Sea Change

 

Let’s begin with a premise: that to address our planetary crises, we must expand our ideas of democracy.

 

Fundamentally, life on Earth is rich with subjects.

 

If we believe in democracy—if we believe that the best way to organize the world is to give everyone a voice in matters that belong at least in part to the collective—it’s because we have an egalitarian assessment of human value. Money, property, education, race, parentage, religion, looks: these things affect our lives in myriad ways, but they do not make our experiences of the world, and our opinions about those experiences, more or less valuable. We are all first-person subjects, worthy of consideration and citizens of the world with perspective to offer. One person may have a deep knowledge of history, another may understand the ways of the natural world, another may be a wonder at fixing things. A diversity of experience is not just acceptable; it’s essential to the functioning of a community.

 

By not extending this appreciation to the natural world, we landed here: in a climate catastrophe; a mass extinction; a crisis of depleted soil and rainfall that is perennially too little, too much, or in the wrong place; and a multifaceted pollution emergency that includes plastics, heavy metals, radioactive waste, and industrial chemicals in our water, soil, and air. Many of us thought of Earth as an “it”, an object. We also thought of plants this way, and animals too in many cases (especially if we wanted to eat them, wear them, or experiment on them).

 

But Earth is not an object—or at least, the Earth that we know is not. Because when we talk about Earth, we’re not talking about elements, rock, and a molten core. We’re talking about the only known biosphere, a wildly complex system that includes every one of us, and that every one of us co-creates all day and all night, with every breath, every bite, every emanation of waste or heat from our bodies, every step, every purchase. We are world-makers, every one—and the same goes for every plant (without which we could not breathe), every animal (beavers are only the most obvious “ecosystem engineers”), every butterfly, every bacterium. Each of us evolved not only to thrive within these niches that we collectively create—but to alter them in turn so that they thrive too. To alter, therefore, one another.

 

We are a vibrant biological puzzle of trillions of pieces, constantly transforming the precise ways we fit together as we unfold in time and space.

 

All species experiment and push boundaries in this process, and throughout history we, like others, have sometimes overtaxed our niches—for example, we hunted some megafauna into extinction, and we deforested vast areas of the Fertile Crescent, China, and Europe, both directly (for wood and farmland) and indirectly (by keeping sheep). When that’s happened, the cultures responsible often learned their lesson; alternatively, they waged war against their neighbors for their resources. This is a choice we still recognize today: learn something humbling and become wiser, or double down in order to not have to experience humility. Either way, the abundance of life was such that over time, a new normal always began to thrive again.

 

The last few hundred years of pillage by the wealthy countries of the global north is the great exception—and as a result, we may not survive, and certainly will not thrive, at least not until we begin to heal the damage we’ve done (or until we are so reduced that we no longer interfere with the restoration of Earth by other species over millennia). Some individuals may thrive in some ways in coming years—but we’ve seen what happens when the interests of a handful of individuals are in opposition to the interests of all the rest of the world, and it’s ugly; oil companies understood the threat of climate change nearly 50 years ago, and simply built their offshore drilling platforms higher. More recently, we’ve seen that a new generation of oligarchs, too, is happy to simply keep their pyramid scheme going: more data centers, more AI, more material goods manufactured and shipped and landfilled in quick succession. This response will hasten the end of thriving for the rest of us, perhaps greatly, and the degradation it causes will last for a very long time.[1]

 

The trouble is that human lifespans are short, political and economic narratives have a great deal of inertia (such that they sharply circumscribe our notions of human nature), and our catastrophes have snuck up on us; slow-moving consequences with tipping points tend to do that, because they seem merely like problems at first, and we’re pretty confident of our ability to solve problems. The solutions to any given problem often seemed to be just around the corner, and sometimes they were; the air quality in London or Los Angeles is far better than it was a hundred years ago. But many such improvements were simply a movement of the problem to someplace less visible (we used to pollute streets with our waste; now we pipe it out and pollute oceans and rivers), and others fixed an immediate problem while ignoring a much longer-term one (the visible, and noxious, smog in Los Angeles was addressed; carbon dioxide was not).

