; he is driven by desire: “he wanted something” (WL 106). On a wet hillside, he removes all of his clothes and lies naked in the primroses, moving “his legs, his knees, his arms right up to his arm-pits” among them, then “lying down and letting them touch his belly, his breasts” (WL 106-107). Finding it “such a fine, cool, subtle touch all over him, he seemed to saturate himself with their contact” (WL 107). Craving something other than the softness of the wet primroses, he goes to a clump of young fir trees “no higher than a man” and lets the “soft sharp boughs beat upon him” as they throw “cold showers of drops on his belly”; a thistle “pricked him vividly, but not too much” (WL 107). Rolling in sticky hyacinths and covering his back in handfuls of fine wet grass, he finds it “soft and more delicate and more beautiful than the touch of any woman”; it is all “very good, very satisfying” (WL 107).

9In this moment, “Nothing else would do, nothing else would satisfy, except this coolness and subtlety of vegetation travelling into one’s blood” (WL 107). Here Lawrence’s theory of “blood-consciousness” is extended to include the natural world; “[t]he leaves and the primroses and the trees,” Lawrence continues, “really came into the blood and were added on to him” and he “was enrichened now immeasurably” (WL 107). This is not only a refreshing moment of repose in nature, but something much more significant. Indeed, it is an enactment of what Lawrence described in a letter of December 1915, where he claimed that “all living beings,” even plants, have a “blood-being” and are thus capable of the kind of transmission he describes “when [he] take[s] a woman” (L II. 470).

10Feeling a pain in the side of his head from Hermione’s blow, Birkin thinks of her momentarily, but quickly concludes that she, like all people, does not matter when one has “leaves and primroses and trees”: “He did not want a woman – not in the least” (WL 107). Knowing he must go back into the human world, Birkin feels safe in the knowledge that he knows now where he belongs, “where to plant himself, his seed […] This was his place, his marriage place. The world was extraneous” (WL 107-108). He questions his sanity, worrying that someone might have seen him lying naked with the vegetation. Yet he feels sure that were he on an island alone “[h]e could love the vegetation and be quite happy and unquestioned, by himself” (WL 108). Nature, here, is a clear substitute not only for a woman, a lover, but for all human relationships, for the repulsive “old sanity of the world” and the “old ethic” (WL 108).

13Lawrence would later explain, in “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” that “[m]arriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth” (LCL 323). “If England is to be regenerated,” says Lawrence, “then it will be by the arising of a new blood-contact, a new touch, and a new marriage […] it will be marriage set again in relationship to the rhythmic cosmos” (LCL 328). He explains that there is a progression here and a path to be followed: “First, there is the relation with the living universe. Then comes the relation of man to woman. Then comes the relation of man to man. And each is in blood-relationship, not mere spirit or mind” (LCL 331). Birkin’s dazed, sensual communing with the natural world then sets him on this path toward the ultimate affirmation of and submission to ‘the vast, creative non-human mystery” (WL 478), to his consoling realisation at the end of the novel that “[t]o be man was as nothing compared to the possibilities of the creative mystery. To have one’s pulse beating direct from the mystery, this was perfection, unutterable satisfaction. Human or inhuman mattered nothing” (WL 479). This realisation clearly mirrors the sense of perfect satisfaction Birkin felt in the consummation of human and inhuman he experienced on the wet hillside.

14In Kangaroo, Somers finds a similar fulfilment in the natural world. He also retreats into nature when dissatisfied with human relations. More specifically, he goes to the sea. Near the end of the novel, with Kangaroo about to die, Somers flees to the shore, feeling soulless and alone. Under a full moon, “so strong, so exciting” (K 340) to him, he goes to be alone with the sea, with only wild ponies as company:

This sluicing, knocking, urging night, heaving like a woman with unspeakable desire, but no woman, no thighs or breast, no body. The moon, the concave mother-of-pearl of night, the great radium-swinging, and his little self. The call and the answer, without intermediary. Non-human gods, non-human human being. (K 341)

Again, Lawrence depicts a sensual communion with nature that seems far more satisfying and uninhibited – as it is “without intermediary” – than the human relationships available to him. Like Birkin, Somers equates the combination of full moon and rising tide with a human, female lover. He later says of his love of Australia that he “want[s] [the country] as a man wants a woman”; he “fairly tremble[s] with wanting it” (K 347).

15Lou Witt in St Mawr experiences a similarly erotic relationship with nature and place. As she informs her mother at the end of the novella, there is something in the New Mexican landscape which is “more real to [her] than men are”; it is a wild “spirit which “needs” and “craves” her, to whom her sex is “deep and sacred” (SM 155). Here nature or the spirit of place is again clearly figured as a lover. For Lawrence, Ellis observes, “when erotic satisfaction is denied by other human beings it can be discovered, or at least sought, in the natural world” (116). Certainly, these characters resort to the natural world and take comfort in nature when human lovers or friends are either disappointing or (as in Hermione’s case) positively murderous. Yet if Earth or nature is a satisfactory lover only as a replacement for a human lover who disappoints or hurts, then the parallels with ecosexuality fall considerably short.

