← V — Liberation activism is a path
VI
Contents
  1. I — Entangled crises in a fragmented world
  2. II — The displaced costs of success
  3. III — The manufacture of not-enough
  4. IV — A system of invisible walls
  5. V — Liberation activism is a path
  6. VI — The interdependences of wellbeing
  7. VII — Creating relational abundance
  8. VIII — Becoming intimate with the wild
  9. IX — The Wild School as a wager

The interdependences of wellbeing

How can we honour our interdependence without dissolving our individuality?

Two brown-skinned adults touch foreheads with visible nervous systems; lines extend outward from their bodies into scenes of care, family, animals, food, work, cultivation, water, trees, birds and ordinary life.

Suffering and wellbeing are, first of all, personally lived experiences. Each of us encounters pain, vitality, fear, ease, exhaustion, joy and meaning from within a life that remains irreducibly our own; being sustained through relations does not make us fragments of a collective, but whole personsIn conversation with Sins Invalid.Disability Justice brings Recognizing Wholeness together with Interdependence and Collective Access: people have inherent worth beyond productivity, depend on one another and may organise access around differing needs and capacities. The Wild School extends that conversation in its own account of personal experience.In conversation with ↓: Sins Invalid
Sins Invalid ↗ with distinct inner lives.

Yet wellbeing does not exist only as an individual condition: it is personal in experience, relational in the ways it is sustained or damaged, and collective in many of the conditions that make particular forms of life possibleSarah C. White · relational wellbeing.White distinguishes personal, relational and collective sites of wellbeing while treating them as dynamically interdependent rather than reducible to one another. Her framework directly shaped this distinction; the sentence itself is the Wild School’s formulation.In conversation with ↓: Sarah C. White
Sarah C. White ↗.

Our ability to sleep securely, eat well, heal, work without injury, or care and be cared for depends upon material circumstances, institutions and relations that are themselves socially and historically producedJaime Breilh — “The Social Determination of Health and the Transformation of Rights and Ethics” · WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health — Closing the Gap in a GenerationSocial determination of health — Breilh treats health as historically produced through interacting social, political, material, biological and ecological processes. WHO likewise traces health to living conditions and distributions of power, money and resources.In conversation with: Jaime Breilh · WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health
Source ↗ · Source ↗. Such arrangements also influence who encounters hazards at work, who lives with pollution, and who has access to protection; over time, these unequal conditions can become embodied as differences in health and illnessSocial production and ecosocial embodiment. Doyal and Pennell trace hazards produced through labour and political economy; Laurell examines how work and eating are simultaneously social and biological; Krieger develops a framework for investigating cumulative pathways of embodiment, resistance and accountability. The sentence is the Wild School's synthesis, not the wording of any one author.In conversation with ↓: Doyal and Pennell · Laurell · Krieger
Book record ↗ · Original Spanish text ↗ · Source ↗.

What is carried by one person can therefore emerge from, persist through, or be relieved by conditions extending far beyond that person.

The boundaries of experience are not the boundaries of causation: wellbeing is personal and not self-contained.

Two workers transfer a crate of vegetables beside a delivery van while a shopper selects produce at a stall.

We propose five forms of interdependence. The first is economaterial interdependence: for us to eat, wash, heal, travel, stay warm and meet other material needs, we rely on chains of labour, provision, infrastructure, markets and institutions extending far beyond the individual. Paying for what we require does not abolish that dependence; it changes the relation through which the need is met. Nor must those relations be financial: the same need may be met through households, markets, public services, or communitiesShahra Razavi — “The Political and Social Economy of Care in a Development Context”Razavi's care diamond maps care across households/families, markets, the public sector and community or not-for-profit provision. Care needs can persist while responsibility for meeting them shifts between these sites.In conversation with: Shahra Razavi
Source ↗, with the burden of provision shifting between them. Because these conditions satisfy routine needs and must be continuously reproduced—food supplied, water treated, waste removed, bodies cared for, things cleaned and repaired—apparent autonomy rests upon forms of maintenanceMierle Laderman Ukeles — Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “CARE”Ukeles contrasts maintenance — repeated work that keeps, cleans, repairs, renews and sustains — with the cultural prestige attached to development, novelty and progress.In conversation with: Mierle Laderman Ukeles
Source ↗ that must continually be performed. Our economaterial dependencies can be organised so reliably, and often so anonymously, that they are mistaken for material self-sufficiency.

