On the radical reality of interdependence
Watch the morning ritual unfold: coffee brewed from beans grown by hands you'll never shake, possibly by children whose names you'll never know, water drawn from aquifers recharged by rain that fell on distant mountains now threatened by drought, electricity flowing through a grid connecting your kitchen to power stations, solar farms, wind turbines spinning across landscapes you've never seen, owned by companies whose shareholders profit from your daily habit.
You are held by networks of care stretching across continents and centuries, and also by networks of extraction, exploitation, and environmental destruction. The calcium in your bones was forged in ancient stars. The microbes in your gut, without which you cannot digest food or regulate mood, might outnumber your human cells. You are more ecosystem than individual, more collaboration than competition, and also more implicated than innocent.
This web extends beyond the human in ways both beautiful and terrible. Trees in forests share nutrients through underground fungal networks, sending resources to struggling seedlings, communicating chemical warnings of insect attacks, until logging companies cut the networks apart. Whales coordinate hunting strategies across ocean basins increasingly polluted by plastic and noise. Even the soil beneath our feet pulses with communication between roots, fungi, bacteria, and countless microscopic lives, except where industrial agriculture has sterilized it into dirt.
Indigenous knowledge keepers have always understood this, and have been systematically silenced for it. Ubuntu philosophy recognises that "I am because we are," a wisdom often quoted by the same institutions that perpetuate separation. Traditional ecological practices work with these relationships rather than against them, treating land as relative rather than resource, until those lands are taken for development or conservation projects that exclude the communities who've tended them.
Our economic and political systems persist in the fiction of separation because separation is profitable. They reward extraction over reciprocity, competition over collaboration, accumulation over circulation. They train us to see ourselves as isolated units competing for scarce resources rather than participants in abundant webs of mutual support, while ensuring that resources actually become scarce for many while abundant for few.
The climate crisis reveals this fiction's catastrophic consequences, and also reveals how interdependence can be weaponised. What we call "environmental problems" are symptoms of severed relationships, but also symptoms of relationships of domination. We cannot solve them through technological fixes alone, but technology is also being used to monitor and control rather than connect and care. They require what indigenous scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer calls "the grammar of animacy," ways of speaking and being that recognise our membership in the living world, while that same living world is being financialized, commodified, and traded on carbon markets.
During the early days of the pandemic, we glimpsed what becomes possible when we remember our interdependence, and also what becomes possible when we forget it. Mutual aid networks sprang up in neighbourhoods while governments abandoned their care responsibilities. People checked on elderly neighbours while nursing homes became sites of mass death. Communities organised food deliveries for those isolating while essential workers risked their lives for poverty wages. Children drew rainbows to thank key workers while their parents hoarded toilet paper. For a brief moment, care became visible, valued, essential, and completely uncompensated.
This caring web never disappeared, but neither did the systems that depend on its invisibility. It was always there, holding up the structures we mistake for solid ground, subsidising with unpaid labour the economies that extract profit from connection. The question becomes: how do we organise our lives and societies around this reality rather than the myth of independence, when independence is so much easier for those who can afford it?
Some answers already exist, though they often exist precariously. Community-supported agriculture connects eaters directly to growers while farmers still struggle with debt and climate uncertainty. Time banks value everyone's contributions equally while existing outside the economy that pays people's rent. Transition towns build local resilience while strengthening social bonds, until gentrification prices out the community members who built that resilience.
The web includes supply chains built on exploitation and ecosystems restored through collaboration. It includes the care worker whose own children are cared for by someone else's grandmother, the farmer feeding the city while unable to afford the food they grow, the solar panel that reduces one community's carbon footprint while its production pollutes another. We are held by others' labour and hold others through ours, often without knowing who we're holding or how.
To live in the web we're already in means making visible the connections that sustain us, including the ones that harm. It means gratitude for the countless hands that make our daily lives possible, and accountability for how our daily choices ripple through those hands. It means asking how our choices affect others, both human and more-than-human, both present and yet to be born, while recognising that individual choices operate within systems designed to limit our choices.
The web holds us whether we acknowledge it or not. But when we remember we're part of it, we can begin to weave consciously, with intention, with love, and also with rage at how the web has been torn and tangled. We can work to mend what's been broken while being careful not to strengthen what needs to be transformed.