The Living Field Hypothesis

Coastal Tree, Queensland, Australia, © Carol Walden 2026.

A New Way of Thinking About Life, Nature and Consciousness

We have spent centuries trying to understand life by taking it apart. We have mapped genes, decoded DNA, explored cells and proteins, and begun to unravel the astonishing complexity of the brain. These discoveries have transformed medicine, agriculture and technology, revealing a universe of remarkable processes hidden within every living organism.

Yet one possibility has received far less attention. Perhaps life cannot be fully understood by examining its parts alone.

A profound question remains. Is life fully explained by understanding its individual components, or does something equally important emerge from the interactions that exist between them? This question has occupied scientists, philosophers and naturalists for generations. My own thinking has been shaped by many of their insights, and this essay is offered in the same spirit of inquiry.

The Living Field Hypothesis proposes that many of the remarkable properties of living systems emerge not simply from the organisms themselves, but from the richness of the relationships between them.

This hypothesis is offered not as an established scientific theory, but as a philosophical and scientific framework that draws together ideas from ecology, biology, systems science, philosophy and our lived experience of the natural world. It proposes that these diverse fields may be pointing toward a larger pattern, one that becomes visible only when we place interdependence, rather than individuality, at the centre of our understanding of life. By bringing together research from multiple disciplines, it offers a new synthesis intended to encourage discussion, further inquiry and, perhaps, new ways of thinking about the living world.

Intellectual Foundations

The Living Field Hypothesis did not emerge in isolation. It stands upon the work of scientists and thinkers who have each contributed important pieces to a much larger puzzle.

Among the most influential is James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis, which proposes that the Earth behaves as a self-regulating system. Rather than viewing the atmosphere, oceans, rocks and living organisms as separate entities, Lovelock suggested that they interact in ways that help maintain conditions suitable for life. His work challenged the long-held assumption that the living and non-living worlds could be understood independently of one another.

Working alongside Lovelock, Lynn Margulis transformed evolutionary biology through her theory of symbiogenesis. She demonstrated that some of the greatest evolutionary advances arose through cooperation rather than competition, showing that the complex cells from which all plants and animals are built originated when simpler organisms formed enduring partnerships (Margulis 1998). The very cells within our own bodies are therefore living reminders that cooperation has been one of evolution's most creative forces.

These ideas resonate strongly with developments in complex systems theory, which explores how order, stability and unexpected properties emerge from networks of interaction rather than from isolated parts. Closely related to this, systems biology has increasingly shifted its attention from studying individual genes or molecules to understanding the interactions that connect them. Living organisms are now recognised as intricate networks whose behaviour cannot always be predicted by examining their components separately.

Within ecology, the work of Suzanne Simard has profoundly changed our understanding of forests. Her research has helped reveal the importance of vast underground mycorrhizal networks through which trees and fungi exchange nutrients and interact in complex ways (Simard 2021; Henriksson et al. 2023). Such research has contributed to a growing understanding of forests not simply as collections of individual trees, but as highly interconnected communities whose resilience depends upon countless relationships operating both above and beneath the forest floor.

The writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer offer another important perspective by bringing together modern botany and Indigenous knowledge. Her work reminds us that connection is not merely a scientific concept but also an ethical one, founded upon reciprocity, gratitude and a sense of belonging within the living world. Donna Haraway has likewise explored the inseparability of humans and the wider community of life, arguing that our identities are shaped through the connections that constitute us rather than through our separateness.

Research into mycorrhizal networks, forest ecology, ecological resilience, criticality and emergence continues to strengthen the case that cooperation is fundamental to the behaviour of living systems. Philosophers including Alfred North Whitehead and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin also challenged the tendency to see reality as a collection of isolated objects, arguing instead that process, change and interdependence lie at the heart of existence itself.

None of these thinkers proposed what I describe here as the Living Field Hypothesis, nor do I suggest that they would necessarily agree with every aspect of it. My aim is to explore whether these diverse observations, drawn from many different disciplines, may together point toward a broader understanding of life in which connection is not merely one characteristic among many, but the foundation from which the remarkable qualities of living systems emerge.

Beyond the Parts

Modern science has become extraordinarily successful at understanding the individual components of life. We know more about genes, cells and molecular processes than at any other point in history, and these discoveries continue to improve our understanding of the living world in countless ways.

At the same time, life often behaves as though something more is taking place than the sum of its individual parts. A forest possesses qualities that cannot be found by studying a single tree in isolation. A coral reef is more than an accumulation of corals, just as a family becomes something richer than the individuals who compose it.

The same is true of ecosystems, whose resilience, beauty and complexity arise not simply from the species they contain, but from the countless interactions that connect them. Again and again, nature suggests that it is these patterns of interaction that give living systems many of their most remarkable qualities.

What Is the Living Field?

The Living Field Hypothesis proposes that whenever living systems become sufficiently rich in interactions, an emergent pattern arises that cannot be fully explained by examining the individual organisms alone. I refer to this emergent pattern as the Living Field.

