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Dear community, My maternity leave officially begins today (only one week out from when our daughter is due!) I will be back to work in November, recording interviews and writing this newsletter. Here's what you can expect in the interim. ### Podcast I've spent the past three months recording a backlog of new episodes. These will be released every second week, in between hand-selected episodes from the Planet: Critical archive. You don't have to do anything differently—an episode will land in your inbox every week, as it always does. The archive episodes I'm republishing are some of my favourites, and were instrumental in shaping the way I see the world today. The new episodes feature some really exciting guests, ranging from activists to writers, and scientists to filmmakers. Stay tuned! ### Newsletter The newsletter over the coming month will also feature a handful of pieces from the Planet: Critical archives, and I'll be very interested to read your astute takes on how Planet: Critical has evolved since they were initially published. The vast majority of newsletters, however, will be brand new pieces, and I'm excited to report they won't just feature my writing! Over the past four months, I've been reading and writing with three stupendously intelligent, caring, learned and talented young people. I call this little writing collective 'The Grove', named as such because each of their styles remind me of a different kind of tree. Anya writes like a willow leans over water, creating new dimensions with her words the way a willow's leaves create a curtain between the world you know and the world that could be. Rishab writes like a pine stretching tall and straight to the sky, piercing the air without hesitation, fiercely reaching for the truth. Jess writes in the way a magnolia tree bursts into your perceptions, her descriptions as vibrant as they are delicate, petals creating a colourful path to follow as she weaves profound emotional insight into her conclusions. As for my own? Who knows. It was far more important I be the humus to The Grove's soil. We did three cycles of reading and writing together before I clocked off for maternity leave. The first cycle, we read the introduction of Timothy Morton's _Being Ecological_ and, after a lengthy discussion, chose the prompt: "What is being ecological?" Our second cycle, we read the essay _Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now: Indigenous Conservation and the Anthropocene_ by indigenous scholar Kyle Powys Whyte. Together, we chose to tackle the question: "What would our ancestors think?" For our final cycle, we read the last chapter of Alyssa Battistoni's _Free Gifts_ and chose to interrogate: "What does it mean to be free?" Next week, my newsletter opens the first cycle, "What is being ecological?" The next week features Rishab's piece, followed by Jess', then Anya's. At the end of every cycle, the newsletter will then feature a piece or two from the Planet: Critical archives, before beginning the next cycle, which will always open with my response to our prompt. I am absolutely honoured to be introducing you all to these three incredible people. Each of them reached out to me of their own accord at some point over the past few years, and I was delighted when they each accepted my invitation to be part of this collective. I have been truly moved to watch their friendships develop in our bi-monthly meetings, and fortunate enough to now have met each of them in person. Working with them has been one of the main highlights of this year for me professionally, and I can't wait to pick it back up when I return from maternity leave. ### Planet: Coordinate For the past nine months, Robert has been working diligently on our first feature-length documentary about the anti-mining community we spent time with in Colombia. This has been a colossal amount of work—not only has he learned how to be a filmmaker, and how to use all the requisite software it demands, but has done it with footage in a language he doesn't speak. I am amazed at what he has successfully put together, and the quality of his hard work is evidenced in the fact that we have just received word that an international streaming platform wants to share the film with their global audience. So, around mid-September, you can expect a big announcement from us that the film is available to be watched! Paying Planet: Coordinate supporters will have access to a preview in the days beforehand, but the film will be available for everyone to watch for free afterwards. ### _HER BODY, OUR CHOICE_ The final manuscript is handed in and with the copy-editor and the legal team! Everything is on track for publication early next year, and I can't wait to share it with you. ### Subscriptions, emails, and everything else I am planning on being totally offline for a few months. I think it very important that Robert and I be present with our daughter and dedicate our time to getting to know her and welcoming her into the world. As such, I have no intention of checking my emails during these months. However, the info@ email address will be monitored by a close collaborator, and she will be able to help out with any problems regarding your subscriptions/memberships. I have no intention of wading through all my emails on my return from maternity leave so if you have contacted me on my address about something important during the coming months, _email me again in November_ and I will get back to you. Equally, I likely won't be able to reply to your comments for some months but **please keep commenting and sharing.