What entanglement means

There's a tendency to use the word as a synonym for interconnected, but that's not quite right. Interconnected suggests that two things which could be or were separate are or are now twined together. In entanglement, the connection is always and already the condition.

Either way, the upshot is that, as John Muir said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." I have just come across the completion of that passage, which is just wonderful: "One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers.”

There is a shadow side to the entanglement idea, of course: when we injure any one thing, that harm ripples outward we know not how far.

This is captured by the Buddhist concept of Pratītyasamutpāda (Dependent Origination). This is the foundational doctrine that all phenomena arise in dependence upon other phenomena. Nothing exists independently. Therefore, unskillful or harmful actions (karma) create conditions that ripple through the web of existence, causing suffering for oneself and others. Harm is never isolated. Native American teachings on reciprocity have a similar vibe. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, "The moral covenant of reciprocity calls us to honor our responsibilities for all we have been given, for all that we have taken.… It’s not just the land that is broken, but more importantly, our relationship to land.”

Aldo Leopold took a stark view: "One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen.”