COMPARTMENTALIZATION AND ITS OPPOSITE

Compartmentalization is the principal mechanism of evil.

—M. SCOTT PECK

 

 

 

THIS CULTURE SPECIALIZES in compartmentalization. If people didn’t blind themselves (and allow this culture to blind them) to the effects of their actions—in other words, if they didn’t put their actions into one compartment and the harmful effects of these actions into another compartment that must never be examined—this culture and its members would not be able to continue a lifestyle based on systematic exploitation and theft. So walls must be erected and maintained. People must be trained to be selectively deaf and blind, to sensate only when necessary to perform the task at hand. Do you want to design a “sustainable” truck factory? No problem. Throw some plants on the roof, then just ignore the effects of car culture. Do you want to design an eco-groovy Nike headquarters? No problem. Just make sure you ignore the slave labor. Do you want to manifest your destiny? Great! Just make sure you eliminate everyone who already lives on the continent. Do you want to run an industrial economy? Wonderful! Just make sure you pay little or no heed to the fact that you’re killing the planet you live on.

More or less all of us in this culture—and I am explicitly including myself—are adept at this sort of compartmentalization. It’s what we do.

The training starts early. If familial abuse hasn’t shattered our psyches—forcing us to compartmentalize our experiences, storing trauma in a compartment we will never allow ourselves to look into, and keeping happy feelings and memories where we can hold on to them—then school will surely teach us to compartmentalize. It does this by separating subjects, and even moreso by separating school from home, and school from landbase, and schooltime from playtime. School is school, and play is play, and never the twain shall meet.

The same is true philosophically. Science is science, ethics is ethics, and these two, also, shall never have more than a passing and uncomfortable acquaintance. We can say the same for politics and ethics, and we can say the same for economics and ethics. (Of course politics and economics, handily for those in power, share no such separation from each other, and in fact politics, economics, and science are all united by their mutual raison d’être, which is the raison d’être of this culture: the drive to accumulate and use power over others.)

Compartments. Men and women in different boxes. Humans and nonhumans in different boxes (except when it comes to vivisection: evidently we have enough in common for nonhumans to be models for how toxins will affect us, yet we have little enough in common that nonhumans can’t feel the agony, frustration, despair, sorrow, rage, and helplessness that we would feel were we similarly tormented). Thought goes in one box. Emotion goes in another. One’s job goes in one box. One’s life goes in another.

In The Nazi Doctors, Lifton describes what he calls “doubling,” by which guards in concentration camps would have one moral code at home, where they might be good parents, and so on; and another at work, where they might torture and murder inmates. In another book, he describes a similar doubling—which, in some ways, is just another word for compartmentalization—among scientists and technicians working on nuclear weapons. The same applies to all of us, really. We try to be good people while participating in this inherently destructive death-camp culture.

People like McDonough claim that actions like putting plants on truck factories—truck factories!—are significant steps toward sustainability, and it should come as no surprise that others in this culture laud this disturbing compartmentalized thinking. So long as you ignore everything but your own particular little action, so long as you ignore every preceding step and every inevitable consequence, that is, so long as you think in a linear, compartmentalized, rationalized¹¹³ way, you, too, can proclaim every one of your actions to be sustainable. You, too, can be praised by presidents and CEOs alike. You, too, can with a clear conscience continue to assist in this culture’s ultimate consumption of the planet.

The real world does not resemble our compartmentalized version of it. Where do I end and you begin? Are you still in the air you just exhaled, the air I now take in, the air that carries with it the sweetness of your breath? Do you end where your fingers touch my skin, or do you follow these sensations into my body? Where do I end when I move inside of you, and where do you end when you move inside of me? And when you leave are you still inside of me? Am I still inside of you? Where do you end and where do I begin?

A week ago my dog Amaru died. He was fourteen. He had been sick for more than a year, from Cushing’s, arthritis, and most of all age. He had lost about 30 percent of his weight, and even more of his strength. When he was younger he gladly chased bears, but those days were gone. He was losing his sight and hearing. And then, the night before he died, he began to throw up. I stroked him, spoke with him, tried to reassure him, but I did not know how to take away his pain and nausea.

