Tell me what's me? A nervous system, a body, a memory, a legal name, a pulse, a species, a voice? For centuries we have looked at "nature" as a totalising other to define "us". Human and nature. Mind and matter. Subject and object. Civilization and wilderness. The valuable and the disposable, the world and the spirit. The capitalist and the worker, the West and the rest, civilization and barbarism.

Once something was pushed into the category of "nature," it became "available", a "free gift": to extract, to discipline, to own. This duality wasn't to define "nature", but to define "cheap". Who belonged to nature belonged to "cheap": women, colonized peoples, animals, rivers, forests and entire land masses. This other box was "society", "civilized society" in Adam Smith's words, which included some humans only: white, European, male, property-owning, along with what capitalism perceives as "civilized".

Wall Street as a way of organizing nature

Jason Moore – along with important names like Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Andreas Malm – is one of the few scholars addressing this duality, this weird separation that has been made and remade to adjust to capital accumulation over and over. Moore calls capitalism not merely an economic system but "a way of organizing nature." And this organization is based on one thing: "distance".

Between consumption and extraction. Between human and non-human. Between the oil rig and the shore. Between the sweatshop and our hands. Between the city and the forest. Between man and women... Between anything and everything until it reaches every single one of us. There, we see the sly and evil "secret" of Wall Street, which isn't in its numbers and its stock market but in its mania for creating those distances.

Climate change is particularly terrifying because the old "distances", the "thresholds" or "remedies" no longer hold, while the mass of capital floating around the globe is getting bigger and hungrier. The world leaks. Smoke into lungs. Oceans into the bloodstreams. Houses into rivers. Heat into the forests. The outside into the inside. Ecological imperialism into regular imperialism. "Social crises" into "ecological crises". Peasant movements into workers' movements.

Today, as new alliances bloom between different parts of the world, between seemingly disconnected social movements, we're increasingly realizing that everything leaks into one another, and that's actually been the reality all along. As the spell of Cartesian dualism cracks open, something long dismissed as irrational begins making a comeback through science, philosophy, and law: animism.

Not necessarily the fantasy that rocks have their inner lives, but the proposition that the world is not dead matter arranged around human ends and is conscious and alive. Especially through exciting movements like 'Rights of Nature' rivers, forests, and ecosystems are increasingly being recognized not through "usefulness" or "consciousness" but through "relationships, respect, and responsibility" towards all life. Not through vast distances but an indissoluble relation. Now, for what it's worth, tell me what's me, again?