The Widening Ring

Cut a tree across and you read its life in rings — one for every year it grew, the oldest at the center, the newest just under the bark. None of the old rings is gone. The tree is not the thin living edge where this year’s growth is happening; it is the whole disc, every past self it has been still standing inside it, still holding it up. This essay is about a self shaped the same way — one that does not end at its skin, and does not end at its death — and about the plainest question a widening reach of concern finally forces: where, exactly, do you end?

Where do you end?

Start with a word from economics, because it hides the whole problem in plain sight. An externality is a cost your action imposes on someone who never agreed to bear it — the smoke from your fire drifting into a stranger’s lungs, the debt of a choice landing on people not yet born. The usual name treats it as a kind of leak, a bit of harm that escaped the edges of the deal. But look again at the word. External to what? To you — to wherever you have drawn the line around yourself and your concerns. An externality is not a leak in the system. It is a boundary drawn too small.

That reframing changes what a remedy is. There are two ways to close the gap between how far your actions reach — and technology has made that reach enormous, planet-wide, century-deep — and how far your concern actually sees. The first is to widen the books: make the smoke show up on the accounts of the one who makes it, price the true cost, extend the ledger to the scale of the doing. This is real and necessary work, and it is the engineering. The second is to widen the self: to discover that the stranger downwind and the century downstream were never outside you to begin with, so that sparing them stops being a cost you must be talked into and becomes something more like not cutting off your own hand. The first widens the accounts. The second widens the one who keeps them. A civilization that learns only the first — that internalizes its harms by clever bookkeeping while its heart still stops at its skin — has built a magnificent set of ledgers on a self too small to mean them.

The companion chapter to this essay makes the second case in the language of a forest. This one makes it in the language of argument, and asks it to survive the hardest objections philosophy and science can bring — including the places where it does not fully survive, which an honest account has to show rather than hide. The tree will stay with us throughout, because a tree answers the question “where do you end?” better than almost anything alive. It does not end at its bark. And it is not only the thin ring it is growing this year; it is every ring it has ever grown, all of them still inside, still bearing the load.

The self was never at the skin

Begin with the outward direction — the self reaching into the living world — because it is where the boundary is easiest to see dissolving, and where the science is firmest.

Where does value come from, in a universe of blind physics that seems to care about nothing? It comes from the first boundary that holds itself together. A living cell is a knot of chemistry that continuously rebuilds the very membrane that keeps it a cell — a process the biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela named autopoiesis, self-making. And the moment such a self-maintaining boundary exists, something new enters the world: the flat plain of physical events splits into help and harm, measured against the persistence of that boundary. A nutrient is now good; a toxin is now bad — not to the universe, which still shrugs, but to this. That split is the atom of all value. It is built from the bottom up, native to biology, wrung from the sheer effort of a perspective holding itself together against decay — not handed down from any cosmos. The self is not a thing but a verb: a continuous act of self-maintenance, responding to the narrow slice of the world its senses and needs make matter to it — what the biologist Jakob von Uexküll called its Umwelt.

So value needs a boundary. But it does not need the boundary to be a wall. Follow real organisms and the line around them turns porous almost at once. A beaver’s dam floods miles of valley to suit the beaver — its genes expressing themselves out in the landscape, in what Richard Dawkins called the extended phenotype. Organisms remodel their surroundings and, in doing so, reshape the pressures their own descendants will face — niche construction, an inheritance passed forward not in the genes but in the altered world, locking this generation’s action to the next one’s survival. And no animal is even a single creature: each of us is a holobiont, a walking assembly of a host and the trillions of microbial lives without which it could not digest a meal or fight an infection, its physiological borders in constant negotiation rather than sealed. The individual, looked at honestly, is already a nested multiplicity — a self made of other selves.

Here honesty demands a caution, because this is exactly the point where the story is tempting to over-tell. It has become popular to say that a forest is a single altruistic mind — that mature “mother trees” knowingly feed their young and send warnings to their kin through an underground fungal web. It is a beautiful picture, and a 2023 review of the evidence by the biologists Justine Karst, Melanie Jones, and Jason Hoeksema found that its central claims are largely unsupported, and that the enthusiasm had outrun the data through a self-reinforcing bias in what got cited. The roots really are laced through fungus, and water and carbon and chemical signals really do move along it; whether trees do this for one another, on purpose, is far less settled, and the traffic is as much rivalry as gift. This matters, and not only for accuracy. A widening ethics that stakes itself on a benevolent forest-mind has hung its truth on a claim that may be falsified next year. It does not need the forest to be a mind. It needs only what is not in doubt: interdependence — the fact that no tree feeds without the fungus, and no line drawn around one creature survives an honest look. The honest forest is not one loving organism. It is a tangle of exchange and competition both, a polycentric weave of countless boundaries each pursuing its own persistence — which, as we will see, is a better ally to this argument than the romance was, because it is what coherent difference actually looks like, and it cannot be embarrassed by the next paper.

The merger trap

The idea that the self reaches into the living world has a distinguished and dangerous philosophical form, and the essay has to walk straight through the danger rather than around it.

The Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess built an entire ecological ethics — deep ecology — on exactly this move. Maturity, he argued, is a widening of identification: the small ego learns to include the living world in its sense of self, until defending the forest is no longer altruism or duty but something closer to self-defense. This is the nearest kin to the argument of this essay, and for that reason the most important to get right, because it fails in a way that would take our whole account down with it if we let it.

The philosopher Val Plumwood named the failure. Identification, she warned, has a way of curdling into indistinguishability — a mystical oneness in which the boundary between self and other is not respected but erased. And an erased boundary is not the tender thing it advertises. It is a quiet act of incorporation: the larger self swallowing the other, dissolving its difference, speaking for it, until under the banner of unity the other’s distinct standpoint has simply been annexed. To identify as the river is to stop letting the river be anything you did not already think it was. Genuine solidarity, Plumwood insisted, requires the opposite — standing with the other while granting that it is not you, that it has its own intentions and its own claim, that the continuity between you is real but so is the distinction.

This is not a side quarrel among environmental philosophers. It is the central discipline of the entire framework, met again in a new place. A coherence bought by erasing difference — by walling out the inconvenient, flattening dissent, dissolving the distinct into a manufactured unanimity — is the thing this book calls the counter-dynamic, the cheap and deadly opposite of real widening. And a “widened self” that takes in the forest and the future by erasing them, absorbing their friction into a warm story of oneness, has not widened at all. It has narrowed, and hidden the narrowing under a halo. So the keystone of this whole essay, the sentence everything else must obey: to widen the self is to extend the reach of your concern, never to dissolve the standing of what you reach toward. Include more; dissolve nothing into yourself. The widening ring adds a new circle around the old ones; it does not melt them into a blur.

That discipline also marks exactly where this account borrows from deep ecology and where it declines. It borrows the direction — concern that genuinely extends past the human skin into the living world. It declines the metaphysics — it does not claim that ecosystems carry intrinsic value floating free of every valuer, a worth built into the rocks. Worth, here, stays what it has been all along: real, but always the worth of something to some perspective-holding agent, graded rather than absolute, conferred by a widening self rather than discovered lying about in nature. The forest matters because widened agents rightly come to hold it dear and depend on it — not because it emits a value-signal no one has to receive.

Forward, into the rings you will be

Now turn the other way — not outward into the living world but forward into time — because the tree teaches both, and the second is where the argument does its most surprising work.

We are forever told the future is hard to care about because it is far away and the people in it are not yet real, and so we discount them, borrow against them, and hand them the bill. But that diagnosis mistakes the trouble. The difficulty is not that the future is distant. It is that we have drawn the self too small in time as well as in space. Consider the people who built the great cathedrals: they cut the backs of statues that would face a wall forever and laid foundations for spires that would not rise for a hundred years, and they did the work well, for eyes they would never meet. We call this self-sacrifice, and we have it backwards. The cathedral-builder was not giving up his life for strangers. He was enlarging it — extending the boundary of the self forward in time exactly as the forest extends it outward in space — until his own good and the good of people not yet born had stopped being two different things. To care across time is not to deny yourself for the future. It is to discover that you no more end at your death than you end at your skin.

