You had quite a singular childhood—your father was an astrophysicist—and I wonder if early exposure to expansive notions of space and time set up your thinking in any way?
In every way. And it wasn’t just my father the astrophysicist. It was also my mother the clinical psychologist. There’s a funny memory from, when I was maybe about ten years old, and I was riding in the back seat of the car. In an inquisitive moment, I asked, “I wonder, where truth is hidden in the universe?” as if, you know, kids said stuff like that. And as if they were anticipating the question, simultaneously my father said “Physics” and my mother said “Psychology.” We still laugh about that. I think, though, that if my adult self had been there, in the car sitting next to the childhood version of me, my answer to where truth might be hidden would be story—the story we tell ourselves about our relationship to the natural world.
There is a moment in the book when you share, and I’m paraphrasing, that life began on earth about four billion years ago, and that it will end in about another four billion years, so that human beings exist at midpoint in this life cycle. For me, this reorientation in cosmic time was a great recalibration.
I have so many friends who are white-knuckling it every day, especially in terms of mounting climate anxiety, this constant state of emergency. And it impacts our health, this inflamed state, as if our bodies are swelling with anxiety—mirroring what’s happening in the atmosphere itself. It’s a state of emergency such that physiology begins to resemble physiography. It’s paradigm-shifting to recognize that our connection to nature is fundamental, and that there is no separation of you and nature. The Cartesian philosophy, “I think therefore I am,” is a sentencing of all that is nonhuman to the space of nonbeing. And because of that, it objectifies the world and opens it to paradigms of endless extraction and nonreciprocation, which is catastrophic in terms of maintaining a relationship with the more than human world.
One positive societal shift I’ve been seeing in response to that is a returning animism—the acknowledgement that a stone has a life, a field has a life. I don’t want to project any kind of religious tradition onto what you’re saying, but it resonates in a very Taoist, Buddhist way.
The ethical presumption that all natural systems are living systems and deserving of an emancipated rebirth from these paradigms of endless extraction and commodification is core to where I begin with my work. The philosophical conclusion that you just made toward something resembling Zen, which is a very rigorous philosophical and spiritual tradition and discipline, is apt and fair.