He finally fell asleep around midnight, and I fell asleep sometime later. I awoke near dawn knowing something was wrong. I had to find him. He wasn’t near my bed, wasn’t in the house. He was outside, collapsed in shallow water at the edge of a pond. He had only been there a short while (I could tell because the water had not wicked up his body), but still he was very cold. I brought him in, warmed him up. He got up once, hours later, to stagger outside to relieve himself, taking care of me by not soiling the house even as he was dying. He couldn’t make it back inside. I carried him in, laid him back down. He never got up again.

I held him as he died, as I’d held him all through the day, talking to him, rubbing him, not quite believing he was dying. But he did. His breathing grew forced, and then stopped altogether, although his heart still beat. I pushed on his chest, and pushed again, and again, but he was dead.

I did not bury him that night. He wasn’t ready to go, and I wasn’t ready to let him go. I let him sleep—or maybe he let me let him sleep—next to my bed one last time, near the head, where for so long I had reached down to pet him in the middle of the night.

The next day I buried him, where he will over time become more and more a part of the forest.

I miss him terribly, though he is even now only thirty feet from me.

I have always had difficulty falling asleep, often lying awake for hours. I’ve written elsewhere that it sometimes feels as though I’ve forgotten how to sleep, or like I never learned. In my late thirties I finally experimented with various herbs—valerian, chamomile, and so on—but none seemed to help, until finally I came upon a combination that put me to sleep: kava kava, 5-htp, and melatonin.

For years then I marveled at the deeply sensuous pleasure of slipping so seamlessly between waking and dreaming worlds. But a few months ago the herbs stopped working, and once again I lay awake each night till near dawn, thinking and not thinking, writing and not writing, meandering sometimes into shallow dreams but rarely going deeper, instead nearly always bubbling back a few moments later to and through that permeable surface, back to this side.

I tried different herbs, and I tried changing other variables in my life. Nothing worked.

Nothing worked, that is, until the night after I buried Amaru. Ever since then I’ve slept soundly, and deeply.

It took me only a couple of days to understand that Amaru had been keeping me awake. Not by snoring (my other dog Narcissus does that, sometimes driving me to wear earplugs or to carry him gently into another room) but because he was in so much pain and carrying so much psychic distress that it hung in the air, seeped through my skin.

Where does Amaru end, and where do I begin?

I often have dreams that are not my own, but rather they come from one friend or another. I may, for example, understand everything in a dream except a strange blue car that drives by too fast and scares me. I try to make some interpretation fit. I think about every blue car I can recall, think about their owners, try to assign some meaning. Nothing works. Then a friend calls, tells me she was nearly run over the day before by someone driving a blue car. This happens often enough my friends and I have a name for it: leakage, because their realities leak into my dreams.

Where do my friends end, and where do I begin?

You and I touch. We make love. I touch the middle of your chest with two fingers. You kiss my forehead, my lips, my shoulder.

One of us gets up, leaves. What is left behind in this room? Where do you end, and where do I begin?

I live in a forest. What is this forest? Is it redwood trees? Or is it soil? Or is it frogs? Slender salamanders? Huckleberries? Shrews? Steller’s jays? Or is this forest all of these and so much more? Where do frogs end and where does water begin? And when the small streams taste like tea from flowing past and through and with all this vegetation—living, dead, whatever—where does the forest end, and where does the water begin?

I’m not saying that we are all one. We aren’t. I am me. You are you. Amaru was and is Amaru. This frog is this frog and that tree is that tree.

But just as we are not one, we are not entirely separable. We are not monads. We are not impermeable. Our boundaries are blurry, shifting, porous, and ultimately indefinable. Mysterious.

When you put us—and by “us” I mean anyone, from me to you to Amaru to the fly that’s buzzing around my face to the frogs outside the window—into a conceptual box, you obviously miss all of this other’s complexity that does not fit into your box. Worse, when you forget that the conceptual box is nothing more than a concept—a tool, a projection, a figment of your rational mind—and is not reality, and does not necessarily even come close to corresponding to reality, you have foreclosed all possibility of entering into any sort of meaningful relationship with this other. Of course you have: you no longer perceive this other; you perceive only your precious and projected box. You are at that point interacting only with yourself and your projected delusions.

