"The Superorganism"

Is Earth just one massive, interconnected organism?

Read time: Approx 5-7 min

If you zoomed out far enough… way past your neighborhood, past the country, and beyond the Earth’s blue marble shimmer… you might start to see something strange. Not a planet of nations and borders and stock markets, but a single, breathing organism. One vast, interconnected being. A superorganism.

This isn’t some hippie hallucination after too much peyote. It’s actually grounded in systems thinking and ecological science. Folks like Nate Hagens, Lynn Margulis, James Lovelock, and Buckminster Fuller aren't (or weren't) merely fringe nutjobs, they’ve been the early whisperers of a truth that Indigenous cultures have been living all along. Earth isn't just on a system—it is one.

Think of it like this…Earth has veins. Its rivers move nutrients the way blood moves oxygen. Highways and power lines may look like marks of progress, but zoomed out, they resemble neural pathways or capillaries—arteries through which energy pulses. Whether it’s migrating caribou or semi-trucks hauling bananas in February. Even our electrical grids hum like a heartbeat, extracting stored life from coal, sun, wind, or the slow death of ancient plankton compressed into oil. Energy flows. That’s what matters.

The true currency of this planet has never been money. It’s energy. Always has been. Calories in, calories out. Animals have always known this. A lion doesn’t chase a gazelle to boost its portfolio—it does it because without calories, it can’t move, can’t function, can’t be. Squirrels store food for winter, not because they’re into long-term savings plans, but because energy hoarding is survival. That same impulse? It got weird when humans learned to hoard stored sunlight from under the ground.

Buried sunlight…that’s what fossil fuels are. Solar energy, photosynthesized by ancient plants, compacted over eons, and now lit on fire to keep our dishwashers humming, phones charged, ChatGPT prompts flowing, and our office buildings glowing at 3 a.m. It’s brilliant, in a Frankenstein’s-monster kind of way. But we’ve turned energy into something abstract, mediated through digits on a screen and the illusion of “growth,” forgetting that at the base of it all, every breath, every heartbeat, every commute, every frappuccino—costs calories. And these calories…they have a limit.

We’ve built a culture that chases money while ignoring energy. We measure GDP while ignoring soil fertility. We count barrels of oil but not bees or microbes or the quiet pulse of fungi underfoot. And in doing so, we’ve broken the feedback loops that once told us when to stop, when to rest, when to give back.

Nowhere is that disconnection more visible than in how we produce and consume food. Most of us see a carton of eggs, a gallon of milk, a boneless chicken breast, or a plastic-wrapped cube of pink ground beef—-and that’s where the story ends. We forget that, behind each of those products, is an animal—-often confined, often suffering, raised in conditions optimized for output, not for life. We forget the staggering amount of energy it takes to maintain this scale of year-round production…the feed, the fuel, the antibiotics, the water, the shipping, the refrigeration. We forget the methane, the runoff, the waste lagoons. We forget that these operations function not within the natural seasons of the year, but against them. And we forget what it feels like to be part of the cycle, not above it. Ever wonder why something you designed, built, or baked just “hits different?” It’s because you were connected to it. Every step. Every input. Every ounce of energy, intention, and care. Food used to be that way, too.

Extraction, in and of itself, isn’t evil. After all, squirrels extract acorns. Bears extract honey. But they do so within the rhythms of the ecosystem, not by dynamiting the entire forest to get a better backdrop for, yet, another seemingly-unnecessary apartment complex. We, on the other hand, have become the species that takes but rarely gives back. We're a bit like that friend who always shows up for dinner but never brings wine.

Zoom in to modern times. In a truly wild twist of ego and detachment, some of the richest among us—those who’ve benefitted most from this extractive culture—are pointing their rockets at Mars. As if this planet, with its oceans and forests and food webs, is just one more disposable asset. As if we can simply burn through what we have here and then go somewhere else to repeat the cycle. This isn’t innovation, it’s escapism in a billionaire, self-flagellating spacesuit. We weren’t dropped on Earth by accident. This place contains everything we need. But instead of listening to the system we belong to, we treat it like a failed startup. The arrogance in thinking we can abandon our planetary responsibilities and colonize another world…another being…is the same extractive mentality that got us into this mess. Mars doesn’t need our ambition. In fact, Mars is probably screaming, “Stay the f**k away!” Earth needs our attention.

We’re mining phosphorus from ancient seabeds to feed modern agriculture, and we're flushing it out to sea where it strangles marine life. We’re chopping down rainforests and replacing them with monoculture crops that deplete the soil faster than you can say “soybean futures.” Even our attempts to “green” things often miss the point by focusing on efficiency instead of reciprocity.

Imagine if your liver kept detoxifying your bloodstream while you just kept pounding tequila every night. Eventually, your body would send you a stern message—usually in the form of collapse, then cirrhosis. That’s what the planet is doing right now, albeit more patiently than we deserve.

We like to think of ourselves as separate from nature, as if we’re standing outside it. Making decisions about it. Managing it. But the truth is more humbling: we are it. Our bodies are made of stardust and salmon. With every death, energy is recycled into new growth. We breathe what the trees exhale. Our well-being is braided into the health of this vast, living system we call home.

Yet we keep acting like we're landlords evicting a tenant. In reality, we're more like cells in a body. And the host is running a fever. Fires, floods, fractures, and Pandemics are the symptoms.

This isn’t a sermon. It’s an invitation. Not to panic, but to recalibrate. To notice. To remember that regeneration isn’t about planting a tree here or recycling a bottle there…it’s about rhythm. Alignment. It’s about living with the system, not on top of it.

Energy doesn’t lie. Unlike our economic fantasies, energy has limits. The planet’s budget is real. And when we exceed it, things start to unravel—not because Earth is cruel, but because that’s how bodies work. How an organism functions.

The good news? Nature is absurdly forgiving. Despite how many times we've given her a big “middle finger.” Give her even half a chance, and she bounces back with a kind of grace that would make most of us weep. But we’ve got to stop thinking like miners and start living like members of a living system. Less conquest. More care.

Earth doesn’t need us to save her. She needs us to remember we belong to her. For every bottle tossed into recycling, for every reusable shopping bag—make it conscious and not performative. Know the why behind the actions. Feel connected to the mission.

Maybe, just maybe, if we start acting less like parasites and more like symbionts, this miraculous blue body might just start to heal.

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