Two people walk separately among plants, a bird, and a rabbit; small molecular marks suggest material exchange through their shared environment.

The second is biocorporeal interdependence. Living organisms are open systemsMary Ann Clark, Matthew Douglas & Jung Choi — Biology 2e, §6.3 “The Laws of Thermodynamics”Biological organisms are open systems: matter and energy cross the boundary between organism and surroundings while organised life is maintained.In conversation with: Mary Ann Clark, Matthew Douglas & Jung Choi
Source ↗, continuously exchanging matter and energy with their surroundings; with every breath, oxygen crosses the respiratory membrane into the blood while carbon dioxide moves outJ. Gordon Betts et al. — Anatomy and Physiology 2e, §22.4 “Gas Exchange”At the respiratory membrane, oxygen diffuses from alveolar air into pulmonary blood while carbon dioxide diffuses from blood into the alveoli.In conversation with: J. Gordon Betts et al.
Source ↗. Infection makes this openness less gently visible: biological material released by one body can enter another and alter its biological trajectoryWorld Health Organization — “Measles”WHO describes measles virus spreading through air and respiratory secretions released when an infected person breathes, coughs or sneezes — one concrete case of interbody biological exposure.In conversation with: World Health Organization
Source ↗. Within the body’s apparent boundaries, we are not biologically solitary either: humans live in persistent functional association with microbial symbiontsScott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp & Alfred I. Tauber — “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals”Gilbert, Sapp and Tauber argue that persistent microbial symbioses complicate simple accounts of biological individuality, including through roles in metabolism, development and immune function.In conversation with: Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp & Alfred I. Tauber
Source ↗ that participate in metabolism, development, and immune function, complicating simple accounts of the biological individual.

A gardener applies fertiliser beside an upstream sapling; faint runoff reaches the river, where a deer drinks and a child collects water.

The third is ecological interdependence. Humans live within ecological systems that regulate climate, air quality, water quality, food production, and many other conditions of lifeSarah Whitmee et al. — “Safeguarding Human Health in the Anthropocene Epoch” · WHO & Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity — Connecting Global PrioritiesPlanetary-health and biodiversity-health reviews document human health's dependence on functioning ecological systems, including climate, food, water and disease-regulating processes.In conversation with: Sarah Whitmee et al. · WHO & Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity
Source ↗ · Source ↗. Human production, consumption, land use, and emissions alter the ecological systems upon which we depend. Those alterations can then return as new conditions of human health—through heat, polluted water, disrupted food systems, changing disease risksIPCC — Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Summary for PolicymakersThe IPCC assesses multiple pathways from climate change to human health, including heat, food and water insecurity, infectious-disease risks and unequal vulnerability.In conversation with: IPCC
Source ↗, or other pathways. Nutrient pollution offers one concrete example: fertiliser, sewage, and runoff can contribute to harmful algal bloomsU.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — “Harmful Algal Blooms: Contributing Factors and Impacts”CDC notes that excess nutrients from fertiliser, sewage and runoff can promote harmful blooms whose toxins can expose people through water or food.In conversation with: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Source ↗ whose toxins later enter human exposure through water and food. Ecological interdependence is recursive: we alter conditions that later return to alter us, though not necessarily equally or symmetrically.

Two people laugh at an outdoor bistro table while a passerby smiles as she walks past.

