The article examines conceptions of ecological humanism that approach the world as an integrated whole, drawing on prevailing strands of Chinese intellectual traditions in which human life is understood as inseparable from the dynamic patterns of the natural world. The Zhuangzi offers valuable resources for contemporary efforts to develop a more relational and integrative ecological philosophy that also accommodates free subjectivity. These starting points illuminate how Zhuangzi’s philosophical thought is connected to a distinct form of Chinese humanism and to discourses that conceive the human—nature relationship as holistic, but not irreductively fused. The article points to the possibility of an alternative worldview that can help us, in our limited time and space, find the possibility of living some kind of sustainable yet here-and-now moment.
Jana S Rošker (2026) studied this question.