Interconnectedness and Nature
“The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events—that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies—and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends.”
The Pando tree complex found in Fishlake National Forest is an aptly named environmental masterpiece: Pando is latin for “I spread”. The Pando organism is an aspen tree clone which was originally born from a single seed and which now inhabits 106 acres and weighs over thirteen million pounds. Consisting of 40,000 individual trees, the Pando is the world's heaviest known organism, and has a root system over 80,000 years old.
Imagine being a single tree in this great ecological system—each day you do the work of pushing toward the sunlight, growing leaves, and healing wounds with sap. You notice the other aspen trees around you (who are also grasping for light) often get in your way. From a broader system perspective, you and these other trees belong to the same organism, yet it doesn’t feel that way in your little tree mind. Notice that recognizing the broader perspective of the forest doesn’t remove the efforts of the individual tree, instead recognizing interconnection leads to a sense of relatedness and affinity. This part of the module will focus on our place in the natural world. We will learn how to recognize our interconnectedness with the earth so we don’t have to feel like isolated trees in a connected forest.
When it comes to interconnection with the broader world, the question is not whether you connect with the natural world, it is how you connect.
“We can either experience our inescapable interdependence as a comforting sense of connectedness, or we can resist it as a form of compulsion and unwanted dependency”
As you reflect on this quote, think about the consequences of each of these ways of viewing the natural world: Which perspective will likely lead to better long-term well-being?
In many ways the very essence of our humanness is tied to our connections with the natural world. This is true both from a physical perspective (we breathe air, drink water, and eat food) and from a psychological perspective (our minds evolved in the natural environments around us). This psychological connection to the natural world has been termed “biophilia”, which is the innate need to connect with other forms of life (Wilson, 1988). Yet, we spend most of our time separate from nature. We are willing to bet that you have spent less than thirty minutes outside every day for the past week. How is the disconnection from nature impacting your psychology? In this module we will focus on our interconnectedness with nature; to learn more about nature connection, check out our nature connectedness module.
Philosopher Alan Watts wrote:
“Does the root of a flower influence the flower as something fundamentally different from it? No, surely the root and the flower are one process, and like your head and your feet it all goes together. In that sense then, the universe, and what you or I do, all goes together, and so that picture of the universe is really a picture of you.”
In this quote, we see that causes and conditions interact to create individuals—the flower is only the flower because of the nutrients and water in the dirt, the seed, and the chemicals in the air. While the seed provided the potential for the flower, the flower itself is a result of many separate processes coming together at the right time. Consider how the flower changes throughout its lifespan—it may wilt in the afternoon sun or produce seeds as a result of bee pollination. These intersecting factors mean that the flower is never a distinct object, but instead is an interconnected process. We too are processes rather than static objects—at what point are your bodily processes completely stationary, your mind completely silent? Even after death our body continues to change and interact with the world around us. Seeing ourselves as interconnected processes is both humbling and empowering: at any point we have the potential to change the world around us and in turn be changed by it. We will end out this section with another quote by Alan Watts:
“Just as there is an interdependence of flowers and bees, where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees there are no flowers. They’re really one organism….
In the same way, everything in nature depends on everything else. So it’s interconnected. And so the very very many patterns of interconnections, lock it all together into a unity, which is much too complicated for us to think about, except in very simple, crude ways….
In other words I seem, like everything else, to be a center, a sort of vortex, at which the whole energy of the universe realizes itself, comes alive. A sort of aperture, through which the whole universe is conscious of itself…
The essential point is obvious: that each one of us, not only human beings but every leaf, every weed, exists in the way it does, only because everything else around it does…
The individual and the universe are inseparable.”
What will you do with your connection to the natural environment? What responsibility do you have to the earth that created you?