The fourth is experiential interdependence. We influence each other’s emotions within relationships and groups, and we hypothesise that such effects may propagate through wider chains of interaction beyond the immediate group. Affect transferSigal G. Barsade — “The Ripple Effect: Emotional Contagion and Its Influence on Group Behavior”Barsade experimentally varied a group member's affective display and found corresponding shifts in other members' observed and self-reported mood.In conversation with: Sigal G. Barsade
Source ↗, meaning the influence that affective displays such as facial expression, gaze, tone, speech pace, posture, and engagement can have on the mood of others, has been demonstrated experimentally. Social regulationJames A. Coan, Hillary S. Schaefer & Richard J. Davidson — “Lending a Hand”In a small fMRI threat experiment, hand-holding — especially by a spouse — attenuated subjective and neural threat responses.In conversation with: James A. Coan, Hillary S. Schaefer & Richard J. Davidson
Source ↗ has also been demonstrated experimentally: relations can alter how an event is experienced; supportive contact, for instance, can change subjective and neural responses to threat. Interaction can also become visible in autonomic physiology: heart rate, heart-rate variability, respiration, and skin conductance have all been found to become temporally coordinated between people in some contexts, although the forms and meanings of such physiological synchronyRichard V. Palumbo et al. — “Interpersonal Autonomic Physiology: A Systematic Review of the Literature”Palumbo and colleagues review studies in which autonomic measures such as heart rate, heart-rate variability, respiration, and skin conductance covary or become temporally coordinated between interacting people. The literature is heterogeneous; synchrony does not by itself identify a mechanism or imply identical subjective states.In conversation with: Richard V. Palumbo et al.
Source ↗ vary substantially across studies. Emotions therefore move across intra- and interpersonal processesArvid Kappas — “Social Regulation of Emotion: Messy Layers”Kappas treats emotion as recursively shaped across intra- and interpersonal levels and cautions that expression is not a transparent readout of felt emotion.In conversation with: Arvid Kappas
Source ↗, although what we feel, what we express, and how others interpret that expression are not identical. Emotional experiences are personal, but they are not experientially sealed. A person’s wellbeing can affect the emotional wellbeing of others, giving each of us a stake in forms of wellbeing that extend beyond ourselves. In this light, the famous Golden Rule, to treat others as we would wish to be treated, acquires an unexpected empirical resonance: the conditions we create for another person do not necessarily end with them.

A standing Māori woman is shown in relation to older ancestors, living family, a mountain and tree, and a pale spirit figure; overlapping frames suggest one situated relational account of self.

The fifth is ontological interdependence. This form of interdependence brings philosophical vertigo at the edge of the cognitive and the spiritual. Ontological interdependence questions the assumption that there is a universally shared understanding of what the self is and where its boundaries lie. Catherine Love, one of the School’s returning students, contrasts a Western image of the self as something like a self-contained vase, reflected in metaphors such as being “in pieces” or “putting myself back together,” with Māori accounts in which identity is located differently. In her work, pepeha can be a “statement of who I am by describing where I am from,”Catherine Maarie Amohia Love — Maori Voices in the Construction of Indigenous Models of Counselling Theory and PracticeIn Love's Māori counselling research, pepeha locates a speaker through whānau, hapū, iwi, marae, land, river and sea: identity is stated through where and from whom one comes.In conversation with: Catherine Maarie Amohia Love
Source ↗ while the Whanganui formulation Ko au te Awa, ko te Awa ko auTe Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017The Act records this Whanganui iwi pepeha — “I am the River and the River is me” — as expressing the intrinsic relationship between Whanganui iwi and the Whanganui River. It is Whanganui-specific, not a generic Māori doctrine.In conversation with: Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017
Source ↗, “I am the River and the River is me,” expresses the relation between river and people in explicitly identity-bearing terms. Other traditions travel in different directions. Some understand personhood as constituted through ancestry, community, territory, or relations with other beings; classical Yoga preserves a distinction between the “seer” and the “seen”Pātañjali — Yoga Sūtra 1.33 and 2.17, with classical commentaryYoga Sūtra 2.17 treats the conjunction of the seer and the seen as a cause of suffering. Classical Yoga here preserves their distinction rather than teaching cosmic merger.In conversation with: Pātañjali
Source ↗; early Buddhism questions the existence of any permanent selfAnattalakkhaṇa Sutta (SN 22.59) and Kaccānagotta Sutta (SN 12.15)SN 22.59 rejects identifying the five aggregates as a permanent self; SN 12.15 frames arising and cessation conditionally while rejecting the extremes of absolute existence and non-existence.In conversation with: Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta (SN 22.59) and Kaccānagotta Sutta (SN 12.15)
Source ↗ · Open text ↗; and some Upaniṣadic traditions radically relocate identity through formulations such as “I am Brahman.Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.10Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.10 contains aham brahmāsmi — “I am Brahman” — within an Upaniṣadic metaphysical and soteriological account of self and Brahman.In conversation with: Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.10
Source ↗”

If humans draw different boundaries around the “self,” then whatever we mean by self is not universal in form. It can instead be understood as an ensemble of cognitive, cultural, philosophical, and spiritual maps, rather than as something reducible to biological fact. The boundaries we draw around the wellbeing of the self therefore also require new maps.

