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In the wise words of John Muir: When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. Not only is everything hitched to everything else, but that everything is extremely varied and complex. By design. Our long-held approach to the world—one where we consider resources to be more valuable when extracted and simplified, where reductionist thinking is regarded as more focused and somehow more powerful, and specialization thought to foster efficiency—is clearly falling apart, producing what seems to be a tsunami of global crises. Crises of climate and weather, fire and brimstone, disease and disassociation. Failures of our individual, collective and planetary minds, bodies, and souls. Despite it all, this is not that hard. It is we who make it hard. We try to pick out things by themselves. We revere some people and alienate others. We judge some materials treasure, others trash. And, in doing so, we have built a world where monoculture is destroying ecosystems, communities, and our health, while lining the pockets of corporations; where individuals literally die of loneliness and broken hearts when a human hand is right around the bend; where our taste for ease has at best left us longing and adrift, and at worst, anxious and depressed. If we look to ecosystems, we see a very different story—despite the havoc we are wreaking on all systems. We see marine algae functioning as primary producers—building biomass from carbon and sunlight—to support a web of life that ultimately feeds the great whales. We see fungi building webs between trees of all species in a forest, allowing plants to talk to each other. Through this internet of fungus, they help each other by sharing nutrients and carbon and by warning of impending threats, including pathogens and pests, using chemical signals. We see some organisms using energy produced by plants directly, others eating organisms that ate plants, still others eating organisms that ate organisms that ate plants, and so on in a complex system entirely supported by the sharing of energy produced by plants and microbes. Every single piece of this web matters. Every single piece of this web contributes to its beauty, its capacity, its resiliency. If we were to follow the lead of nature to focus on reciprocal and regenerative arrangements rather than linear ones in the design of our cities and agricultural systems and communities and relationships, we would be well on the way to healing the ills of the world. As you move about in your world, I encourage you to see it through a systems lens—where you consider a stranger an equal contributor and other species as your sisters and brothers, an expenditure a flow of energy, value, and meaning, the origin and content of the food you eat as important as its taste for—each of these things is hitched to everything else in the universe. If you act from this place, you can’t help but improve your world. Check out more of my writing here.
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