The world was not made for human beings; human beings were made within a world already in motion. Mountains were rising, waters circulating, winds sculpting landscapes, and beings living, dying, and evolving long before anyone called them “resources” or “ecosystems.”
To remember this is to remember that humans are participants, not protagonists, in a larger, unfolding story. The “inbetween” names the field of forces, relationships, and intelligences that hold everything together and quietly teach us how to live.
The Missing Presence
In climate conversations, nearly all focus remains on human experience: our heat waves, our floods, our economies. Even when we speak of “nature,” it is often treated as an abstraction, absent, silent, reduced to numbers and reports.
Picture two people discussing ocean warming, the changing salinity, acidity, and oxygen levels. Their concerns may be sincere, their facts accurate, yet the ocean itself is nowhere to be found. No seawater in sight, no salt in the air, no tangible presence of what they are trying to defend.
What’s missing is not just an object but a relationship. Without water, they speak for the ocean rather than with it. That gap between human words and living reality is the “inbetween”: the space of copresence and reciprocity where genuine listening begins.
The InBetween as Relational Reality
The “inbetween” is the connective tissue of life, the space between beings that is never empty. It is where energy and responsibility circulate, where lessons about balance, limits, and renewal emerge. It is both a classroom and an ethical space: the testing ground for whether humans dominate the conversation or make room for morethanhuman voices.
When discussions ignore the inbetween, they collapse the world into a single human perspective. Nature becomes a backdrop, a passive object in need of representation. Yet the Earth is constantly communicating through tides, wind, migrations, decay, and regeneration. The problem is not silence; it is our failure to listen.
Water as Intelligent Presence
Consider water. Often labelled a “resource” or a line on a climate chart, water is in fact one of the planet’s most sophisticated presences. It shapes coastlines, redistributes heat, carries memory, and enlivens every ecosystem it touches.
Water:
- Holds memory in glaciers, aquifers, clouds, and rivers.
- Organizes life in complex webs that adapt to shifts in chemistry and temperature.
- Nourishes land and species with exquisite timing where its cycles remain intact.
To call water intelligent is not metaphorical flattery. It acknowledges a living system that responds, adapts, and cocreates the conditions for life — something no technology can replicate.
Talking With, Not For
Honouring the inbetween means refusing to speak for nature in its absence and learning instead to talk to it. This begins with presence, bringing the element into the space of dialogue, physically and symbolically, and engaging it with respect.
Imagine climate discussions where:
- A vessel of seawater rests at the center of the room, grounding the conversation in the reality it concerns.
- Participants take a moment of silence, touch the waterl, and consider where that water has travelled and what it has witnessed.
- Decisions are framed as questions to the water: What do you need from us? How are you already responding? How must we change to restore the right relationship?
The water does not answer in words, but through currents, chemistry, and movement. Listening becomes a relational practice of dialogue instead of a monologue.
Beyond HumanCentred Narratives
Recentring the inbetween overturns familiar climate narratives. It shifts concern from what climate change is doing to us to what Earth is asking of all beings, human and morethanhuman. It challenges the idea that the world is a stage built for human achievement and replaces it with humility, the awareness that our knowledge, while powerful, is partial.
Environmental destruction is not only a technical crisis but a relational one. When we discuss oceans, forests, and skies as abstractions, we reproduce the same separation and control that caused the damage.
Reweaving the Web of Relationship
Listening to nature’s voice through the inbetween calls for new practices of connection:
- Bringing elements such as water, soil, plants, and stones into meetings and ceremonies as honoured participants.
- Holding gatherings outdoors, where the morethanhuman world is not excluded but present.
- Practising protocols of greeting, gratitude, and consent before making decisions that affect the land.
- Learning from Indigenous teachings that treat land, waters, and elements as relatives with agency and law, not as mute resources.
In this way, the “impact of climate change” becomes a lived conversation among all beings. Human speech joins a chorus rather than dominating the soundscape.
Honouring the InBetween
Life will continue in some form with or without us, but human survival depends on restoring right relationships with the living world. The inbetween is where those relationships form, deepen, and become sacred again.
When climate dialogue makes space for the presence and voice of water, land, and other beings, it shifts from crisis management to relationship repair. We remember that we are not speaking on behalf of a silent planet, we are speaking within a living one.
In that shift from speaking for to speaking with, another kind of future becomes possible: one where humans take their rightful place inside a wider intelligence, listening to the teachers that have been here far longer than we have, and shaping choices that honour the lifegiving spaces in between.
Blog by Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Image Credit: Hector John Periquin, Unsplash
