Welcome to Entangled Worlds

I have been craving something for as long as I can remember.

I used to say that I was hungry for “story.” Then I thought, mourning my dreams, perhaps it’s called “wonder.” Maybe, “play”? A heartbeat past despair, I called out “hope.” Now, I name it something near “connection.” The wonder of our connection to all other living and non-living beings in the universe. The whimsy of imagining what strange ecological relationships exist beyond our understanding. The curiosity to dismantle the facade of individualism that entraps us in banal materialist systems and to engage our sensuous ecological imagination. What I was looking for was “entanglement.”

"Entanglement describes the ongoing interweaving, of different kinds of things acting at different scales (e.g. mushrooms, pine trees, soils, Hmong-Americans, Japanese buyers, cell phones, property rights, gift-giving customs, markets, etc.), into complex relationships...In order to rearrange our mental landscapes, we must learn not to pull on one end of the thread, but to engage with the knot as a whole."
-From the Anthropocene Curriculum, referring to Mushroom at the End of the World by Dr. Anna L. Tsing

Dr. Anna L. Tsing describes entanglement from an environmental anthropological point-of-view, a way to integrate our understanding of extractive human systems into the ecological systems they claim to be separated from. For me, entanglement is all the things I foraged along my way to the word: wonder and whimsy, curiosity and play, story especially. Plus all the varied disciplines I encountered while following the dangling threads of entanglement: queer ecology, feminist science studies, intersectional environmentalism, ecofeminism, radical imagination, and multi-species justice. As a storyteller, I am making entanglement - in all its shimmering and tentacular immensity - my practice. I write with nature, from nature, and to nature, so my stories become like birdsong.

Most of all, entanglement, for me, is hope. Living in a Sacrifice Zone, I can either give in to the relentless despair of endless extraction or I can choose to see the entangled mychorrizhal roots of the strange more-than-human communities growing in the ruins of extractive industries. I choose entanglement, every single time. Not as a naive luxury, but as stubborn survival. Nature only knows how to grow. And grow. And grow. I want to learn how to dream with it again.

Do you want to come along?

Allons-y. ⬇️

Forage hope from nature.

A frog calls in your cul-de-sac. A stubborn bloom peers from the cracks of the pavement. The flash of a butterfly snaps in the summer heat. Start to notice the aliveness all around you. Pluck it (metaphorically) from the ruins of capitalism. Forage it from rust and decay. Notice. Pay attention. Radically pay attention, in fact, for capitalism will always try to steal this precious gift from you. Then begin to ask questions: Where does this frog live? Why does it call? Why do I only hear it for a few months? Is the bloom a weed? Why does it want to grow here? Where is that butterfly going and why is it here? Following your questions is pulling on the thread that leads to the knot of entanglement. You are slowly cultivating a practice of wonder, and in a world that steals your attention and sells it back to you, wonder is resistance.

Root in community.

Once you begin a practice of foraging hope, your eyes open to the ways that humans and the more-than-human are partaking in creative ecological community-making around you. Humans planting pollinator gardens in the middle of six lane highways. The river painting bluebells upon the crumbling brownfield site. Ants planting gardens of ten million trilliums on formerly-cleared hills made of ancient reefs.

You’re learning to explore the knots and weaves of the more-than-human entanglement around you. But you’ve also noticed the frayed and torn edges. Have you wondered how to mend them? In a Sacrifice Zone, you can see the new entanglements formed in order for communities to survive. Drying streams rejuvenated by communities who depend on them for drinking water. Old landfills planted with thriving pollinator gardens. Queer and socialist collectives confronting poverty from poisonous industries. Unlikely coalitions formed to confront resource extraction. Human and more-than-human communities in Sacrifice Zones are dreaming with nature and, in the process, radically imagining solutions to the ecological crises we all face. See how nature grows when humans and the more-than-human garden together? You’ve followed the thread and you’re finally seeing the knot of entanglement. Grounded in attention and fueled by wonder, you can begin to root radically in place and in community.

Bloom with imagination.

Stories stitch our society together. They can mend relationships and weave new ones, expanding our personal sense of community in our neurobiology. Stories make us want to reach out to others. They fuel prosocial behavior. Can that include the more-than-human too? And yet, we are living with the legacy of a colonialist monoculture of stories and materialist story structures that is limiting our ability to imagine new more-than-human communities. How do we break through?

Let’s learn to dream with nature again. Learn how other beings form strange entanglements and symbiotic connections. Forests think through the branching roots of mushrooms. Oceans breathe through the symbiosis of cyanobacteria. Squid light up the depths in a language made of bacterial light. All around us nature entangles itself through radical collectivism in order to survive. Can we imagine futures where these entanglements thrive? Can we dream of a world where humans celebrate the sacred entanglements around them? Practice your imagination regularly and radically. Spin each entanglement you notice into wild and feral possibilities.

Wild clocks. Insect symphonies. River weavers. The more-than-human world is filled with wonder and whimsy, so shouldn’t our stories be too? Break through cynicism with hopepunk. Collapse realist expectations with speculative escapism. Write nature with animacy. Make everything a poem (like, seriously, everything). Tell stories together. Tell them at a campfire, beneath the flaps of owl wings. Make them immersive. Make them interactive. Make them mythic and fantastical and wondrous. And no matter the form or function, focus on making relationships through story, whether that’s between the reader and the entanglement you write about or you and the river you read your poem to. Story is community. Community is story. Feed your imagination and see what blooms.