 

It’s fair to wonder: if this is all simply a tragedy that happened because problems seemed manageable until we understood their true scope (at which point it was too late), what does it have to do with democracy? Shall we give votes to moray eels and mice?

 

Nature has done so already, by making the world wildly interdependent. Viruses agitate against us quite successfully all the time; bacteria sometimes do too (though often they’re our closest allies); it’s not purposeful in the way that we imagine that word, but it’s nonetheless quite effective at maintaining the diversity essential to thriving. It’s effective as an evolutionary mechanism for a biosphere, in other words. When the ancients imagined that plagues came from a vengeful god, they weren’t entirely wrong, even if there was no vengeance and no god; the system was disturbed, and it responded. When we steal from soil bacteria and fungi, our own food becomes less nourishing. When we kill wolves and coyotes, the too-many deer eat all the young trees and the mouse population explodes, bringing Lyme disease with it. And so on.

 

All beings are subjects, each with their own hero’s journey. Every life on Earth, no matter how simple, has awareness and desires and trajectory: this, not that[2]. Bend towards the sun, or hide safely in a burrow. Play in order to learn your capacities. Revel in a good meal. Blossom. Groom each other. Mate. Tend young. Live out the intent in your bones (or leaves, or mycelia).

 

For billions of years these trajectories worked in concert to develop the health and complexity of the biosphere; humanity was born into Earth’s most riotously rich moment in history, our one true Eden. If there was an overabundance of one population, there was a predator (beast or virus or other) not far behind. That’s nature’s rough-and-tumble participatory democracy, with each voice contributing to a richer, more robust whole. One group could seize resources and dominate for a while, but it always backfired eventually, because evolution acts at the level of the species, not the individual, and the only wealth that really matters to any species is a thriving world where they may continue to thrive. If you wipe out your own most valuable resources, you are not a successful species.

 

We have been responsible for extinctions; we have caused disasters. Even if these things are not unique among animals, we have done them to a unique degree. And the piper must be paid: we are no longer threatening a single species or an ecosystem abundant enough to bounce back within decades or centuries, but rather all of them, in myriad profound ways that interact with one another. We have turned our magnificent living puzzle into a Jenga tower, and we’ve pulled out far too many blocks, hypnotized by the stories we’ve been told about the world, in which taking was what made us kings.

 

We cannot survive on a planet where ecosystems are crashing all around us—we cannot feed ourselves, we cannot fend off disease and disability, we cannot find water free of microplastics and other toxins[3]. Without a robust natural world, we suffer and falter; we’ve already begun.

 

We cannot “fix” our biggest problems, because living beings are not widgets—not toasters, nor even cars or computers. The biological web has to heal—and to help it do that, above all else, we have to stop ripping it apart, and we have to start acting like one species among many, with humility about the limits of our understanding.

 

Some problems are in one sense simple enough that they do seem like widgets—say, the atmosphere’s concentration of carbon dioxide molecules—but they still interact in complex ways with the rest of the biosphere. We cannot emit one unit of carbon pollution in a Shenzhen factory and hoover up one unit in a Nebraska prairie without countless knock-on effects depending on how, what, when, and precisely where we’re emitting and hoovering. Yet we keep hallucinating widgets, looking for engineering solutions to biological problems. Bioenergy from trees was famously declared carbon neutral, because trees grow back (log one, grow one! it’s math!)—which overlooked the fact that it takes several decades for a tree to begin absorbing a substantial amount of carbon, and that most of the carbon in the forest is soil carbon, which is lost because of the use of heavy logging machinery, and which may take millennia to be reabsorbed. One old growth cedar is not equal to one seedling—nor even a thousand seedlings. And even if we could somehow get the carbon math right, it ignores the many essential functions of a forest that have little to do with CO2 (but which will affect it in turn): filtering water, cooling streams, purifying the air, preventing landslides, and providing habitat and sustenance for countless creatures.

 

We have to see the forests, not just the trees—nor the board feet of lumber therein. When we reduce a living web down to a widget, we miss nearly everything that’s important about it.

