There are words that are easy to say but can be hard to live. Love is one of those words. Interdependence is another. They are words that get used and used until it is suddenly easy to forget that they hold power, and possibility, and us too if we let them.
My friend Doug is an Ecologist. Ecology is the study of how organisms relate to one another and to their surroundings. Doug and I studied Biology together in the early/mid 2000s, and I sometimes wonder whether I should have become an Ecologist too (there are many lives I would greedily like to live) because Ecology is really the study of interdependence; perhaps the study of how we dwell, how life lives with itself, what kind of neighbours we are. And I would like to have some answers to these things.
We have good neighbours. Alistair works for Network Rail and he sourced and delivered a load of (incredibly heavy) railway sleepers for our garden project, for free. Ron crafted us a wooden ‘family fun box’ for Christmas, filled with toys and food and wine. Lynn looked after our cat when we were away and he needed medication and extra care. Sue volunteers at the community cafe, and always remembers that I have Coeliac disease and can’t eat gluten. Our neighbours care about us, each other, this place. They are good neighbours. “Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed” says Mary Oliver, and when I look at them, I think how this is true.
Neighbourliness, connection, interdependence, can sometimes feel dark too. January 31st was the deadline to pay income tax in the UK. I had filled in my tax return, but resisted clicking ‘pay now’ until the last few hours of the day. The sums were meagre, but it was there, ready to be used by the government. I like paying tax, I like the feeling that we are shaping and building society together. But this year, my click felt closer to other things — the war economy, warped and hollow language, visionlessness, lovelessness. Though the click of my payment is not itself the click that releases a missile that will obliterate families and communities and histories and soil, I wondered if our connectedness meant that it in some ways, it was. I wondered if it’s possible to want to be a good neighbour locally, at the same time as contributing to bad neighbourliness nationally and globally.
Etymologically, the word ‘neighbour’ derives from the Old English words for ‘near’ and ‘dwell’. Our neighbours are near-dwellers. But there is something else in the word, from the Proto-Germanic root word bheue- ‘to be, exist, grow’. I think our neighbours help us to be and to grow, as well as to dwell, and though face-to-face neighbourliness feels incredibly important at the moment, a more distant neighbourliness is also something to invest in.
I’m reading and writing about the idea that it takes a village to raise a child, and have been reading ‘Mothers and Others’ by the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. It’s about care, and community, and how we became emotionally modern humans. She says:
“Just because humans have become "advanced" enough to vaccinate their young, write histories, and speculate about our origins, this does not mean that evolutionary processes have ceased to operate.”
I have been wondering how our current actions — individual, collective — steer these evolutionary processes, and so the course we’re on. What are the ripple effects into humanity’s future from paying tax, knowing that whilst most of it is used to shape society for good, some of it also destroys our neighbours? What does it do to the ecology of our shared world? Mary Oliver again:
“I saw what love might have done had we loved in time.”
Oliver speaks in the past tense, and though the poem is ostensibly about her father, it haunts me. I have seen what love has done — it has comforted and challenged, fed and sheltered, created and shaped and been beautiful. But the best of love cannot be in the past — we must make it a present and future reality. I imagine the course it might steer if we took it seriously, if the people who make decisions and spend state- and world-shaping taxes took it seriously. In the book All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks explores the question ‘what is love’? (so, catchingly, did this guy). She says,
“when we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.”
I have been thinking about love as a commitment and an orientation even when it feels painful, or more often, inconvenient. I think sometimes that love loves inconvenience; it is a chance to practice patience and listening, generosity and kindness, even when it might not suit our interests — individually, nationally, globally. To commit, rather than sever bonds using language, judgement, bombs. My understanding of ecology tells me that we can never really sever bonds anyway. We might try, but we wither, the bond now a negative one, impacting us with its absence.
Our glowing globe — the one that offered the below sunrise and sunset yesterday — only exists in its current state because of the entangledness of evolution; because of how our distant ancestors were bound up in each other’s present. The first green plant that accidentally sprouted petals, and so made way for pollination and farming. The first hominid ancestor that was just a little more generous than others, and so made way for empathy and communal caregiving in humans.
I paid my tax. I believe in shaping and building our society together. But I cannot see downstream enough to know the ripple effect it has — good and bad. I only know that it does have an impact, that I cannot sever my involvement with my neighbours or the world even when I don’t think of them, that we are all bound up — in love and in lovelessness — in the ecology of everything.
What does interdependence mean to you? — the good bits, the hard bits, the beautiful bits. How do you live it? I’d love to know in the comments below, or in a message.
Some reading about interdependence:
Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman — argues that humans are altruistic more than selfish, cooperative more than violent.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer — explores the interconnectedness of all living things, as seen through the lens of indigenous knowledge and science.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari — how cooperation has enabled us to thrive as a species.
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake — looks at the hidden world of fungi, and how they shape our own history.
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard — explores the complex communication networks that trees use to share information and resources with each other, and the role of the ‘mother tree’ in supporting forest ecosystems.
Thank you for reading, dear neighbour.
Love,
Elizabeth
From the intimate to the Universal and back again for reflection with ease:)
Howard Jones was another guy who voiced the eternal question - Is it only men who have deep trouble with this and is there a clue there??
For interdependence The Associates “Party Fears Two” could say a lot about how a single voter suits politics as it is a somewhat selfish, less nuanced and perhaps a less true vote - Imagine if couples had a conversation on how they each wanted to vote and then how they should vote as a joint vote for the long term as embodied by their partnership if that was a thing.
“Everything Flows Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology” by Nicholson & Dupre’ is a good book and just the 4 page Foreword by Johannes Jaeger is worth having by itself + Anne Sophie Meincke writing at the back is founded on wide ranging interests.
Thanks for your writing Elizabeth.
I think interdependence is not something many British people find easy, as it involves making ourselves vulnerable to each other and admitting that we can’t do everything by ourselves. In that respect, it’s deeply counter cultural. Thank you for this thoughtful piece x