Summary

	Climate
	Natural systems, from molecular to planetary
	Breath
	Food (nearly all of which was once alive)
	Water
	Energy
	Language and meaning
	Politics
	Religion
	Culture, education, sport
	Economics
	Law
	Military systems
	Systems of violence and oppression
	Family structures
	Race
	Gender
	Class

The above list looks a bit like a ministerial cabinet! If you can think of any things or categories to add, or if I've missed your favourite category or sliced the world up in a different way from how you would, please note that.

Our co-dependent involvement with these natural and human systems not only connects us deeply into the world, it also forms our personal character in somewhat unpredictable but unmistakable ways. Then, of course, there are all the very particular and unique connections between ourselves because of our own character and relationships.

These connections are not just ideas. They are the actual basis of the life which we live and experience. If you re-read the list above I am sure you can find many personal examples of how the world contributes to who you "are". This is not trite or banal or predictable. It is a useful and accurate way of understanding the world and our place in it and has profound implications for the way that we behave. Some experience a scary feeling of dissolving boundaries when they begin to notice how their "selves" are spread out all over the world. Even our theories and ideas of a solid, skin-bound "self" turn out, on examination, to have come from elsewhere. We, in turn, pass them along to our children and others with whom we come into contact.

So we live with this strange paradox: we experience ourselves as individuals and are compelled to act as such, but we are in fact embedded in the natural and social world, without which we could not exist. A simple activity like drinking a cup of tea can illustrate what I mean. Here is a poem which is explicitly about interconnectedness:

Tea Ceremony

To this cup, I pay homage.
To the designer of this cup,
to the workers who made this cup,
who mined the ores, I pay homage.
To the workers who dug the clay,
ground the glazes, the farmers
who fed those workers I pay homage.
To the great cycles which give us
clean air, clear water, to all living things,
all the earth, I pay homage.

To this tea, I pay homage.
To the growth in the bud,
air, water and light, I pay homage.
to the workers who grew, tended,
picked the tea, who packed, transported,
distributed the tea, I pay homage.
To the great cycles which give us
clean air, clear water, to all living things,
all the earth, I pay homage.

To this water, I pay homage.
To the rain which falls,
to the rivers, the dams,
the builders and plumbers, I pay homage.
To the oceans and the sun,
the great trade winds
and the world's turning, I pay homage.
To all the cycles which bring us
clean air, clear water, to all living things,
all the earth, I pay homage.

In this collection of web pages, I have discussed air, water, food, energy, and written briefly about some of the systems which mediate our connections to the world.

Air is a gas, water is a liquid, soil and minerals incorporate the solid. Living beings and systems combine all these in their make-up. Energy and information are found in the way that these things are organised.

Air is difficult to own, it's a gas and hard to fence off. As the quality of air gets worse there will be an attempts to own better areas and reserve them for the use of certain people. The privileged will want less poisoned air. Already, in several cities of the world, oxygen is dispensed in the city centers.

	We need to question a political system which allows people to poison the air we breathe so that they may drive big cars or make profit from industry?
	We need equally to question a social order which poisons the air in the name of the people.

Water is also pretty difficult to own, though almost all water on land is now owned. In the oceans, it belongs to all, is the source of most rain and the home of the systems which produce most of the planet's oxygen and much of its food. A necessity for human life, defining water rights has been a social concern since the first agricultural societies formed, and possibly even before that. Roman-Dutch law is still concerned with access to and rights over water. Rivers flow across national boundaries, and water tables do not respect human borders. Like air, water blurs the boundaries of the world, carrying poisons from here to there, connecting continents and systems, providing a path for the great whales and the minute plankton. As water becomes scarce under the pressures of desertification, population increase, and increased industrialisation, access to water will become a big political issue.

Food, the soils and the natural systems which produce and sustain them are the material basis of our lives. But increasingly these vital 'resources' are owned and controlled by business systems which damage them for short-term gain. Access to land and to food have been pretty much tied together since the start of agriculture. The relationship between politics and the land is typically an expedient one: Political systems have not been particularly good at taking a long-term view of caring for the land.

Every living being needs food. This need increases with human population.. As the climate changes in the coming years the politics of food will become to be seen as ecological politics. We can fool ourselves by disconnecting things: politics here, ecology there, but these things are in fact deeply connected.

We need energy for producing food, for cooking things, for warming and cooling our bodies, for changing things and making things. We get most of our energy from the natural ecosystem, as food, oil, coal and wood and so on. Although solar energy is freely available, almost all energy available to citizens is controlled by business interests and must be bought. The business system dictates that the provision of energy will be driven by the imperative for profit in the shortest term.

We need to understand costs of using energy and to work on strategies for democratising access to energy, strategies for making energy renewable so that our children and their children will have a quality of life that is not worse than ours.

We need information so that we may have the tools of thinking. We need to understand the patterns which connect us to each other, and which connect our society into natural systems. Increasingly, information comes to us through television, the Internet and other media. This information, while vast in its scope, is often trivial, incomplete or shallow. Much important information is controlled, manipulated or hidden by the interests (business, state, military etc.) that control it.

	We need high quality information so that we may have high quality minds.
	We need to have unrestricted access to information so that we can make intelligent democratic decisions.
	We need to know how information is controlled and why.
	We need to be part of the global information exchange.
	We need information which tells us clearly what is being put into our systems, what goes into our air, water and food.
	Capital must be denied the right to hide these facts in the name of profit or advantage in business.
	We need education and representation which will make use of these facts and allow us to make use of them.

We are our natural ecology, our human society. We are inextricably tied together through the networks of ecology, politics and economics.

For our own benefit, we need to work for a society where the connections are visible. Where the natural systems which support us are healthy. Where democracy means that we cannot hide these connections and control them for private gain. We need to find the path back to wholeness and to walk this path together. I am going to end with an old workers slogan. And I hope that these reflections will bring a new dimension to it: