Interdependence (and other stories about nature): part two
Welcome to the second article in this series exploring queer ecology and other transformative subjects close to my heart. My dream is to bring this work to more people and I’m hoping to publish it as a book in 2025. Please share with your friends!
Read more about me here: https://otterlieffe.com/
Relationships are everything
I think about relationships often and you probably do too.
I have a memory of being in an ecology class in a badly insulated trailer-classroom during my degree. Feeling understimulated by whatever we were being taught, or at least how we were being taught it, I stared out of the window and let my thoughts wander. As daydreams often do, this one brought me a realisation, maybe even a flash of understanding, about how elements of an ecosystem are related to each other.
Although ecology can be more holistic than some other science disciplines, a lot of teachings are framed, perhaps unconsciously, as the struggles of individuals and individual species. In a classic food web model, there are beech trees and there are caterpillars and there are blue tits and there are hawks; all of them are presented as atomised objects interacting with each other on the background of ‘habitat’.
But for me, in that moment, all these seemed like interconnected, ever-changing manifestations of life — inseparable from each other. Once captured, studied, maybe mounted on the wall of a museum, they were fundamentally changed. Because their relationships stopped existing and what are any of us without our connections?
This realisation didn’t come out of nowhere.
Out of the classroom, I had been reading a lot of Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings. I learned that in all traditions of Buddhism, the belief in an independent self, separate from all others, is considered a primary source of suffering. In other words: “Everything relies on everything else in the cosmos in order to manifest.” [1] That felt important to me then, as it does now.
Long before that, I had spent large periods of my childhood ‘alone’ — meaning in the company of non-humans — in woods and on beaches and the backs of playing fields absorbing my own limited understanding of the interdependence of life.
Also, as anyone in marginalised communities will know, relationships are at the centre of everything — our spaces, our networks, and our survival. [2] Along the way I have been a part of radical queer and trans community, chronically ill and disabled community among others. Organising for survival has been a part of my life since I was ten or eleven and, despite decades of burnout and frustration and for all our imperfections and clunky unlearning, mutual aid and solidarity still get me up in the morning.
As hard as they can sometimes be, I know that relationships are what keep us alive.
Cooperation
Which brings us to cooperation.
While they continue to be dominant in Western mainstream culture, the simplified stories of competition are far from universal. From shrimps to slime moulds, from bacteria to zebras, scientific research has repeatedly confirmed that cooperation is foundational to complex life.
In 1902, Peter Kropotkin, a Russian zoologist and anarchist, wrote Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution in which he emphasised symbiosis and cooperation over competition and struggle. He described how cooperation exists in nature, and that it too must serve a purpose in natural selection. “Sociability,” he stated, “is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.” [3] His ideas anticipated the now recognised importance of mutualism and altruism in biology.
Western models of competition have been contrasted with many Indigenous models which interpret interspecies interactions as more cooperative than competitive. In the words of Potawatomi plant ecologist, Robin Wall Kimmerer:
“…since competition reduces the carrying capacity for all concerned, natural selection favors those who can avoid competition. Oftentimes this is achieved by shifting one’s needs away from whatever is in short supply, as though evolution were suggesting “if there’s not enough of what you want, then want something else. This specialization to avoid scarcity has led to a dazzling array of biodiversity, each avoiding competition by being different. Diversity in ways of being is an antidote to scarcity-induced competition.” [4]
In her inspiring MSc dissertation from 2021, British-Bengali writer, community organiser and artist, Maymana Arefin explores mutual aid further, looking at mycorrhizal networks and their similarities to mutual aid networks set up in the UK during the first years of the Covid-19 pandemic. Importantly, Arefin also reminds us of the limitations of metaphors:
““some of the dynamics that arise in mutual aid work are unique to human relationships and hence complicate the use of a non- human metaphor. In these instances, the metaphor must be applied with caution so as not to risk projecting intentionality or human-centric values onto mycorrhizal fungi.” [5]
Emergent multi-species communities
Yesterday, cycling through the woods near where I live, I saw the signs of beavers everywhere: fallen trees and piles of chewed bark, paths in and out of ponds and a magnificent lodge pushing up against the water. If you ever needed a reason to get excited about beavers, their interdependence with other species is a big one.
Beavers (Castor fiber) are a keystone species, meaning they have an exceptionally large effect on their environment relative to how many of them there are. Where I live in central Europe, beavers can literally co-create the habitats they live in. By damming rivers and flooding land, they create wetland habitats for otters, trouts, and kingfishers and play a key role in flood management [6]. By coppicing trees, they create dense cover for warblers. Even the tree-sized gaps they leave in the forest apparently help pipistrelle bats to navigate.
Having spent the last years sharing habitats with beavers, I can attest to how massive their influence can be. Swimming in their lakes, surrounded by an abundance of water life, I find it hard to imagine that humans here nearly drove them out of existence a century ago.
The concept of ‘keystone species’ is a useful one for ecologists. It is also important to remember that rather than describing any particular object or state, the concept essentially describes relationships. Beavers live embedded in relationships with herons and perches and duckweed — and all the other organisms who rely on their habitat-forming behaviours. In turn they rely on countless species for food, housing and clean, liveable water. If we ignore that context, if we reduce beavers (or anyone) to simple, individual objects — as reductionist science often does — we lose a lot of essential information.
