Perhaps “relation” is the wrong word for what is thought in ecological ontology.  There’s something too ghostly, too incorporeal, about relations.  Everything in the entire cosmos could be still and there would still be relations.  Things would be to the left or right or one another, so many miles or light years apart, larger and smaller, and so on.  Yet ecology, above all, thinks beings in interaction and becoming.  While interaction is a form of relation, the concept of interaction captures a certain fleshiness of how beings hang together in ecologies that risks being lost with the signifier “relation”.

Beings in ecologies interact.  This is a mundane and obvious observation, yet maybe one we don’t often pause to think through.  First, even at a distance, there is always a materiality of interactions.  Every interaction requires flesh.  There are no incorporeal or ghostly interactions.  Two entities at a distance might…