A field note on tenacity and interdependence

A flower metaphor might seem cliché, but these flowers really are tough, together

Toughing it out--together--never looked so good (Images: B.G. Merkle © 2025)

[Bear with me, there’s a so what to the intro musings here. Or, if you’re not feeling contemplative about the nature of nature writing, you can just jump to the large photo below, and read on from there.]

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I don’t write about it much, but I’ve been a nature writer longer than any other type of writer. There are a host of ways to think about “nature writing,” including third-person observations of nature, an emphasis on conveying facts, and noticing seasonal or daily nuances of the ecosystem around us.

A lot of nature writing, for centuries or longer, has also had a very personal layer to it. So, a lot of nature writing could easily also be considered memoir or reported memoir. You’ve almost certainly read something that wove together a person’s experience, their nature observations, and some bigger idea about the cosmos, the meaning of life, or the state of society. Every “generation” of writers seems to have its luminary nature writers. Some of those folks are famous or infamous for their writing while they’re alive. Some of them are the folks who now, from our rear view-mirror perspective, epitomize the style and concerns of nature writing from their era.

Regardless of how confessional, personal, dispassionate, or political a piece of nature writing may be in the hands of a given writer or time frame, all of this writing starts with the same sort of kernel. A person notices something in the natural world (often where the built environment intersects with living things or natural phenomena). Sometimes that’s where it ends. Sometimes, though, that nature observation becomes a pearl, encased in the sands of a writer’s own life and interests, worn smooth and luminescent by the connection between the two.

The best nature writing, according to me, is writing that creates these kinds of jewels for us to admire, respond to, even desire to possess or recreate ourselves. Nature writing that really compels me is writing that reminds me that we humans are human-animals: part of the living, breathing, pulsing, and ever-changing organism of the planet. People are phenomenal because we are phenomena. That any one of us exists is remarkable; that we coexist is wondrous. It may seem unnecessarily obvious to say so, but we also coexist with everything else alive on the planet: our fellow Earth citizens, amoebas, the molds that make cheese delicious, the lichen that show us what interdependence really means, and the larger floras and faunas that delight, terrify, clothe, house, feed, and teach us.

Virtually every culture on the planet (other than the Descartes-misinformed [1] society we sometimes call “Western”) rightly understands humans to be reliant on each other and the other living beings and active forces of Earth. The idea that humans are apart from nature— [2] mashed together with a cascade of bad ideas about rugged individualism, etc.—has twisted our relationships with everything in this society. But as I walk my dog every day[3], I’ve been noticing something particular about the wildflowers this spring.

Wildflowers galore, each with their own elbow room (Image: B.G. Merkle © 2025)

In the ecosystem where I live—a high altitude prairie at ~7,500 feet—there are loads of wildflowers right now. The ones I see on my regular walks grow close to the ground and are frequently called cushion plants. (This isn’t a species, it’s a whole “category” of various species and genera.) But, unlike our couch cushions, virtually none of the ones I’m seeing touch each other. However, they grow close enough together that they are certainly sharing resources, and likely help each other collect the rare moisture [4] and resist the erosive force of our fierce winds.

It’s not just tempting to see these little flowers as a metaphor: we need each other. It’s also accurate to understand these tough, free-standing, but interdependent flowers as such. Research indicates [5] these plants create microclimates that (a) support their own needs and (b) contribute to overall-better conditions for neighboring plants. [6] In fact, a review of 727 studies of plant interactions found that the more stress plants experience, the more they shift towards helping each other! [7] 

Moreover, positive mutualism among plants fosters biodiversity, supporting species that otherwise couldn’t make it on their own. [8] The take-away is straight-up, feel good: “plants growing together help each other out, especially when they most need help.”

Any number of cultures more closely in tune with nature recommend and affirm that we can learn from our more-than-human relatives. Given how fierce the winds of isolation are right now, how dessicating is our widespread despair, it strikes me that we urgently need to remember how hard these teeny plants work together. And how their collective growth facilitates each others’ persistence and even fosters each others blooming.

I’m in a book group on campus right now, and we’re working through a book that discusses the concept of dharma (life’s purpose), as defined and interpreted by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. There’s a relevant, fundamental lesson in the Bhagavad Gita which is also a central concept of Buddhism and several other wisdom traditions (e.g., see Viktor Frankl’s take). That is: in life, pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. In other words, there will always be challenges in our lives—unfortunately, for all of human history, some of these challenges have been self-inflicted and imposed by our fellow humans. But, the question is, how will we interact with these challenges? How will we treat each other in the face of such challenges?

It is tempting to adhere to a fixed, scarcity mindset, to hoard resources, to resent anyone else for what they have, and to assume the only way out is to be self-reliant. History and the modern era are replete with examples of people doing just that. But, seriously, even in the modern world, it’s actually impossible to survive, let alone thrive, in isolation. We rely on other people, and the natural resources of the planet, for food, shelter, communication, transport, medical care, weather reports, music, clothing….this list is truly endless.

So, while it could seem simplistic, I actually think it is deeply profound to look to these little, flowering relatives of ours, and see how they work together to sustain the whole community. The lesson seems especially profound in the context of persisting and mutually thriving in the face of stressors and disturbances.

This doesn’t need to be just an abstract, feel-good admonition. In my community, numerous groups of people are coalescing into efforts to build a weekly meal-sharing collective, organize neighborhood-level glass recycling (a perpetual issue in my town), and to build a tool library via a network of people willing to loan all sorts of tools and appliances that are rarely used, expensive to acquire, but occasionally needed. I have no doubt there are a dozen such efforts for every one I’m aware of locally. And I’m totally confident that there are people acting like cushion plants in your community, too. Scout out what’s going on, and join something! These deliberate, small-scale acts of interdependence are how we concretely, and over the long term, foster resilience and connectivity. These cushion plants, with their profuse flowers and staunch inter-reliance, have a great idea. Let’s thank them for it and use it!

How about you?

What mutualistic community efforts are active in where you live? Which ones seem most compelling to you? What’s one that you can commit to, even just for the next 3 months?

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[1] Here’s a light intro to Descartes’s bad idea, and others that have furthered our misconception that we’re all alone and should be acting that way.

[2] My writing is 100% human-generated. No LLMs or the like were involved (apart from Substack’s built-in grammar/spell checker). Thus, all em dashes—my favorite form of punctuation—are my own. Readers are invited to consider this and all future uses of punctuation the work of writing and thinking that they are; not an indicator of outsourcing such to an oversized auto-prompt/auto-correct with massive environmental and ethical problems.

[3] Even at ten years old, he needs 3+ miles of activity per day or he’s an unbearable dervish in the house! So, I get a lot of walking and noticing time in!

[4] We get about 11 inches of precip annually, roughly the same as Tucson, AZ.

[5] If you want to get nerdy, here are just a couple papers on the subject: Cushion plant morphology controls biogenic capability and facilitation effects of Silene acaulis along an elevation gradient; Nurse plant effect of the cushion plant Silene acaulis (L.) Jacq. in an alpine environment in the subarctic Scandes, Sweden; Biogenic habitat creation affects biomass–diversity relationships in plant communities. If you can’t access these, just let me know; I can get you a PDF of them.

[6] Scientific terms for these mutually beneficial interactions include words like facilitation, positive mutualism, positive interactions, and interdependence.

[7] Here’s a link to that study: Global shifts towards positive species interactions with increasing environmental stress. Let me know if you have trouble accessing it.

[8] Here are links to two papers reporting these effects: Facilitation as a ubiquitous driver of biodiversity; Some implications of direct positive interactions for community species diversity. Let me know if you have trouble accessing them.