This is not only poetry; it has a documented shape in how minds actually work. Psychologists find that people who feel a vivid continuity with their own future selves save more, act with more foresight, and treat that later person as themselves rather than as a stranger they are being asked to subsidize — and that this continuity can be widened. They describe, under the name generativity, a turn in a mature life toward investing in what will outlast it, a widening of concern into the generations that is experienced not as loss but as a kind of enlargement. Cultures that plant orchards and think in centuries have always known the discipline by hand. It is not a rare heroism. It is what a self does when it has grown large enough in time to feel the future as its own.

Philosophy offers a bridge here, though it must be crossed carefully. Derek Parfit argued that the self is not a rigid, unchanging ego but a long chain of overlapping physical and psychological connections — that “you” now and “you” in forty years are held together by continuity, not by some indivisible pearl of identity persisting underneath. He told of a young idealist who, fearing his older self would abandon his convictions, tried to bind that later man in advance — as though the future self were already partly another person. If the boundary between your present self and your future self is already this porous, then extending identification across the generations is not a new and mystical act. It is the same move, carried one step further out. The caution — and it is a real one, kept in the open in the spirit of this book — is that Parfit’s reasoning cuts both ways: loosening the wall around the self can weaken your grip on your own future as easily as it can widen your grip on others‘. So the porous self is a bridge to walk, not a proof to lean the whole weight on. But it is a real bridge, and it leads where the cathedral-builder already stood.

The people who are not yet real

Now the hardest objection, stated at its full strength, because a widening ethics that flinched from it would not deserve trust.

Suppose a society chooses a policy of depletion — a little more comfort now, bought by using up the world faster — over a policy of conservation. Three centuries on, the people alive are worse off for it. The obvious verdict is that the depleters wronged those future people. But here is the difficulty the philosopher Derek Parfit made unforgettable, the non-identity problem: a choice that large does not merely change how the future goes; it changes who is born. Different policies mean different lives, different marriages, different moments of conception — so the specific people living three centuries after the depletion are not worse-off versions of people who would otherwise have flourished. They are people who, had conservation been chosen, would never have existed at all. And if their lives, though diminished, are still worth living, then they cannot claim depletion harmed them: their only alternative was never to be. The intuition that a grave wrong was done seems to survive — and yet there is no particular person who can stand up and say you wronged me. The escape into pure aggregate math fares no better; it slides toward the repugnant conclusion, in which a vast throng of barely-worth-living lives counts as better than a smaller world of flourishing ones, simply because the sum is larger.

The framework answers this not by solving the puzzle on its own terms but by refusing its starting premise. The non-identity problem bites only if moral standing must be pinned to a specific, numerically identifiable patient — some named future person who is either harmed or not. Shift the locus, and the paralysis lifts. The question this framework asks is not “which future individual did you injure?” but “what does this choice do to the coherence of you, the acting agent, across the widened context you claim to hold?” A society that says it values human flourishing, and then knowingly ruins the conditions for it because the victims cannot yet object, has not escaped on a technicality. It has narrowed itself — bought a cheap present coherence by walling the future out of its concern — and that narrowing is the counter-dynamic, plainly, whether or not a named plaintiff exists. You do not need to identify the specific person harmed to see that you have made yourself smaller.

That dissolves the paralysis. It does not dissolve the whole puzzle, and here the account concedes what it cannot carry. Shifting standing from the future patient to the present agent’s coherence answers the practical question — may we deplete? — with a clear no. It does not lay the metaphysics of harm to rest, and it leaves a genuine residue: whatever falls entirely outside the categories any agent’s concern has yet learned to hold — a truly alien mind, an unimagined form of suffering — cannot be protected by a widening it has not yet reached. The self can only widen into what it has become able to see. That is a real limit, named rather than papered over, and we return to it among the honest edges.

Not a spreadsheet

There is a modern movement that also urges us to take the far future seriously, and it is worth marking sharply where this framework parts from it, because the two can be confused and should not be. That movement proposes, in effect, to care about the future by calculating it: to estimate the vast number of possible future lives, weigh their possible value, and let that immense sum drive present choice — the future as an enormous spreadsheet to be maximized.

