The Widening Ring

Cut a tree across and you read its whole life in rings — one for every year it grew, the oldest at the center, the newest just under the bark. Not one of the old rings is gone. A tree isn’t the thin living skin where this year’s growth is happening; it’s the whole disc, every past self it has ever been still there inside it, still holding it up. This essay is about a self shaped the same way — one that doesn’t end at its skin, and doesn’t end at its death — and about the plainest question a widening circle of care finally forces on you: 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 dumps on someone who never agreed to carry it — the smoke from your fire drifting into a stranger’s lungs, the bill for a choice landing on people not yet born. We usually treat the word as if it named a kind of leak, a little harm that slipped out past the edges of the deal. But look at it again. External to what? To you — to wherever you happened to draw the line around yourself and the things you care about. An externality isn’t a leak in the system. It’s a boundary drawn too small.

That one shift changes what a fix even is. There are two ways to close the gap between how far your actions reach — and technology has made that reach enormous, whole-planet, centuries-deep — and how far your care actually sees. The first is to widen the books: make the smoke show up on the accounts of whoever makes it, put a real price on the true cost, stretch the ledger out to the size of the deed. That’s real, necessary work — it’s the engineering. The second is to widen the self: to find out that the stranger downwind and the century downstream were never really outside you at all, so that sparing them stops being a cost somebody has to talk you into and becomes 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 tidies up its harms with clever bookkeeping while its heart still stops at its skin — has built a magnificent set of ledgers on a self too small to mean a word of 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 stand up to the hardest objections philosophy and science can throw — including the places where it doesn’t fully stand up, which an honest account has to show rather than hide. The tree stays with us the whole way, because a tree answers “where do you end?” better than almost anything alive. It doesn’t end at its bark. And it isn’t only the thin ring it’s growing this year; it’s 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 that’s where the boundary is easiest to watch dissolving, and where the science is firmest.

Where does value even come from, in a universe of blind physics that seems to care about nothing at all? It comes from the first boundary that holds itself together. A living cell is a knot of chemistry that keeps rebuilding the very membrane that makes it a cell — a process the biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela named autopoiesis, which just means self-making. And the moment a self-maintaining boundary like that exists, something brand new enters the world: the flat plain of physical events splits into help and harm, measured against whether that boundary lasts. 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’s built from the bottom up, native to biology, wrung out of the sheer effort of a point of view holding itself together against decay — not handed down from any cosmos. The self isn’t a thing so much as a verb: an ongoing act of keeping-itself-together, responding to the narrow slice of the world its senses and needs make matter to it — the slice the biologist Jakob von Uexküll called its Umwelt.

So value needs a boundary. But it doesn’t need the boundary to be a wall. Follow real living things and the line around them turns porous almost at once. A beaver’s dam floods miles of valley to suit the beaver — its genes reaching out and expressing themselves in the landscape itself, in what Richard Dawkins called the extended phenotype. Creatures remake their surroundings, and in doing so they change the pressures their own descendants will grow up under — niche construction, an inheritance handed forward not in the genes but in the altered world, tying 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 crowd — one host plus the trillions of microbes without which it couldn’t digest a meal or fight off an infection, its borders in constant negotiation instead of sealed shut. Looked at honestly, the individual is already a nested crowd — a self made of other selves.

