Everything Is Connected

Natural sciences regularly provide new data showing that the world exists as an interconnected system. This lays the ground for a post-capitalist ethic, reflected in the long-ignored wisdom of indigenous people.

On being ecological

Capitalism is culturally based upon the assumption that mankind is distinct and superior to nature, consequently implying that the latter is to be used at our immediate and exclusive convenience. This colonizer mentality has brought the living world as we know it to the brink of extinction. Feeling the urgency of a cultural shift, many people now agree that we are one with the world around us. What does this realization effectively lead to?

To the Achuar, an indigenous community living in nature along the border between Ecuador or Peru, “nature” does not exist. It does not need to. They see no distance between them and the jungle they are a part of by their way of living. To them, most plants and animals are other beings with the same agency, intentionality, and even self-consciousness as people. Hunting and gathering are, for the Achuar, governed by a sense of care and respect owed to relatives.

On the cultural polar opposite, our modern world tends to dismiss such animist views as quaint metaphors. Cut off from nature’s gift of life, this view is nevertheless the mistaken one. Far from being exclusively about extraction and exploitation, our relationship with nature must be explored from within. Seeing life’s creativity as what binds nature as a whole is, in that sense, a spiritual journey toward facts, not fantasies, the same way that personal relationships can only be genuinely understood when lived. Once recognized for the gift that they are, all relationships prompt a deep sense of reverence and gratitude. Life is a gift far exceeding one’s single body since it takes nothing less than the whole of nature to make individual lives possible.

It might come as a cultural shock to many, but man is not at the top of the natural world; instead, we live in interdependence with it at all levels of our being. This is why, for the Achuar, there is no “nature” since nature is what we are. They know their fate, and thus ours too, is bound with that of the jungle and that the day they decide they are not like other beings there, both worlds might eventually disappear.

This intimate connection and kinship with plants, animals, and even inanimate beings like rivers and mountains implies much more than sustainably exploiting natural resources. Shared worldwide among indigenous populations, respect, reverence, and gratitude toward nature have made it so that 80% of the planet’s biodiversity is on territories stewarded by them.¹. Obviously, there is an immediate environmental benefit to living in a world where nothing is less than human and where, consequently, it is morally unfathomable to exploit and destroy at will.

The Western extractive and exploitative culture of the last 500 years is a consequence of the idea that there is a definite separation and hierarchy between nature, mankind, and God. This literal and thus superficial interpretation of the Bible conveniently instituted a principle of authority in exercising power, similarly giving God’s benediction to “civilized” people for plundering the creation at will. All we were left with was greed, and God almighty has so far been incapable of teaching us that engineering the sixth mass extinction of all life forms on the planet is not a good idea.

Our relationship to nature can, by opposition, be enriching and fruitful. But it has to be an actual relationship, not the morbid application of a principle stating that nature can mean nothing to us. From a practical standpoint, moreover, adopting the “primitive” moral code of never taking more than the other is willing or able to give—in other words, never more than the ecosystem can regenerate—sure looks like a better way to go. This, additionally, would not impede in any way scientific and technological progress.

By the way, what does science say? Is there proof that man and nature are one?

A second scientific revolution

Assumptions that mind is separate from matter, that only men have a mind, and that nature is merely a large mechanic “became popular among European elites in the 1600s because they bolstered the power of the Church, justified the capitalist exploitation of labour and nature, and gave moral license to colonization.” Regarding the last point, it was thus assumed that even though “savages” have minds, they do not clearly know it yet and can only be grateful toward white people who take the pain to “civilize” them. This racist belief about the existence of “savages” worked like a charm in the Western psyche until the mid-twentieth century.

By contrast, during these last decades, science has been increasingly able to measure the effects of the actual interdependence between all things, its findings confirming what “primitive” civilizations (an oxymoron) have empirically known all along. Let’s give a few examples.

For a long time since their discovery, bacteria were thought to be the enemies of a clean, well-functioning body. We now know that the latter could not exist without them and that even our nervous system is impaired if bacteria are missing.² When we look at a tree, we usually consider it a single unit, but trees communicate, cooperate, and share. Not only between individuals of the same species but across species as well.³ Plants, moreover, sense: they see, hear, feel, and smell. In her groundbreaking research, the ecologist Monica Gagliano showed that plants even remember; they learn, in other words, how to better adapt to their surroundings.⁴ All this is applied science. In contradiction with the methodological postulate that nothing can amount to more than the sum of its parts, it is now proven that physical life is not the manifestation of mere automatons.

1. Hannah Rundle, ‘Indigenous knowledge can help solve the biodiversity crisis.’ Scientific American, 2019.
2. Carl Zimmer, ‘Germs in your gut are talking to your brain. Scientists want to know what they’re saying.’ New York Times, 2019; Jane Foster and Karen-Anne Mc Vey Neufeld, ‘Gut-brain axis: how the microbiome influences anxiety and depression.’ Trends in Neurosciences 36950, 2013, pp. 305-312.
3. Robert Mcfarlane, ‘Secrets of the wood wide web,’ New Yorker, 2016; Brandon Keim, ‘Never underestimate the intelligence of trees,’ Nautilus, 2019.
4. Sarah Lasko, ‘The hidden memory of plants,’ Atlas Obscura, 2017; Andrea Morris, ‘A mind without a brain. The science of plant intelligence takes root.’ Forbes, 2018.