Part I: On Separation and Interconnection
This alienation — accented by urban design, advertising, treating nature as a vacation backdrop, sink or hardware store and other means — has allowed us to enact untold damage to the ecosystems that sustain us. Consumption and production patterns at various scales alter our air, water, soil, and their respective cycles via embedded land-use change and fragmentation, resource exhaustion, greenhouse gas emissions, toxicity releases, acidification, eutrophication, and other human-induced changes. These changes are able to simultaneously reorient functional flows — flows that provide distinct functions and improve ecosystem health — and the metabolisms of organisms, including our own. One may, in effect, classify our collective behavior as a domination of biological systems; the rate and scale of which is increasing and approaching a similar order of magnitude as previous planetary state shifts (1). In principle, it is quite simple to comprehend that we have relations to all other things. During this historical moment, defined to a large extent by a pandemic and shared threat, the degree to which our relationships are defined by interdependencies and inextricable interconnection is becoming much more felt, especially considering the relatively new realities of globalization, media, and information technologies. It can be noted that in many cases where this recognition becomes vocalized, emphasis is placed on the systems we have overlaid to provide goods and services. In some cases, interconnection is attributed to the past three or four decades, dispelling the interconnections inherent in our world since its formation. News clips from the months of March and April of 2020 during the COVID pandemic showcase this (2).
While this discussion of interconnection in the current era may seem trite, these layers of meaning are critical to unravel due to their ability to obfuscate needs and wants, realities and social constructions, current and future possibilities.