Читать книгу Mutual Aid - Pablo Servigne - Страница 22

Until proven otherwise, humans do not have the ability to photosynthesize (to store the sun’s rays in the form of appetizing molecules). We draw our energy from ingesting and then burning the tissues of plants, or the tissues of animals that have eaten the tissues of plants. This process of combustion, which is called respiration, is the result of an ancestral bacterial fusion. So here is the first brick of associations that makes us human beings (no. 1). In addition, our cells work together to form a multicellular organism that divides the work into bundles of very varied and coordinated functions. We are also an association of specialized cells (no. 2). In addition to this, the organism which serves as our body shelters a huge population of microorganisms whose fate is intimately bound up with ours.⁴² It is impossible for us to live without this microbiota, and vice versa (no. 3). To live, we eat plants and animals that we have domesticated and with which we have coevolved for millennia. Then we depend on an infinite number of living species to ensure the presence of air, water, nutrients, materials and habitable places (no. 4). Finally, no human being exists in isolation. We are the product of several human associations, those which enable us to live today, families and society in general (no. 5), but also those which preceded us and left us all the information and all the objects necessary for present-day life: that is, culture (no. 6). After all, no human being in the world is able to build a cell phone on their own just from what they can find in nature!

So we are the product of an interlocking set of associations that have been around since the advent of life, and which still take place today, with societies of a unique size and complexity, making us one of the most cooperative species in the living world. In short, we are mutual aid incarnate. This leads, as in certain social insects, to what ecologists call an indisputable ecological ‘success’:⁴³ we have colonized the whole earth (which does not necessarily guarantee a long stay on this planet).