16For Somers and Birkin, their retreat into nature is a momentary retreat from life and from the world; it is accompanied by an initial feeling that the human world is extraneous, that other people are unnecessary. Their sensual encounters with nature, though, herald a new beginning: a break from their previous lives, part of a cycle of death and rebirth and a consequent openness to new connections. Their human and non-human lovers are in some moments brought together, as when Birkin and Ursula make love in Sherwood Forest or when Somers comes to Harriet straight from the sea and is to her “like another creature” (K 147). In these novels, though, Lawrence did not quite express what he would later articulate far more clearly in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, that real sex must connect not only man to woman or man to nature, the cosmos, or the universe; it must do all of these things.

17In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Connie’s withdrawal into nature begins, like that of Birkin and Somers, as a bid to escape the stifling confines of Wragby. Here a new beginning and an awakening to new consciousness is also rooted in a sensual experience in nature. Abiding by nature’s rhythms, Connie’s retreat into the wood coincides with the coming of Spring (“When the crocus cometh forth I too will emerge and see the sun” [LCL 85]). The wood is immediately figured as a sacred and sexualised place; Connie is “strangely excited” there; sitting with her back to a “young pine-tree,” she finds it an “erect, alive thing.” On another occasion, following Connie’s first sexual encounter with Mellors, on returning to the wood she can almost feel “the huge heave of the sap in the massive trees” in her own body (LCL 121). The trees themselves are described as “glisten[ing] naked and dark, as if they had unclothed themselves” (LCL 122). Connie is aligned with the wood and the trees in particular; she is later described as “like a forest, like the dark interlacing of the oakwood, humming inaudibly with myriad unfolding buds” (LCL 138).

18We know that Lawrence himself had a special relationship with trees. Janet Flanner’s New Yorker obituary claimed that “[h]e had, among other eccentricities, a fancy for removing his clothes and climbing mulberry trees’” (36). This claim has been widely dismissed as sensationalist gossip, but there is no doubt that Lawrence, much like many proponents of ecosexuality, was especially fond of and fascinated by trees. Most notably, he enjoyed writing with his back against a tree: in Germany, Italy, England and New Mexico he is known to have written in such a setting. In Ebersteinburg, where Aaron’s Rod was finally finished, he wrote of the “strange stimulus” of the Black Forest and the “living company” of the trees which give off “something dynamic and secret, and anti-human, or non-human” (L iv. 25).

19In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the wood is a haven in a world descended into “mechanical anarchy” and “mechanized greed,” a bastion of the old England in the new, though it is merely “a remnant of the great forest where Robin Hood hunted” (LCL 41). Connie considers that it might be “one of the unravished places,” but quickly retracts this thought in the exclamation: “Unravished! The whole world was ravished (LCL 94). “Some things can’t be ravished,” she concludes, “You can’t ravish a tin of sardines. And so many women are like that: and men. But the earth –!” (LCL 94). The use of the word “ravish” here (with its strong suggestion of another word: “ravage”) and the associated implication that the Earth, unlike a “tin of sardines” can be and indeed has been “ravished,” figures the destruction of nature as a sexual act: an act of rape. It aligns the “evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines,” the malign mechanical world Mellors feels sure will soon “destroy the wood,” so that “the bluebells would spring no more” (LCL 119), with the actions of a sexual aggressor. Mellors’ feeling that “[a]ll vulnerable things must perish under the rolling and running of iron” extends to Connie, who has “some of the vulnerability of the wild hyacinths” and is not “all tough rubber-goods and platinum, like the modern girl” (LCL 119) as well as to himself. Lawrence suggests – much as Hagamen does – that the same conditions that destroy the wood and the Earth itself also destroy mankind, the relations between men and women and man and the cosmos.

20Connie and Mellors resist this by integrating nature into their sexual relationship, so that their sexual and spiritual union connects them not only to each other, but to the wood in which their love-making takes place and, by extension, to the wider cosmos. Indeed, a defining characteristic of their sexual relationship, as Ellis notes, is that it takes place almost always either in a natural setting or close to nature, giving the “impression that their love-making is part of the natural cycle of things” (Ellis 150). One of their early sexual encounters takes place under a tree in a little space with “a pile of dead boughs” (LCL 133). There are parallels here with Paul and Clara of Sons and Lovers, who “includ[e] in their meeting the thrust of the manifold grass-stems, the cry of the peewit, the wheel of the stars” (SL 398) and with Gilbert and Johanna who, in Part 2 of Mr Noon, make love in a dry ditch under a beech tree.

21In another notable scene, Connie and Mellors adorn each other’s bodies with flowers, threading forget-me-nots and campions into their pubic hair. Here is something akin to the performative and comical element now harnessed by the proponents of ecosexuality in their work. Again, a kind of marriage in nature is evoked; Mellors announces their adorned genitals as “John Thomas marryin’ Lady Jane.” By involving the natural world in their love-making as a kind of third lover, Lawrence emphasizes the ways in which Connie and Mellors’ sexual relationship is aligned with and enriched by the Earth’s natural rhythms. Connie and Mellors, like the ecosexuals, thus commit not only to one another, but to a new, regenerated vision of human and non-human relations. In such relations, the divisions of class and other worldly impediments to being in love and in nature may be overcome. The alternative, they feel, is death and destruction. As Mellors writes in his letter to Connie at the very end of the novel, “[i]f things go on as they are,” this is all that awaits mankind in the future. So he believes “in the little flame,” “the forked flame” (LCL 300-301) between himself and Connie, which is for him “the only thing in the world” (LCL 300); it binds them together in oneness with nature and the universe, anticipating an eroticized world in the future.

