An Inquiry
The Ecological Self
The self ends, we assume, at the skin. Beyond that: nature — to be used, exploited, saved. This inquiry follows that boundary back to where it was drawn. The ecological crisis and the problem of the self are not two problems. They arrived together.
Each case follows a threefold form:
Koan
An observation about reality
Record
The empirical ground — backed by historical and scientific literature
Comment
A response into the nature of this case
I
The separated self
A tree exhales. You inhale. Draw the line between you.
Record
Roughly half the oxygen you are breathing right now was produced by marine phytoplankton. The carbon dioxide you exhale will be absorbed by plants and fixed into wood. The atoms in your body were elsewhere a decade ago — gut lining replaces in days, bone over years. A 2016 study in PLOS Biology put bacterial cells in the body at 38 trillion, human cells at 30 trillion. The boundary of the body is not where we assumed.
Sender et al., "Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body," PLOS Biology, 2016 — NOAA, "How much oxygen comes from the ocean?"
Comment
Now — who were you before you drew it?