Trail runners on the Hyannis Trail in North Vancouver, B.C. Even in Canada, a country with extraordinary wilderness, we talk of the environment as something distinct from us.Rachel Pick/JOBFlocks
Rowan Hooper is a journalist and host of New Scientist’s weekly podcast. He is the author of Togetherness: Symbiosis and the Hidden Story of Life’s Greatest Collaborations.
“Politicians should do more to protect the environment.” “Children should spend time in nature.” “I care about the environment.” On the face of it, there’s nothing much wrong with these statements. Almost everyone agrees that there are benefits to being in nature. Most of us also agree that we’ve done and are doing untold damage to the environment. But think about what we are doing when we use language such as that.
We talk of the environment as something distinct from us; we see nature as something “over there.” Even in Canada, a country with extraordinary wilderness and natural beauty, many people live apart from nature. We have all got nature wrong.
I trace it back at least to René Descartes, who said that animals have no soul and are machines for us to use at will. This way of thinking, which we have gone along with for 400 years, underlies our exploitation of nature and our disregard for it. The whole concept of wilderness doesn’t help either. Nature is not “over there,” we are part of it. We are in the midst of an extinction crisis that could rival the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Many ecosystems are on the brink of collapse. It couldn’t be more important that we correct this way of thinking.
Okanagan fires offer a glimpse of a worsening wildfire crisis
“Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness,’” said Lakota chief Standing Bear. Indeed, “wilderness” was only conceived as an idea in the first half of the 20th century, by the American ecologist and writer Aldo Leopold. A former hunter, Leopold wanted a concept that would help preserve areas of land and protect them from human influence. He developed what he called “land ethics,” a concept which, he wrote, “changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”
Leopold was building on the work of the Scottish-American naturalist John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club in 1892. His lobbying helped protect large vast tracts of land, most notably Yosemite and Sequoia national parks, both in California. But Muir’s environmentalism was overtly colonial and racist. It explicitly excluded Indigenous people. On encountering Mono Indians, Muir wrote that “they seemed to have no right place in the landscape.” His idea was of peopleless reserves. Native peoples were killed and forced off their lands at Yosemite and many other national parks in the United States, and the model was adopted around the world, including in Canada.
The first head of the world’s first national park service, Canada’s Dominion Parks Branch, was James Bernard Harkin, who was heavily influenced by Muir. Harkin understood not just the value of wilderness to our mental and physical health, but the contribution it can make to the economy. He also recognized the impact that private ownership of automobiles would have, and saw the value of the tourist dollar: nature was beneficial, yes – but it was also a commodity. Among many other parks, he established Wood Buffalo National Park – the largest in Canada, roughly the size of Switzerland! – which had been inhabited by various Indigenous groups for 8,000 years, including Cree and Dene First Nations, and Métis communities. Soon after the creation of the park, Métis families were forcibly evicted from the land.
My method of correcting our understanding of nature, and our transactional relationship to it, is through symbiosis. In biology, the word simply means “living together,” and is used to refer to two different species, living together intimately for a significant amount of time.
That’s true, but symbiosis is more. It is a process fundamental to how life began, to how it evolved, and to how it operates. Everything we see around us, wherever we go, is there thanks to symbiosis. And if we don’t understand that, we can’t get to a sustainable way of life.
As an example, take legumes, the plant group that includes peas, beans, lentils and pulses. Legumes are the third-biggest family of flowering plants, with around 22,500 species. They all form symbioses with bacteria that make fertilizer for the plant. Nothing else but these bacteria can take nitrogen gas from the air and make it into a form of ammonia that plants can access and make proteins from. Without them humans couldn’t get enough protein to grow our bodies. Just to take soy beans – some 350 million tonnes of soy is grown each year, and about 80 per cent of that is fed to livestock, for us to consume as meat, eggs or milk.
Symbiosis also underlies the mycorrhizal network, the so-called wood wide web of underground fungi which provides nutrient and water support for 80 per cent of all species of land plants. Many plants, including most of our crops, would struggle to grow and thrive without this symbiotic partnership. The fungal network sequesters 13 billion tonnes of carbon a year from the atmosphere – that’s more than a third of the amount we emit each year through burning fossil fuels.
Symbiosis underpins our ecosystems and our agriculture, but also shapes us. We have evolved with a whole range of microbes and larger organisms, and we need to acknowledge them in order to understand our own bodies. Look at helminth worms, the gut parasites that we eradicate with medication. They have been living in human guts forever; we’ve evolved together for millions of years. They take energy from us, sure, but they don’t “want” to kill us. There is good evidence that they help us reproduce, by making eggs more likely to implant in the womb. The worms also help us fight off other pathogens, such as malaria and giardiasis, and maybe COVID-19.
An aerial view of Fort Chipewyan, Alta., on the border of Wood Buffalo National Park. Soon after the creation of the park in 1922, Métis families were forcibly evicted from the land.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
We all know that we are facing a crisis of extinction, but what may pass us by is that the loss of biodiversity extends to the microbial world, too. Microbes are going extinct, often before science has even documented them. It’s a problem because the decrease in diversity of microbes might increase our risk of allergies and diseases. We know that a good diversity of microbes boosts the effectiveness of our immune systems. The point is that we are never on our own, and never have been. Even in the womb, we develop alongside microbes. Our bodies are a rich and diverse ecosystem, a holobiome. Our bodies and minds are made collaboratively.
For example, up to 95 per cent of your serotonin, which influences mood, is made by symbiotic microbes in your gut. Your innermost feelings, secret urges and desires and hurts: they are created, or at least influenced, by your collective self, a blurred-boundaries metaorganism that is the real you. Life is a collaborative process, not just a competitive one; and we are very much part of nature, not separate from it.
Not everyone needs telling this, of course. Indigenous peoples do not. “There is a big circle we call The Circle of Life,” said Albert Bittern, of the Poplar River First Nation in Manitoba. “Every living thing, including the smallest insect, was given jobs to do.”
Nor does Eastern philosophy see a distinction between us humans and the rest of life. For me this is most neatly summed up in the Zen Buddhist concept of jita funi, which literally means “non dualism of self and other”; in other words it is the idea that there is no boundary between individuals.
But it is remarkable that science is now catching up with Eastern philosophy and traditional wisdom. It leads to the conclusion that what you think of as your self isn’t “yours,” it’s a conglomerate. Biologists talk about corals and lichens and other organisms not as individuals but as holobionts – mini ecosystems. Your body, too, is a holobiont.
Opinion: The Great Urban Shift is here, and our urban ecosystems will never be the same
Our symbionts orchestrate the immune system, influence the growth of the brain, and wield power over our feelings and personality. Even our genome, something we might think is locked away in digital format in the nucleus of our cells, is not “ours” in the usual sense: it’s not all human. More than a third of the genes in the human genome have a bacterial origin.
It’s no surprise that traditional wisdom is so similar to the science of ecology. Indigenous peoples have typically lived closer to the source of their food, water and shelter than people in “developed” societies. What I take away from my survey of symbiosis are the implications for what it means to be human. For hundreds of years, people have considered themselves apart from nature. And look where that’s got us: an unfolding crisis of overexploitation of nature and climate.
There is another take-away from this new understanding of nature and ecology that gives me great satisfaction. It concerns the feelings of oneness, those feelings we all have that there is a connectedness in all of nature. Many scientists may feel this kind of thing strays too far into “woo,” into woolly thinking and hippie vagueness – but those feelings have a scientific basis.
To turn around the ecological crisis we have triggered means resetting our thinking on who we are: symbiotic creatures at the deepest level of our cells, living in a world entirely shaped and powered by symbiotic processes.