** It's a really important way to support Planet: Critical, and I'm depending on you all to spread the word in the months I'm offline. We have worked exceptionally hard over the past four months to get everything ready for the next four months, and I'm sure you can all appreciate that the leave we have managed to carve out is less than I would be entitled to if I were employed. In no way do I feel short-changed—I would much rather come back to you all and do this work in four months than return to an employer in 12. But imagining what that return looks like is like groping around in the pitch black because this is my first baby and I have almost no experience about what to expect, and obviously cannot know the temperament or needs of my child before she arrives. I will do everything in my power to hit the ground running in November—but if I hit it only walking, please know that this is due to circumstances out of my control. ### See you on the other side! Thank you all so much for your support, compassion and care as I approach this milestone. I have been overwhelmed by this community's open encouragement for me to take this leave and not worry about work. Of course, I do worry, but am much less so than when I first announced I was pregnant. Enough of this community practices the values which I preach on this platform that I trust my taking this time to be with our daughter will not be considered a breach of our social contract—on the contrary, all of you who have written to me to express outright support, and upgraded your subscriptions to show that support, have deepened that contract, and our relationship. I think this is why this newsletter has become somewhat more personal over the past few months. I feel at home here with you all. Thank you for transforming this small internet platform into a genuine community. With kindness, Rachel __Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis. It is ad-free, paywall-free and 100% reader-supported. To show your support, leave a__ one-off tip__. or become a paying supporter.__ Sign up Share this article: X | Bluesky | Facebook | LinkedIn | Reddit | Email Social Share Buttons Share:

I grew up in a Scottish region scarred by extractive infrastructure: quarries, coal mines, gas plants, coal plants, and one massive oil refinery. Gradually, much of that infrastructure has been decommissioned and shut down. The coal mines are long closed, the coal plant no longer running, the gas plants are being decommissioned and even the oil refinery is closing its doors. For a brief moment—of really only a few months—it looked like Fife would be extraction-free for the first time in over a century. But now a new industry has got its claws into our rich land: "artificial intelligence". One of the biggest data centres in the world is being planned not ten miles from where I grew up, to the horror of local residents. The CATO data centre, named as such after a Roman statesman in an abysmal attempt to wash the project as an intelligent and thoughtful investment, proposes to take over agricultural land, woodland, and the ruins of a castle, next to the small, rural village of Auchtertool. The proposed site dwarfs the village, bumping right up against its boundary. The developers say the infrastructure will be in-keeping with the local surroundings but the plans submitted include a building longer than the length of the village stretching 35 metres into the air. The blue is the proposed 35 metre high building, dwarfing the village of Auchtertool in the bottom left corner. The data centre has been proposed by the ILI Group, a renewable energy property developer who has a habit, said a research librarian at the public meeting, of building out renewable infrastructure in Scotland and selling it off to foreign bidders. They claim that the data centre will be "zero waste" and "net zero", powered by Scotland's enormous wind energy capacity. Scotland does currently overproduce electricity to the extent that enough we could power every home in the country twice over. The data centre would use half of that—50% of residential demand—meaning there arguably _is_ enough green energy to run the thing. What the developers fail to mention is that data centres cannot rely on renewable energy because of the intermittency problem—sometimes the wind drops, or the sun doesn't shine, or the waves don't thrash, and when that happens, and not enough electricity is produced, data centres need a back-up. That involves turning on diesel generators. It was this very problem that made it more economically viable for Microsoft to begin building their own nuclear power plant for their own proposed data centre. Where will the enormous amounts of diesel come from for CATO? And who will pay the cost? And whose fuel will be redirected so that this mammoth fire hazard—built right next to Mosmorran gas plant which is slowly being decommissioned—can reliably stay on? CATO is being sold to Scotland as promising data sovereignty, but it will force a country which is nearing energy independence through electricity production to rely on the whims of the global fossil fuel trade. A particularly laughable claim is that the data centre will only use the equivalent of 239 residential homes' annual water usage (around 2 million litres). Perhaps ILI Group have a secret technology that is unavailable to the rest of the market, because the average water use for these data centres is 11–19 million litres per day_._ Their ludicrous claims do not stop there. In their planning documents, they write that they will collect the water they need by _"_ harvesting rainfall_"._ Scotland is indeed a wet country, but not that wet. How fortunate for the developers that they happened to choose a site right next to a loch which has been used to supply 12 million litres daily to the gas plant for decades—you know, just in case. The ILI Group claims that the data centre will create thousands of local jobs but, as one tech insider said at last week's public meeting, "data centres are built