Ecosexuality's Longest Pitch: Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens Want the Planet in Bed

On a sun-flat afternoon in 2026, somewhere between a coastal bluff and an editing bay, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens finished cutting the latest entry in a filmography the art world has alternately mocked, studied, and ignored for two decades. Playing With Fire, which Hyperallergic profiled on 14 July 2026, is their pitch for a genre they have done more than anyone to define: ecosexuality, a movement that treats the planet not as a resource to be managed or a wounded creature to be rescued, but as a lover worth courting.

The film's argument is deceptively simple. The relationship between humanity and the rest of the biosphere has been organised around extraction, exploitation, and consumption for at least five centuries. If that is, at root, a relational problem, then the solution cannot be a better spreadsheet. It has to be a different kind of relationship, one premised on care, pleasure, and consent rather than on what the filmmakers, in conversation with Hyperallergic, called "the pornographic logic of the Anthropocene." That framing puts Playing With Fire in a longer lineage of ecofeminist art that runs from the early-1990s goddess performances through more recent Indigenous-led critiques of extraction. What Sprinkle and Stephens add is the insistently bodily register: their films have, for years, staged literal lovemaking with trees, soil, oceans, and waterways as a way of dramatising what an eroticised ethic of care might look like.

A movement, not a brand

Ecosexuality is older than the term suggests. Sprinkle and Stephens began collaborating in 2002, married in 2014, and have spent the intervening years turning their partnership into something closer to a multi-decade artistic research project. Hyperallergic's profile traces their work from The Amazing World of Ecosexuality (a 2014 short co-directed with a small collective of collaborators) through a series of wedding ceremonies to the Earth, the sea, and other non-human partners. Playing With Fire continues that project with a feature-length structure and a wider cast of collaborators, including photographer Barbara Carrellas, whose stills are the film's primary visual texture, and a montage team credited to Kate Bornstein and Saul Villegas.

This matters because the movement's longevity is the story. Where most art-world ecological gestures arrive in cycles of attention and then dissipate, ecosexuality has persisted at the edges of performance, queer studies, and environmental activism for nearly a quarter-century. Sprinkle is 71; Stephens is in her early sixties. Their work predates the institutional vocabulary now attached to it (the "more-than-human" turn in the humanities, the "kin-making" preoccupations of multispecies ethnography) and it has consistently refused to be absorbed by that vocabulary. The films are not theoretical demonstrations. They are invitations.

Why the pleasure frame is contested

The pushback is also durable. Critics inside both queer studies and environmental organising have argued, for years, that eroticising the planet risks aestheticising the very harm it claims to oppose. There is a long feminist tradition of arguing that sexuality and violence share more infrastructure than the porn-and-praline crowd wants to admit, and a separate, equally long environmental tradition that insists on scientific and policy literacy as the price of admission to ecological argument. Playing With Fire, by Hyperallergic's account, leans directly into that friction. The film's provocations are calibrated to be uncomfortable in front of mainstream environmental NGOs as much as in front of mainstream porn audiences, and the filmmakers are not shy about saying so.

There is a second, less theoretical objection. In an era when the planet's actual emergencies are heat, drought, fire, and displacement, an art practice premised on pleasure can read as a luxury. That objection is not new, and the filmmakers' usual reply is that the ascetic register of environmental politics has, demonstrably, lost. The planet's emissions curve has continued upward across forty years of earnest moral suasion. If a different emotional vocabulary recruits even a fraction of the people that the standard one has not, the cost of being dismissed as "frivolous" is one the practitioners appear willing to bear.

What the film is actually arguing

Playing With Fire, as described in the Hyperallergic profile, leans on three working premises. First, that environmental harm is downstream of a relational stance, not an information deficit. Second, that a relational stance can be re-trained through art, ritual, and explicit embodied practice rather than through the standard battery of facts and figures. Third, that the relevant scale is intimate, not planetary in the abstract: the soil under a specific tree, the water in a specific watershed, the body of a specific non-human creature. The film stitches together performance, archival footage, interviews, and what the filmmakers describe as direct erotic engagement with sites and elements, and the cumulative effect, by the profile's account, is closer to a long seduction than to a lecture.

It also has an unusually long tail of collaborators. The Hyperallergic piece credits the montage to Kate Bornstein and Saul Villegas, and the stills photography to Barbara Carrellas, with additional appearance from a dog named Butch and a creature billed as Albert, a "mythical white peacock." The mixing of the canonical and the whimsical is consistent with the filmmakers' longer practice: they have always treated seriousness as a mode that survives, rather than excludes, camp.

The structural read

The interesting question is not whether Playing With Fire will convert anyone. The interesting question is what its existence tells us about the limits of the dominant ecological imaginary. The mainstream environmental movement, in the global North, has spent four decades perfecting the grammar of warning: scientific consensus, policy ask, donor appeal, electoral turnout. It has produced a generation of sophisticated professionals and a body of law. It has not, by any metric available, bent the emissions curve.

Ecosexuality's wager is that this is not because the science is wrong but because the relational premise is wrong. A movement premised on management and stewardship will, in the long run, produce managers and stewards. A movement premised on love, pleasure, and care will, perhaps, produce lovers, lovers, and carers. The film's deeper argument is that the choice between these two grammars is not aesthetic. It is structural. And it is one that the current architecture of environmental organising has so far declined to make.

There are reasons to be sceptical. The ecosexual frame, as a recruitment vehicle, has obvious ceilings: it is artistically demanding, culturally specific, and most readily available to people already inside the overlapping worlds of queer and experimental art. It does not scale like a campaign. It does not fund itself like a foundation. It survives because Sprinkle and Stephens have kept producing, kept collaborating, and kept insisting on the same basic proposition long enough that the proposition has, in some quarters, stopped sounding like a provocation and started sounding like a working hypothesis.

What remains uncertain

The evidence for ecosexuality's efficacy is, at this point, almost entirely anecdotal. There is no peer-reviewed literature showing that eroticised ecological practice produces measurable behavioural change. There is no funding pipeline of any size. The movement's institutional footprint consists of festivals, art schools, and a handful of academic departments. None of that is, by itself, disqualifying; many movements that later mattered began with worse institutional support. But it does mean that Playing With Fire, on release, is best read as an intervention in a conversation that is still a long way from settled, rather than as a verdict.

The thing to watch over the next year is whether the film's collaborators, and others working in the same vein, can demonstrate the relational claim in conditions harsher than a coastal editing bay. The proposition that the planet needs lovers more than managers is, at minimum, worth a serious film. Whether it can survive translation into the unglamorous work of soil, water, and policy is the part the art alone cannot decide.

Desk note: Monexus treats ecosexuality as a long-running artistic practice rather than as a viral novelty. The story is anchored to the Hyperallergic profile and the filmmakers' documented history, not to trending-cycle chatter.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Sprinkle
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosexuality