We are collaborative compound organisms
Humans are not solitary beings, but collaborative compound organisms, coordinating the world together.
Yes, we are beginning to encounter ourselves—not always comfortably or pleasantly—as multi-species beings already partaking in timescales that are fabulously more complex than the onwards driving version of history many of us still imagine ourselves to inhabit. The work of the radical biologist Lynn Margulis and others has shown humans to be not solitary beings, but what Margulis memorably calls “holobionts”—collaborative compound organisms, ecological units ‘consisting of trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that coordinate the task of living together and sharing a common life’, in the philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s phrase. —Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey
- see also: the external world is as much you as your own body, which can’t be separated either from the fact we are the process of the universe
- see also: animism is a dynamic, relational structure, because this thinking is not new, when viewed from the perspective of animist traditions of indigenous peoples
- see also: holobionts are both more and less than one