If what we call a self is, depending on the ontology, a relation, a process, a temporary configuration, an expression of a wider whole, or not an ultimately existing entity at all, then wellbeing cannot automatically be assumed to reside within the individual (whatever independent status the individual retains) as its natural container.

Ontological interdependence therefore demands an epistemological revolution, because it changes the question of what the relevant unit of wellbeing is and, in its most radical forms, whether there is more than one unit at all. Parmenides pushed this problem to an extreme more than two millennia ago, describing What-Is as “all together, one, cohesive.Parmenides — Fragment B8In Fragment B8, Parmenides characterises What-Is as “all together, one, cohesive.” This is an Eleatic metaphysical claim about being, not a theory of wellbeing.In conversation with: Parmenides
Source ↗” Depending on the ontology, the whole may be more than the environment surrounding the self: it may partly constitute the self, be one with the self, or be ontologically prior to it. On such accounts, the health of the whole may therefore be irreducible to the health of its apparent parts.

Interdependence does not, by itself, carry a moral verdict. Depending on others and participating in collective life need not threaten freedom; people can organise common life without surrendering individual agencyElinor Ostrom — Governing the Commons (1990)Ostrom’s comparative cases show common-pool resource users building durable forms of self-governance through arrangements including participant rule-making, accountable monitoring, conflict resolution, and recognised rights to organise. She does not present these as a universal recipe.In conversation with: Elinor Ostrom
Source ↗. The danger begins when solidarity becomes enforced identification or homogeneityIris Marion Young — “City Life and Difference” (1990)Young criticises ideals of community based on fusion, mutual identification, and shared values when they suppress difference or exclude people who do not fit the collective identity.In conversation with: Iris Marion Young
Source ↗, or when belonging makes dissent, voice, and exit prohibitively costlyAlbert O. Hirschman — Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970)Hirschman distinguishes exit from voice and shows how loyalty and high penalties for exit can delay leaving and alter the possibility of speaking for change from within.In conversation with: Albert O. Hirschman
Source ↗. For the Wild School, the challenge is therefore to honour interdependence without allowing it to become coercion: to cultivate forms of belonging that deepen mutual reliance while protecting difference, refusal, exit, and self-expression.

The relevant learning for the Wild School is to honour our interdependence through experiences of shared living, without dissolving our individualities into communal belonging. The direction of travel for us becomes learning to inhabit the relations that sustain us more consciously, nourished both by the recognition of our interdependence and by the exciting self-affirmation we find in our similarities and differences.

In conversation with

Wellbeing beyond the self-contained individual

Sarah C. White — relational wellbeing / self in social contextReadClose

White, Sarah C. 2017. “Relational Wellbeing: Re-centring the Politics of Happiness, Policy and the Self.” Policy & Politics 45(2): 121–136. DOI: 10.1332/030557317X14866576265970 ↗

White develops relational wellbeing as an alternative to accounts that treat wellbeing primarily as a property of separate individuals and then add relationships as external influences. She distinguishes personal, relational and collective dimensions as different but interdependent sites of wellbeing and examines how people, relationships and material-social contexts are constituted together. She also cautions against romanticising family or community as inherently beneficial.

WHO Commission — social determinants / power, money and resourcesReadClose

Commission on Social Determinants of Health. 2008. Closing the Gap in a Generation: Health Equity through Action on the Social Determinants of Health. Final Report of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health. Geneva: World Health Organization. Source ↗

The Commission argues that large and avoidable differences in health arise from the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age, together with the wider forces that shape those conditions. Its framework connects health to housing, work, social protection and services as well as to unequal distributions of money, power and resources, placing individual health within social and institutional arrangements.

Jaime Breilh — social determination of healthReadClose

Breilh, Jaime. 2023. “The Social Determination of Health and the Transformation of Rights and Ethics: A Meta-critical Methodology for Responsible and Reparative Science.” Global Public Health 18(1): 2193830. DOI: 10.1080/17441692.2023.2193830 ↗

Breilh presents health as a historically moving process produced through intertwined material, political, cultural, biological and ecological relations. His account of the “social determination of health” criticises approaches that treat social conditions as a list of separate risk variables and instead asks how patterns of health are generated and reproduced through social organisation, power and history.