Another layer to the beaver story is that they, like us, rely on microorganisms in their gut to digest food. Beavers have a strictly herbivorous diet consisting of hundreds of species of plants — from the rootstocks of waterlilies to the bark of hazels. To help digest all of that fibre, beavers have an internal fermentation chamber with diverse communities of bacteria and archaea which (who?) break down the plant material into substances that the beaver can digest. Up to thirty percent of the cellulose they eat is digested this way.
There are no beavers without the community and habitat they rely on and influence, and there are no beavers without their microbiome of coevolving symbionts. They, like all of us, are interdependent with the species around and inside them.
And sitting in the woods, reflecting on those gnawed trunks, something moved in me.
Like the beavers with whom I share a habitat, I too am an emergent, multi-species community. My body consists of trillions of bacteria and others. They co-evolved with my ancestors and many produce enzymes that my genome never evolved to: without them I couldn’t digest food and I couldn’t write these words. In turn, some are dependent on a human gut to live in — they need me too.
Even in the cells of our bodies that are firmly human, around eight percent of our genes are viral in origin. And each mitochondrion in each of our cells has its ancestry in ancient, free-living bacteria.
In other words we have never been individuals and we are never alone — despite the stories Margaret Thatcher may have told us.
The implications of this worldview are immense. If our bodies were always made up of (infected by) others, then politics that revolve around purity and the stigma against people living with HIV, for example, have even less of a place [7]. If we are all interconnected, then damage to one of us hurts all of us, including our ecosystems. If life isn’t only competition, if we are not just individuals fighting to win the game of life, then we might need to rethink some of our behaviour towards others in our communities.
This might be a lot to take in — it might feel a bit philosophical, even abstract. I’d like to offer the following reflection exercise as a way to explore your own experience. Direct experience, after all, is worth more than words.
Reflection
If you grew up in a similar culture to the one that I did, you may have been taught that every object and organism is separate from everything else. This understanding was less of a specific lesson we were taught, than an invisible assumption about life, absorbed over the years and never questioned.
As we’ve seen, this separation doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Not only is my body made up of billions of others without whom I couldn’t live, if I took away all the beings I’ve consumed and cuddled, all the water I’ve drank and bathed in, all the ancestors and communities and experiences that have formed me, there would be nothing left. As much as I might think that I’m separate from that apple tree over there, or that bumblebee with the cute white tail, that warm breeze or memory of the ocean, I’m no longer certain that’s true.
During the first lockdown of 2020 I remember sitting on the floor of the tiny studio flat in the city where I lived. I was in lockdown alone (and would be for the good part of two years) — and also I wasn’t exactly alone.
At some point, the wind had blown a stick in through the window. It was from the massive, whispering black poplar tree in the yard and as I looked closer, I understood that the stick was covered in a community of lichens: a microcosm of yellows, greens and reds. And I was reminded that within each lichen, was another community of fungi, algae, bacteria, viruses. I looked outside the window — the poplar was busy with treecreepers, and nesting wood pigeons and who knows how many invertebrates beyond my vision. I was surrounded by community and always had been.
I invite you to get up close to something — or someone — a stick, a spider, a spoon, and try practising the opposite of all that individualist conditioning. Look for the interconnections, living or non-living (and feel free to interrogate that binary as well while you’re there as I attempted to in my novel, home is a verb).
Look for the lichen on the stick and the fungus in the lichen. The oxygen in the spider, created by trees and dandelions and marine algae, all part of the same air that you’re breathing right now. Even the spoon in your soup came from somewhere, its materials mined from the guts of the planet.
If the cult of individualism damaged us so profoundly, what healing might it bring if we remembered how connected we are?
Explore where exactly you end and where other begins.
Are you sure?
Look closer.
References
[1] Insight of interbeing. Thich Nhat Hanh, 2017
https://www.garrisoninstitute.org/insight-of-interbeing/
[2] Interdependence: Crip Collective Care and the Myth of Individualism. Indigo Ayling. 2020
[3] Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Peter Kropotkin, 1902
[4] The Serviceberry. An Economy of Abundance. Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2022.
https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/the-serviceberry/
[5] Mapping Alternative Futures through Fungi: The Usefulness of Mycorrhizal Networks as a Metaphor for Mutual Aid. Maymana Arefin, 2021
[6] Beaver dams attenuate flow: A multi-site study. Puttock et al, 2020
https://beavertrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Puttock_et_al-Hydrological-Processes-2020.pdf
[7] Queer Theory for Lichens. David Griffiths, 2015
https://core.ac.uk/reader/235683163
Kes Otter Lieffe is a writer, ecologist and community organiser currently based near Berlin. She is the author of four queer speculative fiction novels and several short stories. She also writes non-fiction on class and queer ecology. Kes writes from a working-class, chronically ill, transfeminine perspective.
Learn more about Kes’ work and how to support it at https://otterlieffe.com/
https://www.patreon.com/otterlieffe
Special thanks to Athene Knüfer for detailed edits and feedback and to Natalie Kontoulis for proofing!