to run lean". In the purest vision of Silicon Valley, these mammoth structures only require a handful of staff to run, and engineering problems are often outsourced to foreign experts. Almost every single part of the data centre's construction and management will no doubt be supplied by foreign companies, from the hardware to the expertise. The only thing that will be required of Scotland is our arable land, freshwater, and political weakness. The ILI Group also insists that data centres—and this is but one of three planned across the country—are requisite national infrastructure. The Scottish Government has fallen in line with Silicon Valley's vision for the future and has developed an "A.I" plan for the future. Despite the very many dissident voices questioning why so-called artificial intelligence is a necessary industry at the public meeting, nobody in charge seems willing to challenge the techno-oligarchs who stand to make trillions by appropriating our resources, cutting our jobs, and cementing their grip on political power. "Artificial intelligence" is driving a socio-political change that none of us consented to. It is undermining democracy, increasing the wealth gap, worsening racist and sexist biases, and threatening our already endangered ecosystems. The benefits to the everyman are yet to be seen—perhaps the hope is that depending on ChatGPT for our every thought process will atrophy our brains to the extent we no longer notice how our collective future is being ripped away from us. The icing on the cake is that Fife Council, the local government body who has approved the first steps of the application, is not even demanding an Environmental Impact Assessment for the enormous site. In Scotland, these supposedly necessary pieces of national infrastructure do not yet have national legislation to regulate them. This loophole is what has seen over twenty planning applications for data centres be recently submitted on Scottish territory. Edinburgh Council did the honourable thing and rejected theirs, for lack of clear information as to the energy requirements and local impact. Fife Council have no such honour, it seems. The paltry Environmental Report supplied by ILI Group has cleared their conscience enough it seems—despite great swathes of it being redacted (bizarrely, the planning proposal is no longer available online). Fifers are not stupid folk. Over 250 locals were packed into a tiny village hall last week to hear the Chair of the Auchtertool Community Council lay out the proposal, their objections, and the steps they are taking to resist it. The crowd then offered solidarity and advice on different stages of the process. Not a single person thought the data centre was a good idea. The hall filled with sardonic laughter at the mention of the water usage, employment opportunities, "data sovereignty", and the alleged net benefit to the environment. Those who spoke up from the crowd, alongside the tech insider and the librarian, included former Fife planning officers, parliamentarians, a biologist, a lawyer, artists and locals who have been involved in decades-long campaigns against Mosmorran and fracking. The hall pulsed with possibility. I spoke to the dangers of handing over our precious resources during a worsening eco-crisis to an industry which generates revenue for a handful of men who are actively trying to dismantle democracy. Robert spoke to the need for, alongside legal objections, spilling out onto the streets in protest. We told them of a Colombian community that has fought off a mine for two decades by dismantling the company's machinery. Cheers went up. We are up against huge players. The Former Energy Minister for the UK and current adviser to the UK Government’s Board of Trade, Labour peer Brian Wilson, sits on the board of the ILI Group. He served under then-Prime minister Tony Blair, a man who is up to his neck in Middle East capital, foreign interests, and artificial intelligence projects. Blair has been pushing the current Labour government to adopt a.i. wherever possible—including the failed plans for a digital ID. Since leaving office, Blair has spent his years rubbing shoulders with autocrats all over the world. He helped secure Emirati cash for an environmentally disastrous plan to move Indonesia's capital. Those questioning his loyalties—and the dangers of his close ties to British government in such circumstances—are asking the right questions. The CATO data centre has links to some of the most powerful people in the country—and perhaps the world. They are not the ones who will suffer the consequences of its creation. They will never be forced to live next to its heat, its noise pollution, its localised droughts. They will soak up all the economic benefits and call any localised harm to the environment and people an "externality" for which they cannot be held accountable. Then, one day, in the distant future, their descendants will manufacture yet another industrial revolution and impose their own violent vision of the world on our own descendants, the great-great-great grandchildren of the miners who believed their sacrifice was buying their children a better life. But as long as rich men dictate what happens on our land, our sacrifices will only ever buy better lives for them. The people of Scotland deserve better than for history to ceaselessly repeat itself. We were locked out of our common wealth when the wealthy erected fences on our lands to keep us out. Every extractive innovation since has kept wealth flooding out of our communities: on coal trains, through pipelines, and now via The Cloud. And as that wealth flooded out, pollution flooded in—into our water, our lungs, and our local government. Resisting this mammoth data centre is about so much more than protecting the village of Auchtertool. It is about resisting hundreds of years of colonial exploitation, and resisting the insidious implication that the future is out of our hands. There are no better hands than ours to create what we need where we are. There are no better voices to speak for ourselves where we are. And there are no better ideas for where we are than those that grow from the soil where, united, we stand. __Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis. It is ad-free, paywall-free and 100% reader-supported. To show your support, leave a__ one-off tip__. or become a paying supporter.__ Sign up Share this article: X | Bluesky | Facebook | LinkedIn | Reddit | Email Social Share Buttons Share:

