This piece belongs to A Human Geography of the Self, a series that reads my own life through the concepts geographers use to understand how people and places make one another. It draws on my doctoral and master’s work on the body and somatic knowledge, and on my life as an open-water swimmer.
“In the lake I stop being a thing with edges and become a place where water passes through.”
When I slip into the cold lake at first light, something happens that I have spent years trying to describe. The boundary I walk around with all day, the firm sense of where I stop and the world begins, loosens and goes soft. The water is the same temperature as the inside of grief. It moves into the spaces between my fingers, against my eyes, into my ears, and my breath becomes the loudest thing in the world, a tide of its own. For a few minutes I am not a person looking at a lake. I am a membrane the lake is moving through. In the lake I stop being a thing with edges and become a place where water passes through.
For most of my life I was taught to think of my body as a machine that my mind drives around, a bounded object, sealed and separate, carrying me from task to task. Geography has helped me unlearn that. There is a rich body of work in the discipline that understands the human body as something far closer to what I feel in the water: porous, ecological, continuous with its surroundings, a living system among other living systems. This post is about reading the body as an ecosystem, and about why that reading is a matter of dignity and even of human rights.
The Body That Has No Clean Edge
The geographers who study this work under the banner of visceral geographies (the study of how the body’s gut-level, fleshy sensations shape, and are shaped by, the spaces we move through). Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy (2010), in the paper that helped name this field, set out its central commitments. Visceral geographies, they argue, advance our understanding of the agency of physical matter, both within and between bodies, treating the fleshy body as an actor in social and political life rather than as a passive vessel (Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy, 2010). They press us to move beyond static notions of the individual body toward more interactive versions of self and other, and above all they encourage a deep skepticism of boundaries, inviting us to live in, through, and beyond the old dualisms that wall the body off from the world (Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy, 2010).
That phrase, skepticism of boundaries, is the lake exactly. When I swim, the boundary between my body and the water is revealed as the convenient fiction it always was. Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy (2010) also remind us that the visceral, despite how we talk about it, is far from presocial or simple, and that the body is far from a thing set apart from culture and meaning (Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy, 2010). My gut reactions, my startle, my ease in water, were shaped by a whole history. The body is porous to its past as much as to the lake.
We Are Made of Exchange
If the body has no clean edge, then what passes across that open border becomes the very thing the body is made of. Fay, Coen, and Lawreniuk (2026), writing toward a geography of breath, make this beautifully concrete through the simplest act there is. Bodies and environments, they argue, are involved in processes of co-emergence and co-creation, so entangled that they cannot be cleanly separated, and breathing is their illustrative case (Fay et al., 2026). Each breath shows the body’s very constitution being perpetually mediated by the air and the place around it, by factors social and political as much as biological (Fay et al., 2026). The body, in their account, is a site where matter and energy converge, not a sealed container (Fay et al., 2026).
I think about this every time my breath becomes a tide in the cold water. I am taking the lake’s morning into my chest. The oxygen that becomes my thinking was, a moment ago, the world. The line between the environment and me is a revolving door rather than a wall. Fay and colleagues (2026) push this toward something they call an emancipatory respiratory politics, the insistence that everyone should be afforded the right to breathe clean air (Fay et al., 2026). I find that turn quietly radical. If the body is made of what it exchanges with its place, then a poisoned place becomes a poisoned body, and the right to a healthy environment becomes a right held in the lungs. The ecosystem of the body and the ecosystem of the world are one continuous system, and justice has to be measured across both.
Decentring the Lonely Human
There is a larger shift underneath all of this, and a Canadian geography has been quietly mapping it. Asker and Andrews (2020), reviewing posthumanist work across Canadian geography, describe its shared starting point as a scepticism of human exceptionalism, a refusal of the idea that humans stand alone, above and apart from the rest of the living world. In this work, they write, the sovereign human subject is decentred, and the agencies of a full array of human and nonhuman actors and forces are acknowledged (Asker & Andrews, 2020). They note that many geographers prefer the gentler name more-than-human geography for this same impulse, the attention to everything beyond the human that shares in making the world (Asker & Andrews, 2020). Relational ethics, they observe, sit at the centre of this tradition (Asker & Andrews, 2020).
To call a body an ecosystem is to decentre the lonely, sovereign self in just this way. I am not a single author moving through inert scenery. I am a gathering of dependencies, a crowd of other lives and processes, held together for a while and called by my name. Montefusco (2026), writing on relational food geographies, names the deepest version of this as radical interdependence, the recognition that we are constituted by our relations rather than merely connected across them, and frames the body as the scale through which we live, immersed within metabolic relations that connect society, ecologies, and place (Montefusco, 2026). Every meal, every breath, every cold swim is that radical interdependence made flesh. I am, quite literally, made of my relations.
The Dignity of Being an Ecosystem
I want to close on why this matters beyond the pleasure of a morning swim. For years I treated my body as an instrument to be driven hard and ignored, a machine that owed me performance regardless of how I used it. That belief is a quiet violence, and I have done it to myself. Reading the body as an ecosystem returns it to me as something living, interdependent, and deserving of care, a place rather than a tool. An ecosystem can be depleted, and it can be tended. It has limits that are not a personal failing and rhythms that ask to be honoured.
So I keep going down to the cold lake. I let the boundary go soft. I take the morning into my lungs and give back my warmth to the water, and I feel, for a few minutes, the plain truth that geography spent decades arriving at: that I have no clean edge, that I am made of exchange, that I am one small interdependent system inside a much larger one. The body is an ecosystem. To treat it as such, in myself and in everyone whose air and water and rest are under threat, is the beginning of a justice measured at the scale of the breath. I am not a machine. I am a living place. So are you.
References
Asker, C., & Andrews, G. J. (2020). The understated turn: Emerging interests and themes in Canadian posthumanist geography. The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien, 64(4), 551–563. https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12639
Fay, G., Coen, S. E., & Lawreniuk, S. (2026). Of life and breath: Towards geographies of breath and breathing bodies. Geography Compass, 20(3), Article e70069. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.70069
Hayes-Conroy, J., & Hayes-Conroy, A. (2010). Visceral geographies: Mattering, relating, and defying. Geography Compass, 4(9), 1273–1283. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2010.00373.x
Montefusco, G. (2026). Relational food geographies, underwater: Discussing food and oceans’ entanglements along urban waterfronts. Geography Compass, 20(4), Article e70074. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.70074