22The entanglements of sex and ecology in Lawrence’s final novel are given particular attention in Pascale Ferran’s 2007 film adaptation, Lady Chatterley. Based upon the novel’s second iteration (sometimes referred to and published as John Thomas and Lady Jane), in Ferran’s film the wood is granted almost the status of a third protagonist. In a film with little dialogue and even less music, the sounds of the wood – of streams, birds and even of the trees who seem to converse with one another – predominate. The film’s full title – Lady Chatterley et l’Homme des Bois – further indicates the centrality of the wood. Parkin, even more so than Mellors, is of the wood; Connie in the novel version imagines him as one of the “wild men of the woods” she has seen depicted in old German drawings (FLC 460). In one of the film’s most powerful scenes – a relatively short passage in the second Lady Chatterley and removed in the third – Connie exults in nature as she runs naked during a rain shower. Parkin follows suit, catches her and they make love amid mud and rain. In adapting Lady Chatterley for the 21^st century, then, Ferran amplifies the aspects of the novel that speak most clearly to the ecosexual movement emerging almost contemporaneously.

23In the earlier version of the novel there seems less concern for life beyond the central relationship, for the industrial revolution or the aftermath of the war. Lawrence thus affords more space to “the delicate best of life, the touch” (FLC 323) and to tenderness, an aspect so central to the novel that it was one of several titles he considered. Both are intimately associated with nature, with the communion of human and non-human:

The touch of feet on the earth, the touch of the fingers on a tree, on a creature, the touch of hands and breasts, the touch of the whole body to body, and the interpenetration of passionate love: it is life itself, and in the touch, we are all alive. (FLC 323)

Again, there is a progression here, from the touch of human and non-human to touch between humans culminating in “the interpenetration of passionate love.” Lessons must be learnt from nature, Lawrence insists, before one can approach and truly connect to a human lover and before one can truly experience “life”; “when you come to life itself,” he affirms, “you must come as the flower does, naked and defenceless and infinitely in touch” (FLC 323). For nature is so “tender and full of life,” where man is so often “tough and insentient, hard as iron gripping the wrong things, and missing everything!” (FLC 323). “Why,” Connie wonders, “could human life never be soft and tenderly coming unfolded into leaf and blossom?” (FLC 323).

24Read together, the second and final versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover reveal perhaps the fullest expression of Lawrence’s ecosexuality, registering both his sense that the correct relations between men and women are modelled and enhanced in nature and the extent to which these relations are fragile and under threat in modern, post-war society. Oneness with nature, Lawrence explains in “A Propos to Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” is paramount if mankind is to survive. “Vitally,” he warns, “the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe” (LCL 330). This means ceasing to think of the moon as a “dead lump of earth” or the sun as “so much gas with spots” (LCL 331). It means recovering what the Christian religion, in Protestantism, finally lost: “the togetherness with the universe, the togetherness of the body, the sex, the emotions, the passions, with the earth and sun and stars” (LCL 331). Lawrence would later profess, at the end of Apocalypse, that

For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. […] We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. […] What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections […] and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. (A 149)

Though Lawrence’s rhetoric here is perhaps more solemn and certainly more eloquent than that of Stephens and Sparkle’s “Ecosex Manifesto,” the message is ultimately the same. For Lawrence, as for the proponents of the ecosexual movement, a more intimate connection to nature might be the key to saving both the Earth and the human life it sustains. Those deadening and mechanising forces, which alienate man from himself and his body and render sex merely personal, are the same forces that ravish the Earth and ravage the environment. The ecosexual call to figure the Earth as lover and to promote Eros as the hope for the future of mankind thus finds expression in several of Lawrence’s major works; a movement that properly emerged only a decade ago might claim him as an ancestor. As we increasingly look to Lawrence as a prescient or prophetic figure in these times of uncertainty and environmental crisis – as we ask what Lawrence can tell us about our current situation – it is worth attending to these commonalities.

25Read in conjunction with the contemporary ecosexual movement, Lawrence offers new ways of thinking through our relationship with the environment and new ways of figuring sex and sexuality as irrevocably entangled in the ecological. There are undoubtedly aspects of Stephens and Sprinkle’s ecosexuality that Lawrence would have thought ridiculous and with which he would have disagreed quite resolutely, yet the fundamental messages and desires here are finally alike. Humanity is doomed if it does not begin to love and care for the Earth as one might a lover; if we do not “re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth,” we cannot live. “And what” Lawrence asks, “does life consist in, save a vivid relatedness between the man and the living universe that surrounds him?” (MM 160)