The word field is used deliberately. Here, it is used in a conceptual rather than a physical sense. It does not imply the discovery of a new force of nature comparable to gravity or electromagnetism. In science, a field describes something that extends beyond individual objects and helps explain how they influence one another. Gravitational fields, magnetic fields and quantum fields all describe patterns that cannot be understood by looking at a single particle or object in isolation. Whether life possesses a comparable field remains unknown, and this hypothesis does not claim otherwise. Rather, it asks whether the remarkable coherence displayed by living systems might also arise from patterns of interaction that become visible only when viewed as a whole.

Throughout this essay, I use the word interaction in its broadest biological sense. It includes the exchange of energy, nutrients, information, behaviour and influence between living organisms and the environments they help create. These interactions range from cooperation and competition to communication, mutual dependence and the countless ecological processes through which living systems are sustained.

This idea does not require us to abandon science or embrace the supernatural. Instead, it builds upon the well-established principle of emergence.

Yellowstone National Park

The Orchestra

One way to imagine the Living Field is to think of a symphony orchestra.

An orchestra contains violins, flutes, cellos, brass and percussion. Each instrument is remarkable in its own right, yet no individual instrument contains the symphony. The music emerges only through their interactions: timing, harmony, rhythm and attentive listening.

If every musician played perfectly but ignored one another, the instruments would still be present, yet the symphony would disappear. It is their coordinated interaction that transforms individual sounds into something no single instrument could create alone.

Living systems may be much the same. Genes, cells, organisms and species all matter profoundly, just as instruments do. Yet many of life's most remarkable qualities may arise not from the individual components themselves, but from the intricate patterns of interaction that weave them into a coherent whole.

The Living Field Hypothesis proposes that life may be understood in much the same way. The organisms are real, just as the instruments are real. The Living Field is not another thing within the system. It is the emergent pattern created by the countless interactions that unite the system into a living whole.

A mature forest offers another example. No individual tree can regulate local humidity, enrich the soil, moderate temperature, provide habitat for thousands of species or influence local rainfall. Together, through millions of interactions involving trees, fungi, microbes, insects, birds and countless other organisms, a forest becomes a self-sustaining living community with properties that no single organism possesses. Those qualities emerge from the intricate web of interactions that unites the forest into a living system.

This hypothesis raises the possibility that life itself may possess a similar emergent quality. Rather than existing as a mysterious force imposed upon nature, the Living Field may emerge naturally wherever living systems become sufficiently rich in interaction. As these interactions deepen, diversify and strengthen, they may contribute to the health, resilience, adaptability and coherence of the entire system.

Whether this proves to be true remains an open question. The value of a hypothesis lies not in claiming certainty, but in offering a framework through which existing observations can be viewed in a new light. A useful hypothesis encourages us to ask better questions, to notice patterns that might otherwise remain hidden and, occasionally, to discover entirely new avenues of investigation.

Evidence in Living Systems

Forests provide one of the clearest examples. Research over recent decades has revealed complex underground mycorrhizal networks linking fungi with the roots of plants and trees, allowing nutrients and chemical compounds to move through these associations (Simard 2021; Henriksson et al. 2023). These discoveries continue to deepen our understanding of the interactions occurring beneath the forest floor. While these discoveries do not demonstrate the existence of a Living Field, they do reveal that forests function as integrated communities rather than as collections of independent organisms.

A similar pattern appears throughout ecology. Healthy ecosystems derive their resilience not from the dominance of a single species, but from the extraordinary richness of interactions among many different forms of life. Predators, pollinators, fungi, insects, microbes, plants and animals all contribute to a web of interactions that allows the system to adapt to change. When enough of those ecological relationships are lost, resilience often declines long before individual species disappear.

Yellowstone National Park

Following the reintroduction of wolves in 1995, changes occurred throughout the ecosystem. Changes in elk numbers and behaviour, together with other ecological and environmental factors, contributed to the recovery of vegetation in some areas, with further effects extending through beavers, wetlands, birds and riverbank habitats (Ripple and Beschta 2012; National Park Service n.d.). Although many factors contributed to these changes, the restoration of one key ecological interaction influenced an entire network of others. The significance of Yellowstone lies not simply in the return of a predator, but in the restoration of ecological connections that had long been missing.

The benefits humans derive from natural environments may point in the same direction. A growing body of research has associated exposure to forests, parks and other natural settings with reduced stress, lower blood pressure, improved mood and other measures of health and wellbeing (Twohig-Bennett and Jones 2018).

Although these effects are usually explained through physiological and psychological mechanisms, they also raise an intriguing question. Why should the human body respond so consistently to healthy natural environments unless it remains deeply connected to them?

Beauty offers another clue. Throughout history, people have been drawn towards landscapes, gardens, architecture and works of art that display harmony, proportion and balance. Beautiful places are often treated with greater care, while neglected environments frequently invite further neglect. We tend to assume that beauty is merely decorative, yet it may play a deeper role by encouraging behaviours that strengthen rather than weaken connections within human communities and between humanity and the living world.

Some lessons are learned through books. Others emerge only through observing nature closely across seasons of growth, disturbance and renewal. This kind of sustained attention allows patterns and relationships to reveal themselves over time, including connections that may not be visible from the perspective of any single discipline.

Artists, naturalists, gardeners, Indigenous trackers, wildlife photographers and good scientists all share something of this habit of careful observation. Although their purposes and methods may differ, each understands that discovery often begins with learning to see. The living world rewards those who return to it with curiosity, humility and attention, because it is through repeated observation that relationships which first appeared separate may gradually reveal themselves as parts of a larger pattern.

Perhaps this points towards one of biology's most fundamental questions. Modern biology often begins by asking what an organism is. The Living Field Hypothesis encourages us to ask an additional question: What interactions make that organism possible?

Every living thing exists not in isolation, but through participation in an intricate web of interactions. Trees depend upon fungi that exchange nutrients through the soil. Flowering plants rely upon insects, birds and mammals for pollination. Animals depend upon plants for food, oxygen and shelter, while humans rely upon healthy soils, functioning oceans, stable climates and one another in ways that are easy to overlook precisely because they are so fundamental.

Even within our own bodies, life is profoundly relational. Trillions of microorganisms inhabit our digestive system, skin and airways, contributing to digestion, immunity and countless other processes essential to health (Lloyd-Price, Abu-Ali, and Huttenhower 2016). Increasingly, science recognises that the human body is less an isolated individual than a living community shaped by countless interactions with microbial life.

Every organism exists within networks that sustain it, shape it and allow it to flourish. If this hypothesis has merit, understanding life will require more than identifying its individual parts. It will also require us to understand the patterns of reciprocal exchange that bind those parts into resilient, adaptive and evolving living systems.

This perspective may also invite us to think differently about evolution itself. Evolution is often described as the process by which organisms become better adapted to their environments through natural selection. Yet adaptation rarely occurs in isolation. Every organism exists within a network of relationships that influences its ability to survive, reproduce and flourish.

Throughout evolutionary history, some of the greatest advances have depended upon new forms of relationship. The emergence of complex cells through symbiosis, the partnerships between flowering plants and their pollinators, the mycorrhizal networks that sustain forests, and the intricate cooperation found within social species all suggest that successful adaptation is often shaped by connection as much as by competition.

What if evolution has been selecting not only organisms, but also relationships?

If so, then the history of life may be understood not only as the evolution of species, but also as the evolution of increasingly rich and resilient patterns of interaction. This perspective does not replace natural selection. Rather, it suggests that the relationships organisms form may themselves become one of the most important pathways through which adaptation occurs.

This possibility becomes particularly interesting when we consider our own species. Human beings have developed an extraordinary capacity not only to participate in relationships, but to perceive them, understand them and consciously change them. Through language, culture, observation and accumulated knowledge, we can recognise patterns that strengthen living systems and deliberately share those discoveries with others.

Human beings are also ecosystem-shaping organisms, but with one remarkable difference. We can become conscious of at least some of the consequences of our actions. We can observe when our activities diminish the living systems upon which we depend, and we can intentionally change our behaviour.

This raises a further possibility. Perhaps human civilisation is approaching another evolutionary threshold, not necessarily through the evolution of a physically different human being, but through the evolution of how humans relate: to one another, to other species, to ecosystems and to the Earth itself.

If relationships can influence evolutionary success, then our growing ability to understand and consciously reshape those relationships may represent something genuinely significant. For perhaps the first time in the history of life on Earth, a species has become capable of asking not only how it can adapt to its environment, but how its own behaviour might help create the conditions in which a wider community of life can flourish.

The Value of Wild Places

If the Living Field Hypothesis has any merit, then nowhere is it expressed more completely than in the world's remaining wild places.

Ancient forests, wetlands, coral reefs, mountain landscapes and vast grasslands are often described in terms of the species they contain, yet they are far more than collections of plants and animals. They are living communities whose interactions have been developing continuously over thousands, and sometimes millions, of years.

Pollinating insects carry pollen between flowering plants. Fungi transport nutrients through the soil. Fallen leaves become tomorrow's fertile earth. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria enrich the ground for future generations of plants, while birds, mammals and insects disperse seeds far beyond the reach of the parent tree. Even organisms we rarely notice participate in ecological processes upon which entire ecosystems depend.

In long-established ecosystems, these interactions may become extraordinarily rich and intricate, shaped by generations of adaptation, disturbance and renewal. A mature forest, for example, contains not only towering trees but countless fungi, bacteria, insects, birds, mammals and microorganisms whose lives have become woven together through evolutionary time. The result is a system of extraordinary resilience, capable of responding to drought, storms, disease and other disturbances through intricate processes of adaptation, recovery and renewal.

When wilderness is destroyed, the loss extends far beyond the disappearance of individual species. Ecological interactions that have developed over immense spans of time are broken, often in ways that cannot easily be restored. A single extinction may alter food webs, disrupt pollination, diminish soil health or change the behaviour of dozens of other organisms. Such changes can continue to ripple through an ecosystem for generations.

For this reason, wild places deserve to be valued not only for their beauty or for the resources they provide, but because they represent some of the most sophisticated living systems our planet has ever produced. They are repositories of evolutionary wisdom, shaped by countless experiments carried out over hundreds of millions of years. Every intact ecosystem is, in a sense, a living library whose wisdom is written not in books, but in the living conversation of life.

Perhaps this also explains why so many people experience a profound sense of peace when they enter an ancient forest, sit beside a wild river or watch waves rolling onto an empty shore. Across cultures and throughout history, people have spoken of feeling calmer, more attentive and more deeply themselves in such places. Science has documented many of the physiological benefits of time spent in nature, yet those measurable effects may tell only part of the story.

If human beings evolved within the Living Field rather than apart from it, then our sense of belonging in wild places may not be accidental. It may reflect a deep biological connection that has existed since our earliest ancestors first walked the Earth. Our bodies, minds and emotions were shaped within living ecosystems, and it would be surprising if millions of years of evolution had left no trace of that inheritance.

This possibility carries profound implications for conservation. Protecting wilderness is not simply about preventing extinctions or preserving beautiful landscapes for future generations, important though those goals remain. It is also about safeguarding the intricate ecological relationships that sustain the resilience of the living world and, ultimately, our own place within it.

But perhaps wild places offer us something more than something to protect. They may also offer us something to learn from.

An ancient forest is the result of countless relationships tested, altered and refined across immense spans of evolutionary time. Nothing within it exists entirely for itself. Water moves through soil, roots, leaves and atmosphere. Nutrients pass from organism to organism and eventually return to the earth. The waste of one life becomes the nourishment of another. Diversity creates resilience. Cooperation and competition exist together within a larger system that continually adapts to changing conditions.

These systems are not perfect, peaceful or static. Nature contains predation, disease, competition, disturbance and death. Yet life repeatedly transforms disturbance into new opportunity. Fallen trees become habitat. Decay becomes fertility. Death returns nutrients to the soil from which new life emerges.

Human civilisation has often designed its systems very differently. We extract resources, manufacture products, consume them and discard what remains. We separate agriculture from ecology, cities from watersheds, economics from the living systems upon which economies ultimately depend. In doing so, we frequently interrupt cycles that the natural world has spent billions of years refining.

Yet this need not be the only way humans participate in the Earth.

Regenerative agriculture can rebuild soil rather than exhaust it. Restored wetlands can protect communities while creating habitat. Cities can provide corridors for wildlife, capture water, grow food and support biodiversity. Industries can increasingly design materials to circulate through repeated cycles rather than becoming permanent waste.

These approaches differ in scale and purpose, but they share an important principle: human activity can be designed to strengthen relationships within living systems rather than continually breaking them.

Wild places therefore offer more than refuge from human civilisation. They offer examples of what long-lived, adaptive systems look like.

Perhaps one of the most important things humanity can learn from the living world is that resilience does not arise from independence.

It arises from relationship.

What About Consciousness?

One of the most intriguing questions raised by the Living Field Hypothesis concerns consciousness itself.

Modern neuroscience has largely investigated consciousness through the brain, revealing extraordinary complexity in the interactions of billions of neurons and demonstrating how fundamental neural processes are to our thoughts, memories and awareness. Yet despite remarkable advances, consciousness remains one of science's deepest mysteries. We still do not fully understand how subjective experience arises.

The Living Field Hypothesis does not challenge the central role of the brain. Rather, it asks whether consciousness, like so many other properties of living systems, might also be better understood when relationship is taken into account.

Human consciousness does not develop in isolation. From infancy, our minds are shaped through interaction with other people, language, culture, place and the living world around us. What we notice, value, remember and understand is influenced by relationships extending far beyond the boundaries of the individual.

This raises an intriguing possibility. Perhaps one of the most significant qualities of human consciousness is not simply that we are aware, but that we can become aware of relationship itself.

We can observe a forest and begin to understand the connections between fungi, trees, soil, water and animals. We can recognise that the disappearance of a pollinator may affect plants far beyond it. We can trace the consequences of our actions through rivers, food systems, climates and communities. We can understand relationships that extend across distances and timescales far beyond our immediate experience.

And once we perceive those relationships, we gain something remarkable: the possibility of consciously changing how we participate in them.

This does not mean that consciousness exists independently within forests or ecosystems, nor does it require the existence of a supernatural or planetary mind. The Living Field Hypothesis makes no such claim. It asks a different question.

What happens when a conscious species becomes capable of perceiving the larger living systems of which it is a part?

For most of evolutionary history, organisms have influenced their environments without understanding the wider consequences of doing so. Humans possess at least some capacity to do otherwise. We can study the effects of our behaviour, anticipate consequences, communicate discoveries, preserve knowledge across generations and deliberately alter our actions.

Consciousness may therefore introduce a new dimension into the evolution of relationship: intention.

A forest does not need to understand ecology in order to function as an ecosystem. Human beings, however, increasingly need to understand ecology precisely because our influence has become so great. Our capacity for conscious reflection gives us the possibility of choosing whether our participation diminishes or strengthens the systems upon which life depends.

This possibility remains philosophical rather than established scientific fact, and the nature of consciousness itself remains deeply unresolved. Yet it raises a question with profound implications for the Living Field Hypothesis.

If life has spent billions of years evolving increasingly complex relationships, what might happen when one participant within that living network becomes capable of recognising those relationships and consciously choosing to nurture them?

Why This Matters

The value of the Living Field Hypothesis lies less in the answers it provides than in the questions it encourages us to ask. If patterns of interaction are as fundamental to life as this hypothesis suggests, then many of the challenges facing humanity begin to look different.

Conservation becomes more than the protection of individual species. It becomes the protection of the ecological interactions that allow ecosystems to remain healthy and resilient. Restoration also takes on a broader meaning, because success can no longer be measured simply by the return of individual species, but by the recovery of the ecological processes that allow an entire living system to flourish. The goal is not merely to replace what was lost, but to restore the conditions from which resilience, adaptability and long-term health can emerge.

Our economic systems have become extraordinarily effective at measuring production, consumption and financial value. Yet many of the living systems upon which life depends remain invisible and undervalued because they cannot easily be assigned a monetary value, nor should they be. The stability of a climate, the fertility of healthy soil, the pollination provided by insects, the cleansing of water by wetlands and the quiet restoration of the human spirit beneath an ancient forest are not commodities. They are invaluable because they sustain the very systems upon which every economy ultimately depends.

Education, too, begins to look different when viewed through the lens of relationship. Alongside knowledge and skills, we might teach young people to recognise the connections between seemingly separate fields of understanding: soil and food, forests and rainfall, insects and agriculture, consumption and resources, human health and healthy environments. Ecological literacy then becomes not simply a specialised subject, but part of understanding what it means to live within a living world.

Perhaps the most profound implication of the Living Field Hypothesis, however, lies in how we understand humanity's role within that world.

Human beings are already powerful participants in Earth's living systems. Our agriculture alters soils and waterways, our cities reshape landscapes, our industries move immense quantities of materials and energy, and our economic decisions influence forests, oceans, climates and communities thousands of kilometres away. The question is therefore not whether we influence the Earth, but what kind of influence we choose to become.

For generations, environmental responsibility has often been framed in terms of reducing harm: consuming less, polluting less, destroying less and leaving smaller footprints. These remain important goals, but perhaps they do not go far enough. What if humans can become a beneficial participant in Earth's living systems? What if our presence can restore soils, reconnect habitats, clean waterways, increase biodiversity and create conditions in which other forms of life can flourish alongside us?

This changes the question from how humanity can have less impact to something far more ambitious: What kind of impact do we want to have?

Around the world, fragments of this possibility already exist. Regenerative farmers are rebuilding depleted soils, communities are restoring wetlands, forests and waterways, and architects and planners are exploring ways for buildings and cities to support biodiversity. Industries are developing circular systems in which materials can be reused rather than continually discarded. Indigenous knowledge holders continue traditions of caring for Country developed through generations of close observation and relationship, while scientists, conservationists, farmers, designers and communities are discovering new ways of working with living systems rather than continually overriding them.

Viewed separately, these may appear to be scattered responses to different problems. Viewed together, however, they raise a more interesting possibility. Perhaps they are early expressions of a changing relationship between human civilisation and the living world.

The transmission of learned behaviour is not unique to humans; many other species learn from one another, and some develop traditions that persist across generations (Galef 2012). Human beings, however, have extended this ancient capacity to an extraordinary degree. Through language, writing, education, storytelling, science and now global communication networks, knowledge can travel between communities, across cultures and generations, and around the planet with unprecedented speed. A farming practice developed in one region can inspire experiments on another continent. A town that successfully restores a watershed can share what it has learned with hundreds of other communities. New approaches to architecture, energy, education, manufacturing, conservation and food production can be studied, adapted, improved and passed onwards. No community needs to discover everything alone.

This ability allows successful patterns of relationship to spread far beyond the places in which they first emerge. A regenerative farm may begin as a local experiment, but thousands of regenerative farms exchanging knowledge can begin to change agriculture itself. A community that restores biodiversity can transform its own landscape, while thousands of communities learning from one another may begin to change the relationship between human settlement and the living world. The same principle can extend through industry, education, economics, architecture, conservation and governance, until each successful experiment becomes a source of knowledge for others and each participating community becomes a node within a much larger network of learning.

As those nodes connect, the network itself becomes consequential. What initially appears to be a collection of isolated projects begins to reveal something larger: not simply a regenerative farm here, a restored wetland there or an innovative community somewhere else, but the beginnings of an emerging planetary pattern.

Perhaps human civilisation is approaching another evolutionary threshold, not through the emergence of a physically different human being, but through the evolution of how humans relate to one another, to other species, to the places in which we live, to the systems that sustain us and ultimately to the Earth itself.

Because knowledge can now move between communities with extraordinary speed, changing relationships need not remain isolated. Communities can learn from communities and cultures can learn from cultures, while successful ideas can be adapted rather than merely copied, allowing them to take forms appropriate to different climates, ecosystems, traditions and ways of life. As these networks deepen, something potentially extraordinary becomes possible: planetary coherence.

By planetary coherence, I do not mean that humanity must think alike, live alike or organise itself according to a single system. Healthy ecosystems do not depend upon sameness; their strength arises from diversity held within relationship. A rainforest achieves coherence not because every organism performs the same function, but because innumerable different forms of life participate in relationships that together sustain the larger living system.

Human civilisation might eventually develop a similar kind of coherence. Across different cultures and landscapes, agriculture could increasingly restore the ecosystems upon which it depends, while industries could circulate materials rather than continually creating waste. Settlements could provide habitat as well as human shelter, education could develop ecological literacy alongside other forms of knowledge, and economies could increasingly recognise that enduring prosperity ultimately rests upon functioning living systems. None of this requires a single global authority, ideology or blueprint. Like a healthy ecosystem, coherence could emerge through countless local relationships interacting across larger networks.

At some point, those networks may themselves begin to influence the direction in which human civilisation develops. Practices that strengthen living systems can be observed, tested, refined and shared, allowing knowledge to accumulate across communities rather than continually beginning again. What works in one place will not necessarily work unchanged in another, but the underlying principles can travel, evolve and take root in new forms.

Seen from this perspective, the possibility has deep evolutionary roots. Life began through relationships among simple molecules, and those relationships eventually gave rise to cells. Cells entered into new forms of cooperation and became multicellular organisms, while organisms formed increasingly intricate ecological communities. Across billions of years, life has repeatedly generated greater complexity through interaction, cooperation, competition, adaptation and interdependence.

Now, within those same living systems, our own species has developed an extraordinary capacity to perceive many of the relationships upon which life depends, communicate what it learns and deliberately alter its behaviour in response. Human beings can not only participate in ecological relationships, but consciously ask whether our participation is weakening or strengthening the larger systems of which we are a part.

What might happen if that capacity began to operate not only among individuals, but across communities, cultures and nations? What might emerge if successful ways of restoring and strengthening living systems became increasingly connected, allowing knowledge and experience to move through human civilisation as nutrients and information move through an ecosystem?

Perhaps this is the greater evolutionary possibility suggested by the Living Field Hypothesis. Humanity's future may depend not upon transcending nature, but upon finally understanding ourselves as conscious participants within it. Our greatest evolutionary achievement may not be our mastery of the living world, but our ability to recognise our place within its relationships and deliberately contribute to their flourishing.

For centuries, much of human progress has been measured by how successfully we could command the Earth and transform it to meet our needs. The next great stage of civilisation may be measured by a very different question:

How much life can flourish because we are here?

Author’s Reflection

Long before I gave this hypothesis a name, I found myself exploring its ideas through stories.

When I began writing Fantaeryn, I was not trying to explain a scientific theory or construct a philosophical argument. I simply found myself drawn to a different way of imagining the living world. In those stories, forests possess a quiet intelligence, animals participate in a greater harmony, and the deepest power arises not through domination, but through participation in the greater harmony of the living world. The world's greatest strength lies not in magic as it is commonly portrayed in fantasy, but in the invisible patterns that unite all living things.

Long before I attempted to express these ideas directly, they had already found their way into my paintings and fiction. Looking back, I realise that creativity sometimes reaches towards an understanding before the intellect has found the language to explain it. Only later did I begin to recognise that many of the questions I had been exploring through art echoed ideas emerging from ecology, systems science, evolutionary biology and philosophy.

As the stories developed, another idea began to emerge. The great challenge facing their inhabitants was not simply to rediscover their connection with the living world, but to understand what might happen when that recognition began to spread. Within Fantaeryn, this unfolding transformation is expressed through the Great Turnings of Talmortha, which trace the changing relationship between its peoples and the Living World. One person could change the way they lived. A community could change its relationship with the land around it. But communities learning from other communities could begin to create something much larger.

That idea now seems inseparable from the Living Field Hypothesis.

Human beings have developed these capacities to an extraordinary degree. We can observe relationships, understand something of their consequences, preserve what we learn and pass that knowledge to people we may never meet. We can tell stories, teach children, exchange discoveries, create art, build institutions and communicate ideas across cultures and generations. In this sense, culture itself becomes a means through which patterns of relationship can travel.

Perhaps this is one reason stories matter. Facts can tell us what is happening, but stories allow us to imagine what another way of living might feel like. They can take an abstract possibility and place us inside it, allowing us to experience a different relationship with nature, community and one another before that relationship exists in the world around us.

The Living Field within Fantaeryn should therefore not be understood as a supernatural force, but as a literary exploration of the questions at the heart of this hypothesis. What if the interactions that already shape the living world are even more significant than we have imagined? What if harmony is not merely a poetic metaphor, but an emergent property of healthy living systems? And what might become possible if human beings consciously chose to strengthen the relationships upon which those systems depend?

Fantasy has always provided a space in which difficult questions can be explored without demanding immediate answers. By inviting us into imagined worlds, it often allows us to return to our own world with fresh eyes. Perhaps imagination is not an escape from reality at all, but one of the ways human beings explore realities that do not yet exist.

If Fantaeryn succeeds in doing anything, I hope it encourages readers to step outside after closing the book and look at a forest, a river, a bird or a flower with a renewed sense of curiosity and wonder. But I hope it might also leave them with a larger question: not simply how we can protect the living world, but what kind of participants within it we might yet become.

An Invitation

The Living Field Hypothesis is offered in a spirit of inquiry. It does not seek to replace established science, nor does it claim to provide final answers to questions that continue to challenge some of the world's finest minds. Instead, it asks whether discoveries emerging across biology, ecology, systems science and philosophy may be revealing a larger pattern that has not yet been fully recognised.

Perhaps life is shaped not only by its individual components, but by the interactions that connect them. Perhaps resilience, adaptability and many of the remarkable qualities of living systems arise because organisms participate in relationships that create possibilities no individual could produce alone. Perhaps evolution itself can be understood not only through the changing forms of organisms, but through the changing relationships that make new forms of life and complexity possible.

Or perhaps the Living Field Hypothesis will prove incomplete and eventually give way to a better explanation. That is the nature of every worthwhile hypothesis. Its purpose is not to end inquiry, but to deepen it, to encourage new questions and to draw attention to patterns that might otherwise remain unseen.

One truth already seems increasingly difficult to ignore: life is woven together far more intimately than previous generations imagined. The boundaries once believed to separate organisms, species and ecosystems are giving way to a richer understanding of interdependence. We are discovering that the living world is not merely populated by relationships. In many respects, those relationships are what allow the living world to exist at all.

This understanding invites more than intellectual curiosity. It asks us to reconsider our own place within the systems we are studying.

Human beings did not arrive on Earth from somewhere outside nature. Our bodies were shaped within its ecosystems, our cultures grew from particular landscapes, and every breath, meal and glass of water still connects us to processes extending far beyond ourselves. However sophisticated our technologies become, we remain participants within the living systems that sustain us.

If life exists through relationship, then belonging is not something we have to earn. It is something we were born into.

There is something deeply hopeful in this recognition. Belonging is one of the great human longings, yet many people spend much of their lives searching for a place, a community or a relationship in which they feel they truly belong. The living world offers another way of understanding that longing. Whatever our circumstances, we were never born outside the community of life. We entered a web of relationships already billions of years in the making, and our lives continue within it every moment we are here.

Perhaps belonging, at its deepest level, is not something the world must grant us. It is something we can learn to recognise.

To belong does not mean that we are never lonely, displaced or disconnected from one another. Those experiences are real and can be profound. It means that beneath them lies an older relationship that cannot easily be taken away: our membership in the living world itself.

We belong because we participate. We breathe, nourish and are nourished; we affect the living systems around us and are affected by them in return. We receive from those systems, and we possess the capacity to give something back. Seen in this way, belonging is not passive. It carries with it both comfort and invitation: if we are part of the living world, then we also have a place within its continuing story.

What distinguishes us may be our growing ability to recognise that participation and choose, at least in part, what form it will take.

We can continue to organise much of human activity as though healthy soils, functioning oceans, forests, insects, rivers and climatic systems were external resources whose value lies principally in their usefulness to us. Or we can begin to understand that human flourishing and the flourishing of the wider living world are not separate projects.

This does not require humanity to return to some imagined past or abandon the extraordinary achievements of science, technology and civilisation. It asks something more challenging and perhaps more creative: whether we can use those achievements differently. Can our intelligence, imagination, technologies, economies and communities become means through which we participate more successfully in the living systems of which we are already a part?

The possibilities need not begin at planetary scale. They can begin with a farm rebuilding its soil, a community restoring a creek, a city returning habitat to its streets, a business redesigning waste as a resource, a school teaching children to understand the ecosystem in which they live, or a culture renewing knowledge that has connected people with place for generations. What matters is not that every community arrives at the same solution, but that successful relationships can be observed, shared, adapted and allowed to spread.

If enough of those relationships begin to connect, their significance may eventually extend beyond the places in which they began. What appears locally as thousands of separate acts of restoration, stewardship, innovation and cooperation may, from a greater distance, begin to resemble something else: a civilisation gradually changing its relationship with the living planet that sustains it.

Perhaps that possibility is still distant. Perhaps it has already begun.

The next time you walk through an ancient forest, pause beside a river, watch birds crossing the evening sky or stand quietly beneath a canopy of stars, consider that you may be witnessing far more than individual organisms occupying the same place. You may be standing within one of the most intricate living networks the universe has yet produced, a network to which you also belong.

Understanding such networks will require better instruments, rigorous science and increasingly sophisticated theories. It may also require us to recover an older human capacity: the ability to give the living world our fullest and most generous attention. Science, philosophy, art, careful observation and the accumulated wisdom of Indigenous cultures may approach that task in different ways, but each can contribute to a deeper understanding of the relationships that sustain life.

We have become remarkably skilled at measuring the world. Perhaps the next great advance will come not only from measuring it more precisely, but from understanding more deeply how its parts belong together, and how we belong among them.

If the Living Field Hypothesis contributes anything to that journey, I hope it is an invitation to look again: at a forest, a community, a human body, an ecosystem, perhaps even at civilisation itself, and ask not only what it contains, but what relationships allow it to flourish.

For if the history of life has been shaped not only by the evolution of organisms, but by the evolution of relationships, then humanity may now face an extraordinary choice. We can continue to measure our success primarily by the power we exercise over the living world, or we can learn to measure it by the quality of our participation within it.

Perhaps the future of our relationship with Earth begins with a deceptively simple question:

What relationships can we nurture so that life flourishes because we were here?

Acknowledgements

Every worthwhile idea has many ancestors. Although the Living Field Hypothesis is my own synthesis, it stands upon the curiosity, courage and insight of countless scientists, philosophers, naturalists, artists and Indigenous knowledge holders who have spent generations helping humanity understand its place within the living world. I offer this work in gratitude for their contributions and in the hope that it encourages others to continue the conversation.

References and Further Reading

Capra, Fritjof. 1996. The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. New York: Anchor Books.

Galef, Bennett G. 2012. “Social Learning and Traditions in Animals: Evidence, Definitions, and Relationship to Human Culture.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science 3 (6): 581–592.

Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Henriksson, Nils, et al. 2023. “Re-examining the Evidence for the Mother Tree Hypothesis: Resource Sharing Among Trees via Ectomycorrhizal Networks.” New Phytologist 239: 19–28.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.

Lenton, Timothy M. 2016. Earth System Science: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lloyd-Price, Jason, Galeb Abu-Ali, and Curtis Huttenhower. 2016. “The Healthy Human Microbiome.” Genome Medicine 8: 51.

Lovelock, James E. 1979. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lovelock, James E. 1989. “Geophysiology, the Science of Gaia.” Reviews of Geophysics 27 (2): 215–22.

Lovelock, James E., and Lynn Margulis. 1974. “Atmospheric Homeostasis by and for the Biosphere: The Gaia Hypothesis.” Tellus 26 (1–2): 2–10.

McGilchrist, Iain. 2009. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

McGilchrist, Iain. 2021. The Matter with Things. London: Perspectiva Press.

Margulis, Lynn. 1998. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. New York: Basic Books.

Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. 2002. Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species. New York: Basic Books.

Meadows, Donella H. 2008. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

National Park Service. n.d. “Cycles and Processes.” Yellowstone National Park. U.S. Department of the Interior. Accessed August 11, 2026.

Ripple, William J., and Robert L. Beschta. 2012. “Trophic Cascades in Yellowstone: The First 15 Years after Wolf Reintroduction.” Biological Conservation 145 (1): 205–213.

Sheldrake, Merlin. 2020. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures. New York: Random House.

Simard, Suzanne. 2021. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. 1959. The Phenomenon of Man. Translated by Bernard Wall. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Twohig-Bennett, Caoimhe, and Andy Jones. 2018. “The Health Benefits of the Great Outdoors: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Greenspace Exposure and Health Outcomes.” Environmental Research 166: 628–637.

Waldrop, M. Mitchell. 1992. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Whitehead, Alfred North. 1929. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Macmillan.

Wilson, Edward O. 1998. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Author's Note: The Living Field Hypothesis draws upon insights from ecology, evolutionary biology, systems science, philosophy and Indigenous knowledge. The works listed here represent some of the thinkers whose research and ideas have informed my own thinking. The hypothesis presented in this essay is my own synthesis of these diverse perspectives and should not be interpreted as representing the views of these authors.

© Carol Walden 2026. All rights reserved.
Article posted 11 August 2026

Image Credit: Coastal Tree, Queensland, Australia, © Carol Walden 2026.