Here honesty demands a caution, because this is exactly where the story gets tempting to over-tell. It’s become popular to say a forest is a single loving mind — that wise old “mother trees” knowingly feed their young and send warnings to their kin through an underground web of fungus. It’s a beautiful picture, and in 2023 a review of the actual evidence by the biologists Justine Karst, Melanie Jones, and Jason Hoeksema found that its central claims are largely unsupported — that the enthusiasm had run out ahead of the data, propped up by a self-reinforcing habit of everyone citing the same hopeful studies. The roots really are threaded through fungus, and water and carbon and chemical signals really do move along it; whether the trees do it for each other, on purpose, is far less settled, and the traffic is as much rivalry as gift. This matters, and not just for accuracy. A widening ethics that bets its truth on a benevolent forest-mind has hung that truth on a claim that might be knocked down next year. It doesn’t need the forest to be a mind. It needs only the part nobody disputes: interdependence — that no tree feeds without the fungus, and no line you draw around a single creature survives an honest look. The honest forest isn’t one loving organism. It’s a tangle of exchange and competition both, a scattered weave of countless boundaries each pursuing its own survival — which, as we’ll see, is a better friend to this argument than the romance ever was, because it’s what real, coherent difference actually looks like, and it can’t be embarrassed by the next paper that comes out.

The merger trap

The idea that the self reaches out into the living world has a famous — and dangerous — philosophical form, and the essay has to walk straight through the danger instead of tiptoeing around it.

The Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess built a whole ecological ethics — deep ecology — on exactly this move. Growing up, he argued, means widening who you identify with: the small ego learns to fold the living world into its own sense of self, until defending the forest stops being charity or duty and becomes something more like self-defense. This is the closest cousin to the argument of this essay, and for that very reason the one it’s most important to get right — because it fails in a way that would drag our whole account down with it if we let it.

The philosopher Val Plumwood put her finger on the failure. Identification, she warned, has a way of curdling into indistinguishability — a misty oneness where the boundary between self and other isn’t respected but simply erased. And an erased boundary isn’t the tender thing it advertises itself as. It’s a quiet act of swallowing: the bigger self absorbing the other, dissolving its difference, speaking on its behalf, until under the banner of unity the other’s own distinct standpoint has just been annexed. To identify as the river is to stop letting the river be anything you didn’t already think it was. Real solidarity, Plumwood insisted, is the opposite — standing with the other while granting that it is not you: that it has its own aims and its own claim, that the kinship between you is real but so is the difference.

This isn’t a side-squabble among environmental philosophers. It’s the central discipline of the whole framework, showing up again in a new place. A coherence bought by erasing difference — by walling out the inconvenient, flattening dissent, melting 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, dissolving their friction into a warm story of oneness, hasn’t widened at all. It has narrowed, and hidden the narrowing under a halo. So here’s the keystone of this whole essay, the sentence everything else has to obey: to widen the self is to extend the reach of your care, never to dissolve the standing of what you reach toward. Take in more; dissolve nothing into yourself. The widening ring adds a new circle around the old ones; it doesn’t melt them into a blur.

That same discipline marks exactly where this account borrows from deep ecology and where it says no. It borrows the direction — care that genuinely runs past the human skin into the living world. It declines the metaphysics — it does not claim that ecosystems carry some intrinsic value floating free of every valuer, a worth baked into the rocks. Worth, here, stays what it’s been all along: real, but always the worth of something to some point-of-view-holding agent, graded rather than absolute, granted by a widening self rather than found lying around in nature. The forest matters because widened agents rightly come to hold it dear and to depend on it — not because it gives off a value-signal that nobody has to be there 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 this second direction is where the argument does its most surprising work.

We’re forever told the future is hard to care about because it’s far away and the people in it aren’t real yet, so we discount them, borrow against them, and hand them the bill. But that diagnosis gets the trouble wrong. The difficulty isn’t that the future is distant. It’s that we’ve drawn the self too small in time as well as in space. Think of the people who built the great cathedrals: they carved the backs of statues that would face a blank wall forever, and laid foundations for spires that wouldn’t rise for a hundred years, and they did the work well, for eyes they’d never meet. We call that self-sacrifice, and we’ve got it backwards. The cathedral-builder wasn’t giving up his life for strangers. He was enlarging it — reaching the boundary of the self forward in time exactly the way the forest reaches 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 isn’t to deny yourself for the future. It’s to discover that you no more end at your death than you end at your skin.

