Two Bodies: The Innocent and the Implicated
Lauren Markham:
…to be alive on today’s planet is, as Daisy Hildyard writes, to hold two selves, to inhabit two bodies. “You have an individual body,” she writes, “in which you exist, eat, sleep, and go about your day-to-day life. You also have a second body which has an impact on foreign countries and on whales.” You can just be sitting somewhere in, say, Marseille, as she sees it, while your second body is “floating above a pharmaceutical plant on the outskirts of the city, it is inside a freight container on the docks, and it is also thousands of miles away, on a flood plain in Bangladesh, in another man’s lungs.” Essayist Elvia Wilk refers to this second body as “the ecosystem body,” which both influences and is influenced by “ecologies beyond the individual self.” We may or may not be aware of body number two, but the split is unavoidable, we inhabit both at once: the innocent and the implicated.
Immemorial, p. 57