Being human means being embedded within the environment and living in reciprocity with the natural world. The current climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have reminded us that the Earth is an incessant space of relationships between organisms and non-living objects, a space where humans are not the centre. In our bodies, ten times more non-human bacteria live with us than human cells make up our organs. If we as humans need these microorganisms to survive, are we even just individuals?
Darwin’s theory of biological evolution based on the competition between species did not explain the complete tale. In the 1970s, Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock proposed the “Gaia” hypothesis: that the Earth is a planet-sized self-regulating system where all living organisms – plants, animals, bacteria and fungi – and the non-living aspects – rocks, water and the atmosphere – are intimately connected through complex interactions. Life is not reducible to adversarial competition, but the emergent result of these interactions. We need to understand that we are part of a constantly mutant, elastic and symbiotic world.