Mysterious Knowing: A Critical Reflection
I developed this concept after re-discovering quantum entanglement. The idea that particles could be linked in such a way that a change in one would result in the same change in the other, regardless of the distance separating them, seemed preternatural. It would mean the particles were trading information at speeds faster than light and were thereby violating the laws of physics as we know them. But understanding comes to us in mysterious ways.
Trees communicate with one another through an underground network of mycorrhizal fungi which create living bridges between roots. Through this network they are able to share nutrients in hard winters, absorb nutrients from neighbours when they die and send warnings of threats to their community. In this way, trees that exist even on opposite sides of a forest can receive and understand messages from each other. A forest then becomes a physical example of ecoentanglement, which is typically both invisible and intangible.
Plants like the mimosa pudica can tell what time it is even when placed in total darkness for days on end. Their leaves expose themselves at the same time each morning, and turn away again at the same time each evening, even if the sun is hidden from the plant. Where does this knowing come from?
Humans often talk of a sixth sense: the ability to know something without knowing how. To sense it in the space between one breath and the next. Sometimes we describe this knowing as instinct or intuition, the brain interpreting the signs of the world before it delivers those signs to us. But perhaps there’s something deeper going on here. Perhaps, like entangled quantum objects, we and all other ecological entities have a means of communicating that transcends what we know or can know about the world.
Ecoentanglement could help us to understand our sixth sense, to understand how particles trade information faster than light and plants can tell what time it is. The theory of ecoentanglement supposes an intrinsic connection between all things, one that ecoentangled objects can use to share information with others in the network. Such a network would exist everywhere at once, as invisible and undetectable as spacetime—what Brian Greene calls “the fabric of the cosmos” (Greene ix). Perhaps that network even is spacetime.
In prologue to The Overstory by Richard Powers, Powers writes, “That's the problem with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next” (Powers 4). Ecoentanglement is that thing “unseen”, the connection “right here, right next”. Plants and particles use it to communicate with each other at speeds which defy the current understanding of physics, but human beings have yet to crack the code. Instead we get glimpses of it in half-awake, half-present moments, when we for a moment step outside the “I” of our being and connect.
Works Cited
Greene, Brian. “Preface.” The Fabric of the Cosmos, Penguin, 2008, pp. ix-xii.
Morton, Timothy. “Poisoned Ground.” Symplokē, vol. 21, no. 1-2, 2013, pp. 37–50.
Powers, Richard. “Roots.” The Overstory, Vintage, 2019, pp 3-4.