Building an Eco-Civilisation | Jeremy Lent 0:00 /3632.579909 1× In an age of bad news, it is so important to remember that everything we need to remake the world is already with us. From how we produce food to how we organise our political systems, the solutions we need have long been developed and tested. What we need now is political will and community vision—and to hold onto the fact that everything is still worth fighting for. 🎧 __You can listen to the episode on your podcast app, in your browser,__ download__it or__ watch__it on Youtube (where automatic subtitles are provided).__ Acclaimed author and integrator Jeremy Lent has spent the past years researching a vital book which explores how we can reform and revolutionise our most critical sectors, from finance to agriculture, in order to build a true ecocivilisation. _Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All_(US version, UK version) is a hopeful testament to both our past and our future, illustrated with real-world examples throughout the ages which show time and time again just what we are capable of when we put our minds and hearts together. On this episode, Jeremy walks us through his research, emphasising that such reforms would transform our relationships with each other and the wider world. This is a beautiful conversation which explores how we create the conditions for live to thrive—today, tomorrow, and for the rest of time. __Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis. It is ad-free, paywall-free and 100% reader-supported. To show your support, leave a__ one-off tip__. or become a paying supporter.__ Sign up Share this article: X | Bluesky | Facebook | LinkedIn | Reddit | Email Social Share Buttons Share:

One of my favourite moments from my favourite comedy special, _Nanette_ by Hannah Gadsby, is when she puts her art history degree to perfect use and dispels the myth of tortured genius artist. She tells the story of being berated by a fan for taking anti-depressants. This fan insisted that without the willingness of the great minds of our time to feel the depths of their very souls, and all its aches, we would not have great art. He tells Hannah: "If Vincent Van Gogh had taken medication, we wouldn't have had _The_ _Sunflowers_." She rapidly deconstructs this dangerous myth, explaining that Van Gogh _did_ medicate, and painted many portraits of the psychiatrists who were treating—and medicating—him, and that a slight overdose of the foxglove plant, from which his medications were derived, can make the patient experience the colour yellow "a little too intensely". But, more importantly—most importantly—Vincent Van Gogh had a brother who loved him, a brother who supported him both emotionally and financially throughout the artist's difficult career and painful existence in the world. Hannah calls this Van Gogh's "tether", his connection to the world that made being in it possible, and made his art possible, and made all our wonderment at what he produced possible. The Van Gogh works we know and cherish grew from his brother's labour and love. Somewhere in my first trimester of pregnancy, I decided—on no research—that I wanted us to use reusable nappies for our child. I was directly warned against this by some, whilst others offered a more subtle rebuttal: "I'll let you find out on your own." Wondrously naive about the requisite labour of baby toileting, I persevered with my insistence and, once I completed my research, believed I had made the right choice. The simple fact is that, in a cultural and economic system of convenience, speed and profit-maximisation, fulfilling good intentions often demands more labour. This, I am willing to take on; frankly, this is the labour of parenting under that very system. This budding personal concept of my little labours of love, to prepare for our child's arrival, has extended to making my own natural ingredient cleaning supplies, hours spent online looking for second-hand cotton clothes, and replacing all the plastic in our kitchen with glass. My partner, Robert, and I visited every single charity shop in the area a few weeks back and came home with a life's supply of mason jars and an armful of children's books. We have also split the research requirements of pregnancy and birth between us, selecting the topics and titles together before swapping notes afterwards. We share the intention of being very deliberate guardians and advocates for our daughter. That includes how we advocate for one another and for her before she arrives. In one of the more recent moments that someone giggled at my commitment to reusable nappies, and the endless cycle of washing and drying which accompanies that decision, a look was thrown across to Robert who, being the eldest of many, knows far better than I do how much work having a baby in the house truly is. He offered a conciliatory smile, but said that, in fact, it is his job to help facilitate this thing I want us to succeed at. Even though I know him to be this man already, I was still moved by the steadfastness of his support. His praxis is not to meet my every whim, but to throw the enormity of what he has to offer at the