 

If we begin treating the other denizens of the world like subjects rather than objects—inherently valuable, interesting, and playing roles in the web that we will never fully fathom—then we can, perhaps, save ourselves. A rights of nature framework is the approach that Ecuador and many sub-national entities have taken—including the city of Everett, WA, which gave the Snohomish River rights in its legal system. The eponymous government entity in Kim Stanley Robinson’s book The Ministry for the Future suggests a related model: recognize whose voices cannot be in the room, and give someone the responsibility of attempting to speak for their interests. Might there be ministries in every government for that nation’s primary ecosystems? Or would the animal and plant kingdoms be represented in clusters of some other sort, with pollinator experts convening with avian and farming experts? How would the overwhelming need of all living things for a reasonably predictable climate system be represented across the ministries? How would the threat of temporary but potentially catastrophic events like pandemics be integrated?

 

Any such system would probably be doomed to strangeness, and would definitely be doomed to imperfection—but also, any such system would probably be leagues better than what we have now; the Endangered Species Act was transformational, but it gives animals no rights until they are (much more than literally) decimated, thus vastly reducing genetic diversity, and the ability of those species to keep their ecosystems healthy. The Clean Water Act was a big step forward, but it doesn’t account for things like agricultural runoff, or the PFAS in the foams used to fight wildfires. The Clean Air Act was essential, but until 2007 it simply ignored carbon dioxide, and it grandfathered in major sources of pollution like coal plants. In all of these, we thought we were being both bold and pragmatic, balancing immediate needs with our desire for a healthy natural world. We forgot that a thriving whole is the most baseline need that we have; it cannot be “balanced” against other needs, because it lies at the root of every one of them.

 

There is precedent for a broader and more egalitarian worldview, of course—primarily in Indigenous communities, which historically have had direct and deeply knowledgeable relationships with the lives around them, some of which were integrated into their own identities. But even in Europe, in the middle ages, animals were sometimes perceived as so central as to be part of one’s self, and a self was not strictly internal to an individual—it was part of a social whole; take someone out of their community, and it wasn’t just that they’d be lonely or vulnerable, it was that their self was greatly diminished. There’s a fugitive truth in this worldview: when we talk about someone being powerful, for example, we don’t mean only that they could fire us, hire us, or hurt us, we mean that some aspects of their self (history, relationships, words, art) have a life well beyond the person standing awkwardly in front of us at any given moment. Their power resides elsewhere, though it is part of who they are—because a “self” is a capacious entity with many and varied connections through time; we all have tendrils of self that affect people in ways we can never fully understand, and that can persist in our absence and even after our death.

 

So the social self is still very real, and we can see that without squinting too hard, but in Western culture, we have mostly forgotten to recognize it as real; we do tend to think of a self as internal to an individual, so the fact that it also resides in our relationships is knowledge that’s adrift in some sense. It seems likely that our registering the rest of the living world as subjects with their own versions of desire and meaning is quite similar; this is an awareness we had for hundreds of thousands of years, so it doesn’t take very much to nudge us back to it, even though it seems a little wild—even primitive—at first.

 

Perhaps this is partly because we fear the consequences of such knowledge—have we been monsters? Do we have to give up everything we’ve grown accustomed to? Will recognizing that plants and other animals are as fully alive as we are mean that we can never cut down a tree or eat a hamburger?

 

These seem to me to be the wrong questions. The raucous democracy of the living world is unsentimental, and it gives voice more to species than to individuals. Everybody eats, and only plants eat light; the rest of us eat what was once alive. There are still excellent reasons to avoid unnecessary suffering and death, of course, but the living world is likely more disturbed—physically—by the scale and conditions of animal agriculture, than by the simple fact of bovine death. Treating living things like widgets, especially at scale, is what turns the Eden we inherited into a barren planet where every bean is counted. It’s our gravest mistake, and we’ll be paying for it for a long time, because this is a Jenga tower that falls over years, decades, and centuries.

 

We haven’t done very well with “love thy neighbor”, even when we understood it to imply only humans. Can we find a way to treat the living world as a major actor in the human polity?

 

All possibility, all joy, and all thriving depend on it. We can find a way to return the Earth to being a vibrant biological puzzle, constantly transforming—or we can eke out increasingly difficult lives in a ruined world. Those are our only options.

 

Is the deepest intent in our bones to thrive? I believe that it is, but our work is cut out for us.