Nature and Health Beyond Exposure: Pluriversalism and Relationship (Introduction to the Special Issue)

Abstract

This article situates this Special Issue (SI) on Nature and Health within a rapidly evolving field that is beginning to move beyond narrow, exposure-based paradigms. Inspired by the 10 articles introduced here, we highlight critical questions about how the field might expand conceptually and methodologically, offering insights that challenge dominant assumptions and open space for approaches grounded in cultural specificity, lived experience, historical depth, and ecological context. In our view, the contributions in this SI continue to mobilize the field toward a pluriversal nature and health science; they invite an attentiveness to multiple worlds, diverse ways of knowing and being, and the ethnocognitive, linguistic, and semiotic dimensions of life. We situate this SI in dialogue with earlier Nature and Health collections, acknowledging how each has advanced the field by identifying, for example, structural inequities, naming epistemic exclusions, and proposing new research agendas. Building on these foundations, this issue expands the conversation, one step toward, to more relational ontologies that dissolve the human–nature divide and encourage methodological innovation. To honor the dialogic and relational ethos that motivated the call, we invited contributing authors to articulate, in their own voices, the key insights they hope readers will carry forward. Their reflections emphasize themes of relational emplacement and emotional scale, mammalsensing (the evolution-based sensory grounding of cognition and psychological life), community-centered inquiry, and reciprocity. Taken together, this introduction offers not a unified voice for the collection but an expanded horizon: a field in motion, engaging the pluriverse, and opening pathways toward more just, diverse, and relational futures in nature and health scholarship.