things I truly believe are important. This is why he was willing to hit the ground running with me in South America and learn how to be a filmmaker on the job, and why he is settling in my home country for the first year of our child's life. While the standards we hold one another to create an atmosphere of curiosity and questioning (and while he is indeed often forced to talk me out of my spontaneous hyper-fixations), he backs me to the hilt when it matters. In this way, my decisions are no longer my own; decisions are always ours, even if they originate from one of us. In the days since that conciliatory smile, I've been mulling over this alternative labour he performs, and how it absolutely undergirds the more obvious forms. What I mean by this is that without his willingness to facilitate this decision of ours that I insisted was important, my workload would have increased massively. Our dissonance would have bridled my ability to succeed. Either I would have been forced to labour alone or I would have had to give up my good intentions. The fact of the matter is that, particularly in a world which maximises profit and convenience above all else, our good intentions mean very little without the wider web of community around us to facilitate, nurture and manifest those good intentions. That web is like the humus of soil, filled with billions of creatures who create the conditions for a seed to germinate and sprout; it is invisible to the naked eye, but an absolute requisite for goodness to grow. A feminist recently pointed out online that the one thing most of history's "great minds" shared was that each of these men had a wife who laboured, invisibly. Her commitment to raising the children and taking care of the home facilitated his quest for greatness. Her hours spent producing the conditions of their family's reproduction allowed him to squirrel away his own time in an office behind a locked door. This was also how I wrote my own manuscript. Every day, for months, Robert pushed three home-cooked meals in front of my face, and edited the podcast, and made the films and read each draft—just so I could focus on this thing that felt most pressing, most important. I met every tight deadline because he met my every need during that time, his labour unknown to my global audience, my editor and my agent, but absolutely essential. He has been my humus. He will be a wonderful father to our daughter. I suppose I am left thinking about how two-dimensional my previous understanding of reproductive labour truly was. I was still caught in a neoliberal worldview, whereby I viewed each woman as labouring individually to produce the conditions for life to thrive in her private environment. Now, thanks to Robert, I understand how absolutely necessary it is that each individual be supported by the web of wider work if her good intentions are to manifest. Better yet: we must all be intimately supported by the web of life's labour throughout the ages so that our collective intentions may manifest. The work we do to survive together can never be done in isolation from each other, just as the work any organism does to survive cannot be achieved in a vacuum. Every commitment I make to doing things the harder way because it is ethically sound is a demand upon my web of support to work with me to achieve this. These demands of mine were previously silent. Now I know to vocalise them and to express deep gratitude for the willingness of those who hold me to also share my load. Conceiving our daughter was the promise to be what she needs for the rest of time. But, at the eleventh hour, with her arrival imminent, I wonder how I could have been so shallow as to fail to grasp that there is a world of good intentions beyond my own; that, before being a parent, all this time I could have been humus. __Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis. It is ad-free, paywall-free and 100% reader-supported. To show your support, leave a__ one-off tip__. or become a paying supporter.__ Sign up Share this article: X | Bluesky | Facebook | LinkedIn | Reddit | Email Social Share Buttons Share:

In 2022, the Nobel Prize in physics went to a team who proved that everything in the universe is "non-locally real" on a quantum level, meaning that reality is fundamentally relational. You can imagine this in different ways, that we are all one body or that there are invisible strands connecting all the bodies, holding us all together in a literal web of life. We’re not even, technically, separated by space on a quantum level; what happens over there is also always happening here. It is a beautiful proof of our enmeshment, out interrelationality, our absolute interdependence. It suggests there is no such thing as distinct beings, but rather a continuum of beingness to which we all belong and through which we all express aliveness. This is somewhat echoed in the environmental mantra that we are not separate from nature but _are_ nature. Environmental thinkers and writers have encouraged all of us to perceive that oneness with the wider world, and with each other, as a means of bypassing the culturally inculcated belief that human beings are somehow other or superior to the natural world, and that we as human beings live individual lives. Ecology shows us time and time again that nothing lives in a vacuum; that, to live, we must be inherently intertwined with one another. Eradicating the violence with which homo sapiens have eradicated our fellow species necessitates feeling into that intertwinement and recognising the edges that contain us are far more blurred than we imagine. And yet. And yet I see a new pattern of thought emerging from very recent literature which challenges this absolute collectivism and seeks to reinstate the individual as intrinsic, valuable, and _real._ Rather than swinging