Welcome to what passes for thinking in this culture of compartmentalization. Welcome to the wonderful world of rationalized exploitation.

Have you wondered why, in this book ostensibly about shit and more broadly decay, I wrote about making love, followed by a description of my Amaru’s death, jumped from there to insomnia and then to the porous boundary between waking and sleeping, from there to dream leakage, and then back to making love? I do this sort of thing in all my books and talks.

Years ago after one of my talks, someone said to me, “At first I didn’t understand your jumps, and then I thought you were crazy, but now I see the patterns, and I see how the different subjects come together, and I like it.” I’ve gotten a fair number of letters over the years from people who say, “Thank god I’ve finally found someone who writes like I think.”

I like these notes, but I don’t like the notes in which people compliment me on what they call my “disorganized style,” and for “writing whatever happens to come to mind.” The reason I don’t like them is that my style isn’t disorganized, and I don’t (usually) write whatever comes to mind. I try to make the organization as tight as I can. But my writing is organized along different principles than those that normally guide discourse and thought in this culture. I write this way to undercut or even destroy the monopoly, the stranglehold, that linear thinking has over our discourse, our thinking, our lives. This hegemony is incredibly dangerous.

It’s dangerous in part because it doesn’t match reality. The world is not organized linearly. A forest is not organized linearly. A river is not organized linearly. An intrahuman (or interspecies) relationship is not organized linearly. A human (or nonhuman) is not organized linearly. Life is not organized linearly, or parabolically, or sinusoidally, or any of the other mathematical models we can try to project onto it; these regressions may sometimes describe a portion of what we see, but they do not come close to defining reality. These regressions are not reality, and they are no substitute for reality. The combination of the near-ubiquitous cultural delusion that one’s concepts are more important than the real and the near-absolute cultural narcissism where one perceives oneself as entitled to exploit everything and everyone else has led to a culture capable of destroying everything.

But there are other ways to be, other ways to perceive, other ways to think. The Lakota man Brave Buffalo said, “I have noticed in my life that all men have a liking for some special animal, tree, plant, or spot of earth. If men would pay more attention to these preferences and seek what is best to do in order to make themselves worthy of that toward which they are attracted, they might have dreams which would purify their lives. Let a man decide upon his favorite animal and make a study of it, learning its innocent ways. Let him learn to understand its sounds and motions. The animals want to communicate with man, but Waka’Taka [the Great Spirit] does not intend they shall do so directly—man must do the greater part in securing an understanding.”¹¹⁴

I asked the American Indian writer Vine Deloria what, in the Indian perspective, is the ultimate goal of life.

He said, “Maturity,” by which he meant “the ability to reflect on the ordinary things of life and discover both their real meaning and the proper way to understand them when they appear in our lives. Now, I know this sounds as abstract as anything ever said by a Western scientist or philosopher, but within the context of Indian experience, it isn’t abstract at all. Maturity in this context is a reflective situation that suggests a lifetime of experience, as a person travels from information to knowledge to wisdom. A person gathers information, and as it accumulates and achieves a sort of critical mass, patterns of interpretation and explanation begin to appear. This is where Western science aborts the process to derive its ‘laws,’ and assumes that the products of its own mind are inherent to the structure of the universe. But American Indians allow the process to continue, because premature analysis gives incomplete understanding. When we reach a very old age, or have the capacity to reflect and meditate on our experiences, or more often have the goal revealed to us in visions, we begin to understand how the intensity of experience, the particularity of individuality, and the rationality of the cycles of nature all relate to each other. That state is maturity, and seems to produce wisdom. Because Western society concentrates so heavily on information and theory, its product is youth, not maturity. The existence of thousands of plastic surgeons in America attests to the fact that we haven’t crossed the emotional barriers that keep us from understanding and experiencing maturity.”¹¹⁵

One of those barriers—and I want to smash this barrier—is the stranglehold that linear thought has on thought itself, such that any other thought is considered nonthought, any other organization is considered disorganization.

