Interdependence (and other stories about nature): part one
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/
Stories
I have been told many different stories about life and I’m sure that you have too.
I’ve been told that competition drives evolution and that we are all clearly delineated individuals (or nuclear families) fighting over limited resources.
Life is a battleground, I was told. Look at the stags smashing their antlers into each other during mating season, look at the trees fighting to reach the sunlight and block all their competitors. Genes are selfish, I was told. Humans are not a part of nature. Reproduction is the point of life and — only slightly unrelated — queerness is an unnatural perversion exclusive to humans.*
I grew up under the reign of Margaret Thatcher and section 28, a series of laws introduced by her government in 1988 that prohibited the “promotion of homosexuality”, specifically as a “pretended family relationship” by local authorities. LGBT support groups were shut down, public libraries were censored and we were told that ‘there is no such thing as society’ and there is no alternative to individualist, dog-eat-dog neoliberalism.
Honestly, that does something to a person.
I’ve also been told other kinds of stories. Tales of ‘mother’ trees taking care of baby saplings via mycelial networks. Of plant mutual aid and cooperative mongooses and gay penguins and big glowing trees at the centre of Pandoran forests.
The stories we tell have the power to transform our relationship with the rest of our ecosystems — and each other. We have always looked to ‘nature’s order’ to legitimise our social ones [1] and when we are told that either biology or human society is fundamentally competitive (or cooperative), we’re primed to see everything else that way, too.
Survival of the fittest
Let’s begin this story where many end — with competition.
The phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ has become synonymous with many popular understandings of evolution by natural selection. From eugenicists (including Darwin’s cousin) to CEOs, to Darwin himself, it has received a wide range of interpretations, all with important political ramifications.
The phrase wasn’t actually coined by Charles Darwin, but he adopted it. Unlike so many other interpretations of these four words that we might have heard, he used it in the following sense:
“Survival of the form that will leave the most copies of itself in successive generations.”
That’s it. No inherent fighting over limited food or breeding opportunities. No ‘might makes right’ or ‘nature, red in tooth and claw’. Just survival of the form that will leave the most copies of itself in successive generations. It’s good to note that ‘fitness’ here is a biological measure of reproductive success and survival — it has nothing to do with physical fitness.
You may have been told another story, as I was. You may have been told that competition for scarce resources is the main driver of natural selection, that strong, smart, and ‘fit’ individuals and species survive while the others don’t. You may have been told, however subtly, that females are resources that males compete for, and aggression is a biological universal, both genetic and adaptive [2]
These are myths founded on prejudice and power and they have devastating consequences.
From the beginning, classism and eugenics were at the heart of the myth-building of competition. The emphasis of ‘fighting over scarce resources’ comes in part from the population principles of the English economist Thomas Malthus. He famously opposed nineteenth-century poor laws in England, believing that aid would encourage the poor to reproduce and thus have a detrimental effect on society as a whole. His ideas still echo in neoliberal austerity policies today.
While this evolution-as-competition story has been used to support all kinds of oppression, from racism and ableism, to imperialism and fascism, it continues to go unquestioned by the mainstream. Perhaps because this myth is also an important driver for free market capitalism.**
As recently as 2023, I sat through a high budget wildlife show — produced by Steven Spielberg no less — which repeatedly described competition driving adaptation as a ‘fundamental rule of life.’ Survival was framed as ‘winning’ and the living environments of Earth are, apparently, a ‘battlefield’. When these are the stories that Western culture tells us — interspersed with cute digital baby dinosaurs and epic footage of whales to make them as attractive as possible — there will remain a lot of work to be done.
Nature
On the subject of dangerous stories, let’s look at the word ‘nature’ for a moment. Dictionaries in English mostly define nature as something outside of us. There are humans and there is nature and there is a clear, definable separation between the two.
In the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, nature is:
“The phenomena of the physical world collectively; esp. plants, animals, and other features and products of the earth itself, as opposed to humans and human creations.” [3] [my emphasis]
According to Collins: “Nature is all the animals, plants, and other things in the world that are not made by people, and all the events and processes that are not caused by people.” [4] [my emphasis]
The message is clear: nature and people are separate. Also, importantly, in these definitions, organisms are products or things — a worldview that presumably makes their exploitation much easier.
Many trace this human-nature separation back to French philosopher René Descartes who is also credited with popularising another dualism — the separation of body and mind — in Western science. Alongside this separation, humans in the Cartesian worldview became the only species to have souls and free will; everyone else became effectively non-sentient machines. This was human exceptionalism — the view that humans are fundamentally different, and usually better, than all others. It has been an important myth in Western culture and religions (among others) for a long time.
Human exceptionalism has no place in modern science (which recognises that humans are just one more species among millions) nor in the understandings of many Indigenous cultures [5]. But still, and in spite of campaigns [6] to bring definitions more in line with scientific consensus, it is impressively tenacious.
Right now, wherever you are engaging with these words, you are both a living, breathing organism and an integral part of inconceivably complex ecosystems. It can be easy to forget, easy to fall into the trappings of cultural myths, but all these divisions of you versus the world, of humans versus nature, of us versus them, are just that: myths, simplifications and false binaries.
Stories of competition, individualism and human exceptionalism are not the only ways of understanding the living world. What about interdependence and cooperation? What about community? How might our behaviour, even our political structures change if we understood that we are all part of nature; indivisible and interconnected?
I’ll explore these questions in part two.
* Or for those who hate non-human nature, ‘even dogs and rats can be queer, so human queers are no better than dogs and rats.’ The story is flexible as long as it results in non-queerness being at the centre and having power.
** This story holds for as long as we ignore all the times the powerful turn to the state for political favours, tariffs, and protection. In reality, competition rarely exists in a pure form, even among capitalists.
References
[1] The Less Selfish Gene: Forest Altruism, Neoliberalism, and the Tree of Life. Rob Nixon, 2021
[2] Sex, Science and Symbiosis. Feminism and Queer Theory in a More-than-human World. David Andrew Griffiths, 2014
[3] https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=nature
[4] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/nature
[5] How the Myth of Human Exceptionalism Cut Us Off From Nature. Robin Wall-Kimmerer, 2022
https://lithub.com/robin-wall-kimmerer-humans-nature/
[6] https://wearenature.org/who-we-are/
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!