the pendulum back along the binary of collective vs individual, researchers and writers like Alyssa Battistoni and Melanie Challenger (whose episode is out in a few weeks) are gesturing towards a whole which includes, protects and affirms the necessary distinctness of each living being within the wider collective. For Challenger, prioritising the collective over the individual creates policies which forget the organism for the species, such as conservation approaches which only consider the macro rather than what is done to individual living bodies. For Battistoni, her formula for freedom hinges on the necessary interaction between the individual and the collective, an ambiguous space which produces the conditions for human choices to become meaningful. These women are pulling at a vital thread, and doing so in such a way which reconciles what has previously been considered a tension, forcing us to ideologically take up a position at either end and staunchly defend it. I have always found this quite difficult, as my romanticism for the biological world which has come to me over the years of doing Planet: Critical never quite usurped a libertarian streak which I prize dearly (and by libertarian I mean the original sense of the word which inferred that the individual should not be interfered with by government or other institutions). I am invested in the particularities of my own freedom, or sense of freedom, and have always taken great joy in expressing it in whatever absurdist way I can manage in a world which increasingly felt divested of choice. And yet, my body is but one of many, and my life but one of many, and I am wholly dependent on the great vehicle of aliveness which marches time on Earth forward. I did not feel that these two beliefs and interests were at odds within me—but, equally, I had never been forced to put them to the test, so to speak. I am indebted, then, to the work emerging now which weaves these two vantage points as interdependent necessities; a friction, a balance, through which life itself emerges. It is the very fact of our distinctness from each other which creates the possibility to be together. If we were not distinct; if our bodies did not hold their shape, or if all the molecules of every living thing were identical, and we existed as one great super structure, one great river, perhaps, then there would be no experience of being other than oneness. And how can life emerge from oneness? How can evolution occur without the possibility of chance encounters between distinct creatures? How can bodies and environments shape one another into difference in the dance of accidental genetic gardening? How would complexity emerge? And language? Art? If we were not somewhat contained within ourselves within the whole, and instead lived as the whole, would we have anything to say at all? The limitations of our physical forms—our genetic certainties, our defined edges, our inbuilt entropy—are what make the relationships we choose to create and nurture meaningful. We are indeed all interconnected ecologically, biologically, genetically, culturally, and even on a quantum level, but the very finiteness of each of our experience of being alive limits the choices available to us, which makes the interconnections we actively commit to matter all the more. Matter matters, and more than we give it credit for. It is the genesis of constraint and freedom, of dependence and independence, of sovereignty and belonging. Matter contains but one, and this inherent limitation is what allows each of us to feel the very many all around us, and, within everything, find our place. Every year, an idea catches my eye that takes up most of my intellectual headspace. There is something crucial about this individual within a collective formulation which I think chimes nicely with the work we've been exploring on this newsletter about reproductive labour and feminism over the past few months, and it's what I'll be chewing over in the months to come. Our political institutions are imploding thanks to their inability to reconcile what has long been portrayed as a negative tension of incompatible poles rather than a necessary tension which holds the shape of the world. Much of feminism's adherence, too, to the absolute sovereignty of the individual has failed to produce a theory of liberation for all people—let alone all beings. The fact that we are both separate and enmeshed, together and apart, that we must make room for possibility by not collapsing into certainty—these are the very conditions which produce life, but also the very ambiguity which produces discomfort. And yet, this is where meaning comes from: from our choices, as per Battistoni, and from the distinct boundaries of our sensory bodies which feel their way through the world, as Challenger argues. We cannot make meaning without being both one and just one, both together and distinct. We cannot find the edges of what is possible if the world loses its edges altogether. The very first time I drank ayahuasca, I was overcome with the sensation that we are all one. And then a question came to me: _Why are we not one big tree?_ Why did Life divide herself into many? Soon, the answer followed: _Life divided herself in order to love herself._ That lesson has stayed with me since, but now I find new language to affirm it, in tandem with Challenger and Battistoni. We are divided so that we may come together, so that we may choose to do so, and so that our being with one another may mean everything to each other. __Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis. It is ad-free, paywall-free and 100% reader-supported. To show your support, leave a__ one-off tip__. or become a paying supporter.__ Sign up Share this article: X | Bluesky | Facebook | LinkedIn | Reddit | Email Social Share Buttons Share: