Mor Keshet is a New York-based Integrative Eco Art Therapist who has worked internationally with refugee children, survivors of human trafficking, and families in crisis. She defines emotional resilience as the ability to recover and adapt in the face of stress, adversity, and change. Many people learn this skill in therapy or through self-help, but she asks: what if the deepest teachers of resilience are right outside our doors, in nature?

Biomimicry is often understood as emulating nature’s forms and systems to solve human challenges. Keshet extends this idea to emotional and relational well-being: What if ecosystems could show us how to metabolize fear, restore balance, and regenerate after trauma?

She tells the story of the Klamath River. When it was freed after a century of damming, salmon surged upstream within weeks. Otters reappeared, wildflowers bloomed, and a damaged ecosystem remembered how to breathe. In an age of climate grief, she says, this moment was more than ecological—it was emotional. It showed that systems can heal, and that nature offers not just metaphors but living blueprints for how we, too, might adapt and endure.

Keshet calls this “post-traumatic ecology.” Like post-traumatic growth in psychology, it names the regenerative potential that follows disruption, but places the focus on systems as well as individuals. Healing, she suggests, is not a return to normal but an evolution into deeper interconnection.

In this article Keshet makes a wonderful connection: emotional resilience is not the absence of suffering; it is the capacity to reorient toward vitality after disruption. Like rivers, we carry histories and encounter blockages. Yet with the right conditions, we too can flow again. Just as ecosystems adapt through fire, flood, or drought, our psyches adapt through trauma. This process, slow and layered, mirrors ecological succession, where new complexity emerges after disturbance. Healing does not erase the wound—it grows life around it.

"By emotional biomimicry, I mean drawing on nature’s strategies not for buildings or materials, but for how we regulate, recover, and relate. It is my way of describing how we can embody ecological principles – adaptation, diversity, cyclical regeneration – to restore emotional integrity and resilience."

"In healthy ecosystems, diversity isn’t a threat, it’s a strength. The same is true emotionally. Yet in our hyper-pathologized, dopamine-chasing culture, we often categorize emotions as “positive” or “negative,” rather than recognizing them all as necessary and informative. We distract ourselves from burnout and label grief as a problem. But diversity is necessary to the health of an ecosystem."

"This approach invites us to stop pathologizing our responses to a profoundly dysregulated culture, and to begin honoring our feelings as signs of vitality. Rage, despair, and grief aren’t just symptoms,  they are signals and part of what makes us human. Just as the river can carry sediment, salmon, and stillness all at once, we too can carry the full spectrum of emotion; in fact, it’s necessary for resilience."

ARTICLE: Post-Traumatic Ecology: Learning Emotional Resilience from the Living World

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