And this isn’t only poetry; it has a real, measured shape in how minds actually work. Psychologists find that people who feel a vivid, continuous link to their own future selves save more, plan further ahead, and treat that later person as themselves rather than as some stranger they’re being asked to bankroll — and that this sense of continuity can be widened. They describe, under the name generativity, the turn a mature life takes toward pouring itself into what will outlast it — a widening of care into the generations that’s felt not as loss but as a kind of enlargement. Cultures that plant orchards and think in centuries have always known the discipline in their hands. It isn’t a rare heroism. It’s just what a self does once it has grown large enough in time to feel the future as its own.

Philosophy hands us a bridge here, though you have to cross it carefully. Derek Parfit argued that the self isn’t a hard, unchanging ego but a long chain of overlapping physical and psychological links — that “you” now and “you” in forty years are held together by continuity, not by some solid little pearl of identity sitting underneath it all. He told of a young idealist who, afraid his older self would sell out his convictions, tried to bind that later man in advance — as if the future self were already partly a different person. If the line between your present self and your future self is already this porous, then reaching identification across the generations isn’t some new mystical leap. It’s the same move, carried one step further out. The catch — a real one, and kept out 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 just as easily as it can widen your grip on other people’s. So the porous self is a bridge to walk, not a proof to hang the whole weight on. But it’s a real bridge, and it leads right to where the cathedral-builder was already standing.

The people who are not yet real

Now the hardest objection, laid out at full strength — because a widening ethics that flinched from it wouldn’t deserve your trust.

Suppose a society picks a policy of depletion — a little more comfort now, bought by burning through 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’s the difficulty the philosopher Derek Parfit made unforgettable, the non-identity problem: a choice that big doesn’t just change how the future goes; it changes who gets born. Different policies mean different lives, different marriages, different moments of conception — so the specific people living three centuries after the depletion aren’t worse-off versions of people who’d otherwise have flourished. They’re people who, had conservation been chosen, would never have existed at all. And if their lives, though diminished, are still worth living, then they can’t claim depletion harmed them — their only alternative was never to exist. The gut sense that a grave wrong was done somehow survives, and yet there’s no particular person who can stand up and say you wronged me. And escaping into pure aggregate arithmetic is no better; it slides toward the repugnant conclusion, where a vast crowd of barely-worth-living lives counts as better than a smaller world of thriving ones, just because the total is bigger.

The framework answers this not by solving the puzzle on its own terms but by refusing where it starts. The non-identity problem only bites if moral standing has to be pinned on a specific, countable patient — some named future person who is either harmed or not. Move where standing sits, and the paralysis lifts. The question this framework asks isn’t “which future individual did you injure?” but “what does this choice do to the coherence of you, the agent doing it, across the wide context you claim to hold?” A society that says it treasures human flourishing and then knowingly wrecks the conditions for it — because the victims can’t object yet — hasn’t escaped on a technicality. It has narrowed itself: bought a cheap present-day coherence by walling the future out of its care, and that narrowing is the counter-dynamic, plain as day, whether or not any named plaintiff exists. You don’t need to name the specific person harmed to see that you’ve made yourself smaller.

That dissolves the paralysis. It doesn’t dissolve the whole puzzle, and here the account owns up to what it can’t carry. Moving standing from the future patient to the present agent’s coherence answers the practical question — may we deplete? — with a clear no. It doesn’t lay the metaphysics of harm to rest, and it leaves a genuine leftover, which we come back to among the honest edges.

Not a spreadsheet

There’s a modern movement that also urges us to take the far future seriously, and it’s worth marking sharply where this framework parts ways with it, because the two get confused and shouldn’t be. That movement proposes, in effect, to care about the future by calculating it: estimate the vast number of possible future lives, weigh their possible value, and let that enormous sum drive what we do now — the future as a giant spreadsheet to be maximized.

