“We’re Here, We’ve Got Changed, We’re Going Out”: Wild Swimming Groups as Ecologies of Care

Abstract Green/blue wellbeing is increasingly a focus of mental and physical healthcare in the United Kingdom, with green/blue space “prescribing” touted as providing a range of benefits. Attempts to explore the “how” and “why” of potential mental health improvements through these activities to date are primarily quantitative, and/or utilize medical/individualized models. Such approaches are situated within and can reinscribe a humanist, extractivist, one-way relationship with the natural world. Here, we draw on ecofeminist approaches to care to explore findings from our fieldwork with two wild swimming communities in Scotland, enabling us to consider human–nature interactions as relational. The wild swimming focus groups presented a complex picture in which the mental health benefits of swimming are entangled with relationships between group members, and embodied, sensory experiences of and relationships with blue spaces. By conceptualizing these groups as “ecologies of care,” we seek to embrace that intricacy, considering how wild swimming is a political act engaged with through deviant bodies or in deviant temporal/weather conditions, and how care is engendered through mutuality, space, and cold water. In conjunction with this complexity, the emergent nature of these groups has transformative implications for futurity, justice-to-come, and hyper-local ways of living within and alongside blue spaces.