Lesley Doyal with Imogen Pennell — political economy of health / labour and exposureReadClose

Doyal, Lesley, with Imogen Pennell. 1979. The Political Economy of Health. London: Pluto Press. Book record ↗

Doyal and Pennell situate health and disease within the organisation of production, work, care, political institutions and colonial economic relations. They trace concrete routes from work hazards, pollution, food systems, infection and stress into bodily conditions and unequal patterns of illness. The book brings a political-economic explanation to these pathways; its empirical examples belong to their historical context rather than serving as current estimates.

Asa Cristina Laurell — collective health–illness process / social and biologicalReadClose

Laurell, Asa Cristina. 1982. “La salud-enfermedad como proceso social.” Cuadernos Médico Sociales 19: 1–11. Original Spanish text ↗

Laurell argues that illness and health have historically situated, collective patterns, not just individual clinical histories. She examines how work and eating are simultaneously socially organised and biological processes, connecting social production with bodily wear, nourishment and disease. Her account acknowledges that the precise pathways remain questions for investigation; it does not treat biology as an illusion or social class as a complete individual diagnosis.

Nancy Krieger — ecosocial theory / pathways of embodimentReadClose

Krieger, Nancy. 2024. “Theorizing epidemiology, the stories bodies tell, and embodied truths: a status update on contending 21st c CE epidemiological theories of disease distribution.” International Journal of Social Determinants of Health and Health Services 54(4): 331–342. Source ↗

Krieger brings together four connected dimensions of ecosocial inquiry: embodiment; pathways through which social and ecological conditions become embodied; cumulative exposure, susceptibility and resistance across life courses and generations; and agency and accountability. The framework asks how and why institutions and environments produce differentiated health patterns, and who can change them. It develops earlier social-medicine inquiry rather than originating the idea that social conditions affect bodies.

Sins Invalid — disability justice / interdependence and wholenessReadClose

Sins Invalid. 2015–. “10 Principles of Disability Justice.” Organisational statement, Sins Invalid. Source ↗

Sins Invalid's disability-justice principles hold together wholeness, interdependence and collective access. They describe disabled people as whole persons with histories, desires and internal lives while also insisting that people rely on one another and that access can be organised collectively according to differing needs and capacities. Interdependence here is a political principle that does not require the disappearance of individual personhood.

Provision, bodies, and ecological conditions

Shahra Razavi — care diamond / distribution of careReadClose

Razavi, Shahra. 2007. The Political and Social Economy of Care in a Development Context: Conceptual Issues, Research Questions and Policy Options. Gender and Development Programme Paper No. 3. Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. Source ↗

Razavi analyses care as work distributed across four institutional sites: households and families, markets, the public sector, and community or not-for-profit provision. The boundaries among these sites vary historically and politically, so responsibility for meeting a care need can move from one sphere to another rather than the need disappearing. She also stresses that unpaid care carries real labour, time and distributional costs and is deeply shaped by gender and power.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles — maintenance / care labourReadClose

Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. 1969. Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “CARE”. Manifesto. Source ↗

Ukeles sets “Development” and “Maintenance” beside one another as contrasting systems of activity. Development is associated with change, novelty and progress; maintenance with keeping, sustaining, renewing and repeating what life and development continually require. She connects the low cultural status of maintenance to domestic and low-paid work and declares her own washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing and supporting to be art.

Mary Ann Clark, Matthew Douglas & Jung Choi — open systems / thermodynamic exchangeReadClose

Clark, Mary Ann, Matthew Douglas & Jung Choi. 2018. Biology 2e. Houston, TX: OpenStax. Relevant section: §6.3, “The Laws of Thermodynamics.” Source ↗

The section describes organisms as open systems: they maintain organised life while matter and energy move across their boundaries. Biological order therefore depends on continuing exchanges with an environment rather than on physical isolation from it.

J. Gordon Betts et al. — gas exchange / bodily opennessReadClose

Betts, J. Gordon, Kelly A. Young, James A. Wise, Eddie Johnson, Brandon Poe, Dean H. Kruse, Oksana Korol, Jody E. Johnson, Mark Womble & Peter DeSaix. 2022. Anatomy and Physiology 2e. Houston, TX: OpenStax. Relevant section: §22.4, “Gas Exchange.” Source ↗

The section explains external respiration across the respiratory membrane. Oxygen diffuses from air in the alveoli into pulmonary blood, while carbon dioxide diffuses from blood into the alveoli to be expelled. Ordinary breathing therefore depends on continuous exchange across a maintained bodily boundary.

World Health Organization — measles / airborne biological interdependenceReadClose

World Health Organization. 2026. “Measles.” WHO Fact Sheet, 15 July 2026. Source ↗

WHO describes measles as a highly contagious viral disease transmitted through the air and respiratory secretions when an infected person breathes, coughs or sneezes. The example makes visible one way in which material released by one body can enter another body's biological environment and alter its health.

Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp & Alfred I. Tauber — symbiosis / biological individualityReadClose

Gilbert, Scott F., Jan Sapp & Alfred I. Tauber. 2012. “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals.” The Quarterly Review of Biology 87(4): 325–341. DOI: 10.1086/668166 ↗

Gilbert, Sapp and Tauber review evidence that animals and plants live in persistent functional association with microorganisms and argue that these symbioses complicate familiar accounts of biological individuality. They discuss microbial participation in metabolism, development and immune function and ask how biological individuality should be understood when organisms are constituted through durable multispecies associations.

Sarah Whitmee et al. — planetary health / ecological conditions of healthReadClose

Whitmee, Sarah, Andy Haines, Chris Beyrer, et al. 2015. “Safeguarding Human Health in the Anthropocene Epoch: Report of The Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on Planetary Health.” The Lancet 386(10007): 1973–2028. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(15)60901-1 ↗

The Commission links human health to the condition of Earth's natural systems and examines how environmental change generated through human activity can undermine the foundations of health. It connects health to climate regulation, food and water systems, biodiversity and other ecological processes while emphasising that environmental gains and harms are unequally produced and distributed.

IPCC — climate impacts / human wellbeingReadClose

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 2022. Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Working Group II contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report. Summary for Policymakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Source ↗

The IPCC assesses how climate change is already affecting ecosystems and human societies and projects further risks as warming increases. Its synthesis connects ecological and climatic change to heat exposure, water and food insecurity, infectious-disease risks, livelihoods and displacement, while repeatedly emphasising unequal vulnerability and uneven capacity to adapt.

WHO & Convention on Biological Diversity — biodiversity / ecosystem-health relationsReadClose

World Health Organization & Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity. 2015. Connecting Global Priorities: Biodiversity and Human Health: A State of Knowledge Review. Geneva: World Health Organization. Source ↗

The review synthesises links between biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and human health. It examines ecological contributions to food, water, air quality, medicine, disease regulation and other conditions of life, while also tracing ways in which environmental degradation can alter exposure to health risks.

U.S. CDC — harmful algal blooms / ecological feedback to healthReadClose

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2024. “Harmful Algal Blooms: Contributing Factors and Impacts.” Source ↗

CDC describes how nutrient pollution from sources including fertiliser, sewage and runoff can promote harmful algal blooms. Some blooms produce toxins that can reach people and animals through contaminated water, food or air, providing a concrete pathway by which altered ecological conditions return as conditions of bodily health.

Experience between persons

Sigal G. Barsade — emotional contagionReadClose

Barsade, Sigal G. 2002. “The Ripple Effect: Emotional Contagion and Its Influence on Group Behavior.” Administrative Science Quarterly 47(4): 644–675. DOI: 10.2307/3094912 ↗

Barsade experimentally manipulated the affective behaviour of one member of small groups performing a decision task. Differences in facial expression, gaze, tone, speaking pace, posture and engagement were associated with changes in other group members' observed and self-reported mood. The study also examined how these shifts related to cooperation, conflict and perceptions of group performance.

James A. Coan, Hillary S. Schaefer & Richard J. Davidson — social regulation of threatReadClose

Coan, James A., Hillary S. Schaefer & Richard J. Davidson. 2006. “Lending a Hand: Social Regulation of the Neural Response to Threat.” Psychological Science 17(12): 1032–1039. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01832.x ↗

Coan, Schaefer and Davidson studied sixteen highly satisfied married women anticipating possible electric shock while holding a spouse's hand, a stranger's hand or no hand. Hand-holding altered subjective and neural responses to threat, with spousal contact producing the strongest attenuation in several measures. The experiment provides a bounded example of social relation changing how threat is experienced rather than merely transmitting the same emotion from one person to another.

Arvid Kappas — social regulation of emotionReadClose

Kappas, Arvid. 2013. “Social Regulation of Emotion: Messy Layers.” Frontiers in Psychology 4: 51. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00051 ↗

Kappas argues that emotion cannot always be understood as an intrapersonal process that is merely expressed into a social setting afterwards. Emotional processes move reciprocally across intra- and interpersonal levels, while expressive behaviour also serves social goals and does not provide a transparent readout of what a person internally feels.

Richard V. Palumbo et al. — physiological synchronyReadClose

Palumbo, Richard V., Marisa E. Marraccini, Lisa L. Weyandt, Oliver Wilder-Smith, Heather A. McGee, Siwei Liu & Matthew S. Goodwin. 2017. “Interpersonal Autonomic Physiology: A Systematic Review of the Literature.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 21(2): 99–141. DOI: 10.1177/1088868316628405 ↗

Palumbo and colleagues review research on relationships between people's autonomic physiological dynamics during interaction. Across varied contexts, the literature reports forms of physiological synchrony or covariation in measures including heart rate and inter-beat dynamics, heart-rate variability, respiration, and electrodermal activity. The review also emphasises fragmentation, methodological variation, and differences across contexts and measures, so physiological synchrony should be treated as a context-sensitive empirical phenomenon rather than a single mechanism or a fixed indicator of psychological connection.

Plural maps of self and personhood

Vivian L. Vignoles et al. — self-construal beyond the East–West binaryReadClose

Vignoles, Vivian L., Ellinor Owe, Maja Becker, et al. 2016. “Beyond the ‘East–West’ Dichotomy: Global Variation in Cultural Models of Selfhood.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 145(8): 966–1000. DOI: 10.1037/xge0000175 ↗

Across multiple studies and national samples, Vignoles and colleagues examine self-construal along several distinct dimensions rather than treating independence and interdependence as a single opposition. Their results show varied combinations within and across societies and challenge the simple claim that “Western” selves are individual while “non-Western” selves are relational.

Catherine Maarie Amohia Love — Māori selfhood / whakapapa and placeReadClose

Love, Catherine Maarie Amohia. 1999. Maori Voices in the Construction of Indigenous Models of Counselling Theory and Practice. PhD thesis, Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand. Source ↗

Love's counselling research examines Māori accounts in which identity and healthy selfhood are located through whakapapa, whānau, hapū, iwi, wairuatanga and relations with place. Her discussion of pepeha describes a person locating who they are through where and from whom they come. The thesis presents these relational forms within a specific Māori counselling and intellectual context rather than as a universal account of Māori identity.

Te Awa Tupua Act — Whanganui River / relational identity and legal personhoodReadClose

New Zealand. 2017. Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017, Public Act 2017 No. 7. Especially Part 2 and Part 3, including s. 69. Source ↗

The Act gives legal form to the Whanganui iwi relationship with the Whanganui River and recognises Te Awa Tupua as an indivisible living whole with physical and metaphysical elements. It records the Whanganui formulation Ko au te Awa, ko te Awa ko au — “I am the River and the River is me” — as expressing the intrinsic relationship between Whanganui iwi and the river. The formulation is specific to Whanganui history, identity, responsibility and Treaty settlement.

Ana Milena Horta — Indigenous territoriality / body, person and territoryReadClose

Horta, Ana Milena. 2021. “Aportes para el entendimiento de las territorialidades indígenas. Cuerpo, persona y territorio en el caso del pueblo iku.” Desacatos 66: 126–139. Source ↗

Horta examines Iku understandings of body, person and territory in which territory is not simply a bounded external space but is constituted through relations and exchanges among human and other beings. The article describes bodily and personal formation as entangled with these territorial relations, offering a situated ethnographic account rather than a general theory of Indigenous relationality.

Ifeanyi A. Menkiti — community-constituted personhoodReadClose

Menkiti, Ifeanyi A. 1984. “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought.” In Richard A. Wright, ed., African Philosophy: An Introduction, 3rd ed., 171–181. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

Menkiti argues that personhood cannot be adequately understood through the isolated psychological and physical properties of an individual. He gives community constitutive priority and describes personhood as processual and acquired through social incorporation and ethical participation. His essay presents this as “the African view,” a continental generalisation that later African philosophers have strongly contested.

Kwame Gyekye — moderate communitarianism / person and communityReadClose

Gyekye, Kwame. 1997. “Person and Community: In Defense of Moderate Communitarianism.” In Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience, 35–76. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195112252.003.0002 ↗

Gyekye defends a moderate communitarian account in which persons are deeply socially embedded without being exhausted by communal membership. He argues that individuals retain capacities for evaluation and choice as well as dignity and rights. His position therefore directly contests stronger forms of communitarianism that give the community overwhelming normative or ontological priority.

Pātañjali — relational dispositions / seer–seen distinctionReadClose

Pātañjali. Yoga Sūtra, 1.33 and 2.17, read with the classical Vyāsa commentary (Yoga Bhāṣya) and established English translation. Source ↗

Yoga Sūtra 1.33 presents friendliness, compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity toward the happiness, suffering, virtue and non-virtue of others as dispositions conducive to the clarification or settling of mind. Yoga Sūtra 2.17, by contrast, treats the conjunction of the “seer” and the “seen” as a cause of suffering. Classical Yoga therefore combines relational disciplines with a strong distinction between seer and seen rather than teaching an ontology of universal merger.

Early Buddhist texts — not-self / dependent arisingReadClose

Saṃyutta Nikāya 22.59, Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta; Saṃyutta Nikāya 12.15, Kaccānagotta Sutta. Pāli Canon. SN 22.59 ↗ · SN 12.15 ↗

SN 22.59 examines form, feeling, perception, formations and consciousness and rejects identifying any of them as “mine,” “I” or a permanent self. SN 12.15 rejects the opposed extremes of absolute existence and non-existence and instead describes arising and cessation through conditions. These texts support early Buddhist not-self and dependent-arising traditions without positing a universal cosmic Self.

Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad — self / BrahmanReadClose

Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.10. Primary Sanskrit text; multiple established English translations checked. Source ↗

In 1.4.10 the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad contains the formula aham brahmāsmi — “I am Brahman.” The passage belongs to an Upaniṣadic metaphysical and soteriological account in which ordinary self-identification is radically relocated through knowledge of the relation between self and Brahman. It is not an empirical claim about psychological wellbeing and should not be assimilated to Buddhist or classical Yogic accounts.

Parmenides — unity of beingReadClose

Parmenides. Fragment B8, especially B8.1–6 (DK 28 B8). Greek text in the Diels–Kranz tradition; quoted English wording checked against Patricia Curd's translation in The Legacy of Parmenides: Eleatic Monism and Later Presocratic Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Source ↗

In the “Way of Truth,” Parmenides characterises What-Is as ungenerable, imperishable and complete, and at B8 describes it as “all together, one, cohesive.” The fragment advances an Eleatic metaphysical argument about being and plurality. It is included here as an extreme philosophical position on the unity of what is, not as a theory of wellbeing.

Common life, difference, loyalty, and exit

Elinor Ostrom — self-governed commons / common-pool institutionsReadClose

Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Relevant primary locus: Chapter 3, especially the comparative analysis and Table 3.1. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511807763 ↗

Ostrom compares long-enduring institutions through which resource users organise and govern common-pool resources themselves. Across the cases she identifies recurring arrangements including defined boundaries, user participation in modifying rules, monitoring accountable to users, graduated sanctions, accessible conflict-resolution mechanisms and recognised rights to organise. She presents these patterns as provisional findings from comparative cases rather than as a universal recipe for community governance.

Iris Marion Young — difference without fusionReadClose

Young, Iris Marion. 1990. “City Life and Difference.” In Justice and the Politics of Difference, 226–256. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Publisher record ↗

Young shares the critique of atomistic individualism but rejects an ideal of community built around fusion, mutual identification, face-to-face transparency or shared values. She argues that such ideals can repress difference and exclude people with whom members do not identify. Her alternative seeks forms of social and political relation capable of sustaining difference without treating difference itself as a failure of community.

Albert O. Hirschman — exit / voice / loyaltyReadClose

Hirschman, Albert O. 1970. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Relevant primary locus: Chapter 7, “A Theory of Loyalty,” especially “Loyalist Behavior as Modified by Severe Initiation and High Penalties for Exit.” Source ↗

Hirschman distinguishes “exit” — leaving a declining organisation or relationship — from “voice,” efforts to change it from within. In his account of loyalty, attachment can hold exit in abeyance and make voice more likely, while severe initiation or high penalties for exit alter the practical meaning of leaving. Exit can therefore be formally possible while carrying economic, social or internalised costs that make departure difficult.

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