A forest, for example, is organized in a way we have been trained not to recognize (in fact, often to fear). Our culture has trained us not to understand a forest in even a shadow of its full complexity because understanding would impede the exploitation of that forest. Consider this: perceiving a forest only or primarily in terms of board feet facilitates the forest’s exploitation. Perceiving the complex interrelationships that make up a forest does not. Likewise, perceiving a river only or primarily in terms of the amount of hydroelectricity it can produce facilitates that river’s exploitation. Perceiving the complex interrelationships that make up a river does not. Likewise, perceiving a woman only or primarily in terms of her orifices and how you can gain sexual satisfaction from those orifices facilitates that woman’s exploitation. Perceiving the complex interrelationships that make up a woman does not.

I want to be able to begin to recognize the organization of a forest, the organization of a stream, the organization of a woman.

No, I want to be able to understand what a forest, a stream, a woman may wish to communicate to me. Even more than that, I want to be able to understand a forest, stream, woman on each of their own terms, insofar as each of them may wish me to understand them.

To do so, I must begin to break the shackles of linear thought.

I’m not saying that my work is anywhere near so complex as a forest. Of course it’s not. But I’m attempting to introduce—or rather reintroduce—myself and readers to a new—or rather old—way of seeing, thinking, being in the world, relating to the world, a way that does not rely on the particular and peculiar compartmentalization that characterizes this culture, a way that is far more complex than this culture’s “normal” mode of thinking, a way that is, I believe, far more natural.

Just today I did a radio interview that manifested compartmentalized thinking. The interviewer, named Andy, was a Bible-quoting, property-rights-über-alles antienvironmentalist. I don’t know if he requested an interview with me because he wanted to bash an environmentalist, because he didn’t like the sound of my name, because God told him to, or because environmentalism is, according to many Bible-quoting, property-rightsüber-alles antienvironmentalists, a religion that must be stamped out using any means necessary. Most likely he requested an interview for reasons I’ll never know and wouldn’t understand anyway. I know it wasn’t because he’s read any of my work; he said so on air when I challenged him about the abysmal quality of the interview.

Normally people who interview me—and there’ve been hundreds of them, ranging from national radio interviewers to major print journalists to enthusiastic (and nervous) teenagers interviewing me for their photocopied zines—do so because they’re concerned about the murder of the planet, and they want to explore with me the deep underlying reasons for this culture’s ubiquitous destructiveness, and far more importantly, how to stop it. This interviewer cared about none of this, and in fact did not seem to consider environmental problems “real”: whenever I gave any—and I mean any—specifics about planetary collapse he said as much. I said that 90 percent of the large fish in the oceans are gone, and he interrupted me to say, “Let’s keep this interview about the real world.” I talked about dioxin in every mother’s breast milk, and he cut me off to insist once again I talk about what he called “the real world,” which evidently does not include the real world. Salmon are being exterminated, I said, but before I finished he cut me off with the same refrain. I told him that there’s no world more real than the physical world of soil and trees and birds and insects. But he, like so many members of this delusional culture, believes that the real physical world is secondary, peripheral, and that industrial capitalism is primary—in his words, “the real world.” If insanity can be defined as being out of touch with physical reality, this man is insane. Literally.

He was also extraordinarily hostile. His hostility made no sense to me. Why would he invite someone onto his radio program, then cut the person off, talk over the person, chide the person, ignore everything the person said except for one or two key words he would then use to launch an attack? What’s the point? If he’s not going to listen anyway, he should just get a recording he can turn off and on: the interview equivalent of masturbating to porn, as opposed to actually engaging another human being.

Early in the interview I spoke about about dams killing rivers. The interviewer said that we need dams for electricity: “Some environmentalists, especially radical environmentalists, say that air conditioners aren’t sustainable. They say that dams aren’t sustainable. They seem to say that everything isn’t sustainable.”

“I wouldn’t call air conditioning and dams everything, but those two things aren’t sustainable. Dams kill rivers by forcing—”

He cut me off: “Oh, come on. Get back in the real world. We need air conditioning. We need dams. We need all those things.”

I said, “I live on Tolowa land. The Tolowa lived here for at least 12,500 years, and did so without air conditioning, and without dams. They lived here without materially harming the landb—”

“You’re doing it again,” he said. “Get back in the real world. I don’t care about history.”

Which means, I thought, that you’ll never learn anything from it.

He continued, “I want you to stop being so ethereal.”

