Module
The Ecological Self
The Ecological Self
The self ends, we assume, at the skin. Beyond that: nature — to be used, exploited, saved. This modules 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, inspired by the case-comment methodology used in Zen koan literature:
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
You exhale. A tree inhales. 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
The self that stands apart from nature is the same self that can treat nature as a resource. The boundary and the destruction arrive together. Buddhism has held this for 2,500 years — not as a belief to adopt, but as something to see. Now that you see it: who were you before you drew the line?
To sit with
Where does your body end and the world begin? Can you find the exact boundary?