What kind of guidance can those worlds I call forests provide for living well on Earth in times of planetary anthropogenic ecological fragmentation? How, that is, can we learn to “ecologize” our ethics? I approach this question as an anthropologist. That is, as someone who is committed to cultivating forms of radical listening as I move among modes of being that can, at times, dissolve me in my quest to understand who I am amid a larger flow of life that vastly exceeds me. Reflecting on my ongoing anthropological, and increasingly collaborative, research in and around indigenous communities of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, and drawing on and distorting immersive ethnographic technologies in the process, my goal is to use what I thus might learn to help find a path that can orient us (humans) in our attempts to live well in relation to the many kinds of others that make and hold us. “Ecologizing” ethics, I argue, turns on understanding the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in a number of registers. I explore in various ways, including via the relationship between form and ends in biology and the relation between wholes and parts in shamanism. I do so, ethnographically, by attention, first, to how diverse engagements with forests manifest this, and second, by virtue of an exploration of how different forms of “aesthetic” representational techniques might manifest this.
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