He actually used the word ethereal (definition: characterized by lightness and insubstantiality; intangible; not of this world) to describe my reference to a culture that has lived on and with this same land for at least six hundred human generations. Six hundred generations of eating what the land gives willingly; six hundred generations of living, dying, being eaten by the soil, bones becoming food for trees, food for forbs eaten by elk then eaten by the human children of those whose bones fed the soil. Six hundred human generations is even long enough to witness several generations of redwoods. He called my reference to humans living in an intact native redwood forest filled with salmon, grizzly bears, and lamprey ethereal.

He continued, “I’m talking about people right now whose property would be destroyed by floods if it weren’t for dams. What would you tell these people who’ve built their homes—their dream homes—right next to a river?”

“I would tell them that—”

This time he made no pretense of listening, but started up again, “And what about all the cropland that’s near rivers, the cropland that would get flooded?”

He took a breath, and before he could start up again I said, “Flooding is crucial to the health of the soil. It’s one of the ways that lands near rivers regenerate. That’s one reason the Nile Delta, for example, was so extraordinarily fertile, and—”

“Derrick, Derrick, you’re doing it again.” Yes, he actually was that condescending. “We’re not talking about history. Can you please stay in the real world? I’m not talking about what the soil needs over the long term . . .”

He actually said that.

He continued, “I’m talking about fields and homes getting flooded.”

“Floods are necessary to the health not only of the river but of the whole river plain.”

“You’re avoiding my questions. What are you going to say to the people whose dream homes are next to a river?”

It occurred to me he might be talking about his own home. I said, “I would tell them that to force a river not to flood is to kill the river and to kill the surrounding lands.”

He almost shouted, “Just answer the question!” He’d clearly watched too many bad courtroom dramas. But his demand was as rhetorical as his questions, as he didn’t let me answer anyway. He continued, “And what about the tens of thousands of people in some poor country who just died in a flood? We need dams to protect us from the ravages of nature.”

“How much does deforestation add to catastrophic—as opposed to normal—flooding?”

“Answer the question, Derrick. Floods kill people. Dams are necessary to protect us.”

“It may or may not be the case that dams protect people from flooding, but how many people suffer mercury poisoning because of dams?”

“We’re not talking about mercury, and we’re not talking about deforestation. We’re talking about dams saving people from floods.”

I knew by now of course that he was locked into a compartmentalized way of thinking, and that his compartment was very small indeed. The only thing that mattered to him was the question of whether dams protect people’s dream homes from floods. (I knew that his expressed concern about the lives of poor people was purely rhetorical, since he’d already said that the global poor are not that way because of the theft of their resources by the rich, but rather because corruption and local caste systems combine to drag them into poverty; and since he’d already told me to get back into the real world when I’d pointed out that a half a million human children die each year as a direct result of so-called debt repayment by nonindustrialized nations to industrialized nations: his real concern was property.) I said, “If the relationship between dams and human safety is important to you, then surely you know about endemic onchocerciasis and schistosomiasis.”

For once, he said nothing.

I said, “Do you know what they are?”

He still didn’t say anything.

I said, “I’m surprised you’d talk about dams and safety if you don’t know what endemic onchocerciasis and schistosomiasis are. As a direct result of the Akosombo Dam on the Volta River, in Ghana, which powers huge bauxite smelters (and from which the displaced or otherwise affected people don’t even receive electricity), 100,000 people have contracted endemic onchocerciasis, or river blindness, rendering 70,000 of them totally sightless; and another 80,000 have been permanently disabled by schistosomiasis.”

I have to admit that this little checkmate wasn’t as satisfying as I’d hoped, because the next thing he said was, “You’re changing the subject. Floods kill people and they destroy property.”

In his compartmentalized mind, the only victims who matter are those killed by floods; the only damage that matters is that caused by floods; the only effects of floods that matter are the ones that harm property (as opposed to those that keep rivers and floodplains alive); the only floods that matter are the ones dams prevent; and the only cause of floods is a lack of dams. Never mind the permanent floods caused by dams that destroy tens of thousands of villages. Never mind the great runs of salmon killed by dams. Never mind the soil exhausted because dams don’t allow flooding. Never mind the “dream homes” that fall off sandy cliffs because dams rob beaches of sediment. Never mind the cataclysmic floods caused by deforestation or climate collapse.

I kept trying to smash the compartment he was building, and he kept trying to reconstruct it and force us both to climb back inside.

If you can make the compartment of discourse and thought small enough, you can make sure that all questions you ask lead only to predetermined answers, which takes us right back to the rhetorical equivalent of masturbation. This was clearly his (probably entirely unconscious) intent. This sort of compartmentalized thinking is not thinking at all, and this sort of compartmentalized discourse is not discourse at all. This sort of compartmentalized thinking and discourse is fundamentally a lie. And I was not willing to go along with his lie.

I’m not nearly so smart as my books make me seem. One of the advantages of being a writer is that I get to win every argument. Most of the conversations in my books don’t happen the way I represent them, where a friend says something really smart, and I say something smart back, and then the friend responds brilliantly, and so on. What really happens is that my friend says something really smart, and I say, “Gosh, that’s really smart.” A few weeks later I call up my friend and finally have a good response. My friend will immediately say something brilliant to me, and I then say, “I’ll get back to you in a month.”

That happened in this interview. I came up with the perfect response to his final comment. Unfortunately, my “perfect response” came about twelve hours after we’d hung up. Here’s the story. Toward the end of the interview he finally came clear on perhaps the most fundamental premise underlying his opinions. He said, “You don’t seem to have an appreciation for the fact that Genesis says God gave man dominion over all of the earth.”

I stammered a response: “If you attempt to have dominion over or dominate something, you destroy all possibility of relationship with it, and if you attempt to have dominion over the world, you destroy it.”

He didn’t believe me, of course, and I had to walk him through—rather, drag him through—an analysis of the complexity of, for example, a forest, and how removing one component can lead to unintended consequences. This time he didn’t tell me to return to the real world. He said, “Time’s up. The interview’s over.” I didn’t complain.

My response was okay as far as it went—or, to be honest, it was pretty tepid—but a few hours later this came to me: “Actually, Andy, I do have a great appreciation for God handing out dominion. In fact just last night I was talking to God, and God said to me, ‘Derrick, when I gave man dominion over the earth, I was way too general. What I really meant was that Derrick has dominion over the earth, and especially over everyone named Andy. So you, Andy, need to give me, Derrick, everything you own—including your dream house on the river. If you don’t, then God says I can bring in an army and take it.”

He probably would have responded, “My Bible doesn’t say that.”

And I would have said, “I can’t help it if you read the wrong Bible.”

“That’s absurd,” he would have said.

And I would have responded, “But that’s why I love this particular God so much. He always tells me exactly what I want to hear.”

Shit breaks down the barriers created by this culture of compartmentalization. When it’s in my intestines, is it part of me? Or is it something else, not me, simply held inside of me, in a tube made of intestines? Are they my intestines? Or just intestines that (who?) happen to work for me? Or are they somewhere in between, part me and part not me? Is that line between me and not me blurry? When is that line between me and not me blurry? When is that line not blurry?

I have Crohn’s disease, an incurable progressive autoimmune disorder that (who?) can cause sores anywhere along the digestive tract from the lips to the anus. Is this Crohn’s disease part of me, or is it something outside of me? Where is the boundary? Crohn’s disease is a disease of civilization: it is very rare in nonindustrialized regions. As industry invades a region, so does Crohn’s disease. There have been many theories as to why this is the case, ranging from increased pollution to changes in diet to changes in hygiene. A few years ago, researchers noticed that people whose intestines are populated by a certain sort of intestinal parasite called helminths, or whipworms—and approximately a billion humans share their intestines with whipworms (or, to use more common language, have whipworm infestations), and, as recently as the 1930s, essentially 100 percent of children in the southeastern United States had whipworms—generally do not have Crohn’s disease (nor, for that matter, multiple sclerosis, asthma, diabetes, allergies, or hay fever, although they do sometimes have filariasis or schistosomiasis). For a time, researchers thought that perhaps people with Crohn’s disease just had extra strong immune systems, and that immune systems without whipworms to fight off started attacking their own bodies instead (“a police riot” is how one doctor who, interestingly enough, didn’t know my politics, explained it to me). But more recently the accepted theory is that whipworms somehow modulate the immune system, such that “our” immune system (is “my” immune system still part of me when it’s attacking me?) can go a little crazy when whipworms are not present. This should probably have surprised me less than it did. Our bodies are natural communities, just as forests are natural communities. And when you remove members of these communities, it can be hard (especially for linear thinkers) to predict how the removal of those members will affect the rest of the communities. For example, Douglas firs require that a certain sort of fungus live in or on their root tips in order for the fir and the fungus to together metabolize food. Without the fungus, the firs die. Red-backed voles eat the fruits of this fungus and then distribute its spores around the forest by shitting them out in nice little pellets (pooparoonies, to use the language of one highly respected forest ecologist). If you get rid of the red-backed voles, the Douglas firs have a much harder time growing. Why should we expect any less complexity and interdependence from the natural communities that are our bodies? If we remove some of the members of this community—members with whom we have evolved—can we not expect for there to be repercussions? Now, if we can ask what is a forest, and ask if a red-backed vole is part of that forest along with the Douglas firs and that particular fungus, can we not ask the same of our intestines? Are the whipworms part of us? What about the others—worms, bacteria, viruses, and so on—who live in or on or with us, and with whom we also evolved?

Where do we stop and the whipworms begin?

Last year, I had the worst Crohn’s flare-up of my life. Some modern medicines saved my life. But they didn’t make me better. What ended that flare-up was that I started (with my doctor’s enthusiastic approval) to ingest whipworm eggs. Unfortunately (or fortunately, I’m not 100 percent sure which) they’re not human whipworms, but rather pig whipworms. If the doctor had given me human whipworms and the whipworms didn’t stop the Crohn’s, I would have had both Crohn’s and a whipworm infestation. Not good.

I started worrying about the welfare of the whipworms I was ingesting, and the pigs who were providing the whipworms. After all, they were making me better; the least I could do was hope both the pigs and the worms had happy lives. I asked the supplier of the eggs. The news was bad: I found that the pigs are slaughtered to provide the worms. But that should change soon: it’s technically feasible to harvest eggs without killing pigs. That latter method of collection is unfortunately not yet approved by either the Food and Drug Administration or its European equivalent. I also found that after the eggs hatch, the baby worms are unable to properly attach to my intestinal wall—I am, after all, not their proper host—so they lead short miserable lives before dying of starvation and being excreted. I felt bad about this—although not bad enough to quit taking the eggs who were making me well—and I brought up the subject with my doctor. He immediately asked if I eat meat.

I said yes.

“Consider them food, then, if that helps.”

It helped my anxiety (though not the lives of the worms), but also takes us back to that question about whether the worms are part of me. If those worms who attach to my intestinal walls and live there for a year or more are a part of me, then what of these more transient worms?

And when I defecate, is this shit—which we can presume is no longer me—part of the soil? Or before it can be considered a part of the soil, does it first need to be digested by this soil, as I suppose the carrots, potatoes, and others I take into my body need to be digested by me before we consider them a part of me (unless we consider them a part of me as soon as I take them inside)?

If I shit in a forest, where, then, do I stop, and where does the forest begin?

I go for a walk through a forest with a mushroom hunter. I know some of the basic mushrooms, but his eyes and his experience help me see this familiar forest anew. He teaches me about fungi. Their names. Their habits. Their preferences. He teaches me that fungi can live for a very long time, and can grow underground to almost unimaginable sizes: an Armillaria ostoyae mushroom in eastern Oregon may be 8500 years old and cover nearly four square miles. He tells me what he gives mushroom patches in return for their mushrooms: he makes sure no one overpicks, he protects the patches from loggers, he asks if it’s okay with the mushrooms for him to take the fruit, he says please and thank you, and he gives the forest his shit.

He stops in his story to point out some chanterelles. Even I can recognize these. Then some turkey tails. They’re easy to spot, too, since they look like, well, turkey tails. We keep walking. He looks at me out of the corners of his eyes. He looks ahead. Then back to me. Then back ahead. Finally he says, “And the biggest part of what I’ve promised them is my body after I’m dead, not pumped full of poison to keep me from decomposing, but rather a body that will feed them as they have fed me.”

Where does he stop, and where does the mushroom patch begin?