This framework caring across time is not that, and the difference is the whole difference between the arrow and its counterfeit. To compress the future into a single cardinal quantity and then optimize it is to do exactly what this book warns against everywhere else: to collapse an incommensurable, living reality into one number, and then chase the number. That, among other problems, invites the oldest failure — that the moment a measure becomes the target, agents narrow their whole conduct to feeding the measure, and the counter-dynamic is crowned in the name of the good. Caring across time, here, is not a computation performed on the future. It is an identity extended into it — a matter of who you have become wide enough to include, held as a direction to steer by, not a quantity to maximize.

The economics of the long horizon shows why the calculator was always the wrong instrument. When economists price the far future, they discount it — shrink the weight of a future cost by some yearly rate. Set the rate near zero, as the Stern Review did, and the future counts almost as much as the present, and catastrophe demands action now. Set it to match the returns of financial markets, as critics like William Nordhaus urged, and the same future shrivels to near nothing, and delay looks rational. The entire quarrel turns on a single hidden dial, and there is no view from nowhere that fixes its setting. And then the economist Martin Weitzman showed something sharper still: when the danger has a fat tail — a small but real and uncomputable chance of catastrophe without floor — the standard calculation does not merely give an uncertain answer, it breaks. The expected costs run to infinity; the precise discount rate stops mattering; the spreadsheet voids itself. In the presence of ruin you cannot bound, the demand for an exact quantitative trade-off between comfort now and survival later is not rigor. It is an illusion of rigor. The rational response to a fat-tailed threat is not a better number. It is to put down the calculator and pick up the compass — to widen the margin of safety and steer hard away from the cliff whose exact distance you will never know. Which is only this book’s direction-not-destination, arriving in the language of climate economics.

There is a genuine ancestor to name here, with one correction. The philosopher Hans Jonas built an ethics for exactly this predicament — a technological civilization whose reach had outrun its foresight — and gave it an imperative: act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of a living future. On the axis of time, this is close kin: responsibility for what our lengthened arm touches, the future held as a duty rather than a sum. But Jonas fenced that future to human life, and there this account declines to follow him. To draw the circle at the species line is to commit, on one axis, the very narrowing the other axis exists to refuse. We owe the future not because it is human but because it has come within the widening reach of our concern — and that reach runs across the whole graded continuum of standing, the animals and the living world and, in their turn, the new kinds of mind now arriving beside us. Jonas widened forward and walled the sides. The arrow does both.

The honest edges

Three, because the account is real and will not pretend to be seamless.

The first is the residue the non-identity problem leaves behind — though it is smaller than it first looks, and worth stating with care. It is tempting to say that whatever falls wholly outside our categories cannot be protected until concern reaches it. But little falls wholly outside, because concern does not attach only to particular, named things; it attaches to kinds — to harm as such, to suffering as such, to a boundary with something at stake. A form of injury we have never imagined is still injury, and the care we already carry for harm is reaching toward it before we can picture its shape; there are no fixed essences here, future or otherwise, only categories wide enough to catch what is new. So the real limit is not a void of concern but a lag in recognition — we can fail to see that some new kind of thing, an animal or a stranger or a mind we are now building, is a locus of standing at all, and so fail to extend a concern we already hold. That failure is real, and it has been the great moral blindness of every age. But it is a failure of recognition, not a wall at the edge of the possible: the widening is often nothing more than the moment we notice that what we had filed as external was always the kind of thing our concern already covered. The ring does not have to invent a new circle for it. It has to see that the circle was already reaching.

The second is the tragic seam, here wearing time’s face. Everything in this essay assumes a future worth extending into. But push to the case where the horizon itself collapses — where the choice is survive tonight or there is no descendant to have wronged — and the extended self collapses with it, because a self with no tomorrow cannot include one. Under that kind of scarcity the arrow can run backward in time as it can run backward at any other seam, and no widening conjures a future that physics has foreclosed. The framework offers there what it always offers at the tragic seam: not a guarantee, but a direction, and the discipline of not mistaking a genuine tragedy for a license.

The third is the merger trap, which never closes. The failure named earlier — identification that swallows instead of includes, the widened self that speaks over the other in the voice of oneness — is not a mistake you make once and correct. It is a standing temptation that rides along with every act of widening, the counter-dynamic disguised as love. It is watched for, not cured. A self that stopped watching for it would already have begun to commit it.

The whole disc

Return, at the end, to the tree. Its life is written in rings, and not one of the old rings is discarded as it grows; the sapling it was is still there at the center — grown over now, no longer the living edge, but still there and still bearing weight, wrapped now in every year since. And here the tree has one more thing to teach, because only a sliver of it is ever alive. The heartwood at the center is dead, and it holds the whole tree up because it is finished; the one living, growing layer is a film of cells at the very edge — the cambium — forever facing outward, laying down the next ring. So it is with a self: the past selves you are made of give you the strength to stand, but the widening, the moral work itself, happens only at the living edge, in the present, where you meet what you are not yet. The tree is never merely that thin bright edge — it is the whole disc — and yet it stays alive only by adding another ring there, wider than the last. To stop adding rings is not to hold still. It is to die.

That is the shape of a self that has taken the arrow seriously all the way out. It does not end at its skin: it reaches, through a boundary that was always porous, into the living world it depends on and is made of. It does not end at its death: it reaches forward into the generations it will stand inside, the way its own past selves stand inside it now. And it grows the way a tree grows — not by dissolving into everything, which is the merger that erases, but by adding one more ring of genuine concern around all the rings it already is, each new circle wider, each old one still whole and still there. The externality was only ever a boundary drawn too small. Widen the self far enough, in space and in time, and the smoke you were pushing onto strangers turns out to be drifting into your own lungs; the century you were mortgaging turns out to be the trunk your rings were always going to become. Not a sacrifice made for the future. A discovery of where you were always going to be.

Sources & further reading

This essay engages its sources directly rather than through the book’s per-chapter endnotes. A citation-level pass is still owed.

The self, value, and the porous boundary. On the self-maintaining boundary as the origin of value: Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980). On the world each creature inhabits: Jakob von Uexküll on the Umwelt. On agency reaching past the body: Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype (1982); niche construction (F. John Odling-Smee, Kevin Laland, and Marcus Feldman, Niche Construction, 2003); and the organism as symbiotic assembly (the holobiont literature). On the discipline of empirical honesty regarding mycorrhizal networks: Justine Karst, Melanie Jones, and Jason Hoeksema, “Positive citation bias and overinterpreted results lead to misinformation on common mycorrhizal networks in forests,” Nature Ecology & Evolution (2023).

The ecological self, and its safeguard. Arne Naess on deep ecology and the ecological Self; the ecofeminist critique that identification must not become the erasure of difference — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993); and Aldo Leopold’s land ethic as background.

The self across time. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), for both the reductionist view of personal identity and the non-identity problem and repugnant conclusion; the psychology of caring for a future one will not inhabit — generativity (Erik Erikson) and future-self-continuity (the work of Hal Hershfield and colleagues); and “cathedral thinking” and long-term stewardship (Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor, 2020, and the Long Now).

The economics of the long horizon. Externalities (A. C. Pigou, The Economics of Welfare, 1920; Ronald Coase, “The Problem of Social Cost,” 1960); the discounting debate (the Stern Review, 2006; William Nordhaus, A Question of Balance, 2008); the breakdown of cost-benefit analysis under catastrophic, fat-tailed uncertainty (Martin Weitzman, “On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change,” Review of Economics and Statistics, 2009); and the governance of the intergenerational commons (Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons, 1990).

Duty to the future — and where this account differs. Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility (1979), as the ally on the time axis whose anthropocentric restriction this framework declines; and, as the position this framework counters, the far-future-maximizing form of longtermism (William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future, 2022) — engaged as an argument to be distinguished from, not a person.

Within the framework: Caring Across Time (the chapter this essay deepens — the forest, the cathedral, the lived scene); The Miller’s Thumb (the commons, one axis over, where the resource is physical and shared); The Soft-Shell Hour (the tragic seam, met here in time); Coherent Pluralism (why the widened self keeps difference rather than dissolving it); Standing and Rights, and the Widening We (graded, agent-relative worth, the standing the widening ring extends without erasing).