In 2022, the Nobel Prize in physics went to a team who proved that everything in the universe is "non-locally real" on a quantum level, meaning that reality is fundamentally relational. You can imagine this in different ways, that we are all one body or that there are invisible strands connecting all the bodies, holding us all together in a literal web of life. We’re not even, technically, separated by space on a quantum level; what happens over there is also always happening here. It is a beautiful proof of our enmeshment, out interrelationality, our absolute interdependence. It suggests there is no such thing as distinct beings, but rather a continuum of beingness to which we all belong and through which we all express aliveness.

This is somewhat echoed in the environmental mantra that we are not separate from nature but are nature. Environmental thinkers and writers have encouraged all of us to perceive that oneness with the wider world, and with each other, as a means of bypassing the culturally inculcated belief that human beings are somehow other or superior to the natural world, and that we as human beings live individual lives. Ecology shows us time and time again that nothing lives in a vacuum; that, to live, we must be inherently intertwined with one another. Eradicating the violence with which homo sapiens have eradicated our fellow species necessitates feeling into that intertwinement and recognising the edges that contain us are far more blurred than we imagine.

And yet.

And yet I see a new pattern of thought emerging from very recent literature which challenges this absolute collectivism and seeks to reinstate the individual as intrinsic, valuable, and real. Rather than swinging the pendulum back along the binary of collective vs individual, researchers and writers like Alyssa Battistoni and Melanie Challenger (whose episode is out in a few weeks) are gesturing towards a whole which includes, protects and affirms the necessary distinctness of each living being within the wider collective. For Challenger, prioritising the collective over the individual creates policies which forget the organism for the species, such as conservation approaches which only consider the macro rather than what is done to individual living bodies. For Battistoni, her formula for freedom hinges on the necessary interaction between the individual and the collective, an ambiguous space which produces the conditions for human choices to become meaningful.

These women are pulling at a vital thread, and doing so in such a way which reconciles what has previously been considered a tension, forcing us to ideologically take up a position at either end and staunchly defend it. I have always found this quite difficult, as my romanticism for the biological world which has come to me over the years of doing Planet: Critical never quite usurped a libertarian streak which I prize dearly (and by libertarian I mean the original sense of the word which inferred that the individual should not be interfered with by government or other institutions). I am invested in the particularities of my own freedom, or sense of freedom, and have always taken great joy in expressing it in whatever absurdist way I can manage in a world which increasingly felt divested of choice. And yet, my body is but one of many, and my life but one of many, and I am wholly dependent on the great vehicle of aliveness which marches time on Earth forward. I did not feel that these two beliefs and interests were at odds within me—but, equally, I had never been forced to put them to the test, so to speak. I am indebted, then, to the work emerging now which weaves these two vantage points as interdependent necessities; a friction, a balance, through which life itself emerges.

It is the very fact of our distinctness from each other which creates the possibility to be together. If we were not distinct; if our bodies did not hold their shape, or if all the molecules of every living thing were identical, and we existed as one great super structure, one great river, perhaps, then there would be no experience of being other than oneness. And how can life emerge from oneness? How can evolution occur without the possibility of chance encounters between distinct creatures? How can bodies and environments shape one another into difference in the dance of accidental genetic gardening? How would complexity emerge? And language? Art? If we were not somewhat contained within ourselves within the whole, and instead lived as the whole, would we have anything to say at all?

The limitations of our physical forms—our genetic certainties, our defined edges, our inbuilt entropy—are what make the relationships we choose to create and nurture meaningful. We are indeed all interconnected ecologically, biologically, genetically, culturally, and even on a quantum level, but the very finiteness of each of our experience of being alive limits the choices available to us, which makes the interconnections we actively commit to matter all the more. Matter matters, and more than we give it credit for. It is the genesis of constraint and freedom, of dependence and independence, of sovereignty and belonging. Matter contains but one, and this inherent limitation is what allows each of us to feel the very many all around us, and, within everything, find our place.

Every year, an idea catches my eye that takes up most of my intellectual headspace. There is something crucial about this individual within a collective formulation which I think chimes nicely with the work we've been exploring on this newsletter about reproductive labour and feminism over the past few months, and it's what I'll be chewing over in the months to come. Our political institutions are imploding thanks to their inability to reconcile what has long been portrayed as a negative tension of incompatible poles rather than a necessary tension which holds the shape of the world. Much of feminism's adherence, too, to the absolute sovereignty of the individual has failed to produce a theory of liberation for all people—let alone all beings. The fact that we are both separate and enmeshed, together and apart, that we must make room for possibility by not collapsing into certainty—these are the very conditions which produce life, but also the very ambiguity which produces discomfort. And yet, this is where meaning comes from: from our choices, as per Battistoni, and from the distinct boundaries of our sensory bodies which feel their way through the world, as Challenger argues. We cannot make meaning without being both one and just one, both together and distinct. We cannot find the edges of what is possible if the world loses its edges altogether.

The very first time I drank ayahuasca, I was overcome with the sensation that we are all one. And then a question came to me: Why are we not one big tree? Why did Life divide herself into many? Soon, the answer followed: Life divided herself in order to love herself. That lesson has stayed with me since, but now I find new language to affirm it, in tandem with Challenger and Battistoni. We are divided so that we may come together, so that we may choose to do so, and so that our being with one another may mean everything to each other.