This framework’s caring across time is not that, and the difference is the whole difference between the arrow and its knockoff. To squeeze the future into one big number and then optimize it is to do the exact thing this book warns against everywhere else: collapse a living, uncountable reality into a single figure, and then chase the figure. That, among other problems, invites the oldest failure there is — the moment a measure becomes the target, people bend their whole conduct to feeding the measure, and the counter-dynamic gets crowned in the name of the good. Caring across time, here, isn’t a sum you run on the future. It’s an identity extended into it — a matter of who you’ve grown 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 the wrong tool all along. When economists put a price on 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 we act now. Set it to match the returns of the financial markets, as critics like William Nordhaus urged, and that same future shrivels to almost nothing, and dragging our feet starts to look rational. The entire quarrel turns on a single hidden dial, and there’s no view from nowhere that tells you where to set it. And then the economist Martin Weitzman showed something sharper still: when a danger has a fat tail — a small but real and uncomputable chance of catastrophe with no floor under it — the standard calculation doesn’t just give a shaky answer, it breaks outright. The expected costs run off to infinity; the exact discount rate stops mattering; the spreadsheet cancels itself. When the ruin you’re facing can’t be bounded, demanding an exact number for the trade between comfort now and survival later isn’t rigor. It’s rigor’s costume. The sane response to a fat-tailed threat isn’t a better number. It’s to put down the calculator and pick up the compass — widen your margin of safety and steer hard away from the cliff whose exact distance you will never know. Which is just this book’s direction-not-destination, showing up in the language of climate economics.

There’s a real ancestor to name here, with one correction. The philosopher Hans Jonas built an ethics for exactly this fix — a technological civilization whose reach had outrun its foresight — and gave it a rule: act so that the effects of your action stay compatible with the permanence of a living future. On the axis of time, that’s 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 here this account won’t 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’s human but because it has come within the widening reach of our care — and that reach runs across the whole graded range of standing: the animals, 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 won’t pretend to be seamless.

The first is the leftover the non-identity problem leaves behind — though it’s smaller than it first looks, and worth stating with care. It’s tempting to say that whatever falls wholly outside our categories can’t be protected until our care reaches it. But almost nothing falls wholly outside, because care doesn’t 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’ve never imagined is still injury, and the care we already carry for harm is reaching toward it before we can even picture its shape; there are no fixed essences here, future or otherwise, only categories wide enough to catch what’s new. So the real limit isn’t an emptiness where care should be — it’s a lag in recognition. We can fail to see that some new kind of thing — an animal, a stranger, a mind we’re now building — is a place where standing lives at all, and so fail to extend a care we already hold. That failure is real, and it has been the great moral blindness of every age. But it’s 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’d filed as external was always the kind of thing our care already covered. The ring doesn’t 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 reaching into. But push to the case where the horizon itself caves in — where the choice is survive tonight or there’s no descendant left to have wronged — and the extended self caves in with it, because a self with no tomorrow can’t hold one. Under that kind of scarcity the arrow can run backward in time the way it can run backward at any other seam, and no widening conjures up a future that physics has already closed off. There the framework offers what it always offers at the tragic seam: not a guarantee, but a direction — and the discipline of never mistaking a genuine tragedy for a permission slip.

The third is the merger trap, which never fully closes. The failure named earlier — identification that swallows instead of includes, the widened self that talks over the other in the voice of oneness — isn’t a mistake you make once and then correct. It’s a standing temptation riding along with every act of widening: the counter-dynamic dressed up as love. It’s watched for, not cured. A self that stopped watching for it would already have started committing it.

The whole disc

Come back, at the end, to the tree. Its life is written in rings, and not one of the old rings is thrown away as it grows; the sapling it once was is still there at the center — grown over now, no longer the living edge, but still there and still bearing weight, wrapped 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 wood, and it holds the whole tree up because it’s finished; the one living, growing layer is a film of cells right at the edge — the cambium — always facing outward, laying down the next ring. It’s the same with a self: the past selves you’re 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’re not yet. The tree is never just that thin bright edge — it’s the whole disc — and yet it stays alive only by adding another ring there, wider than the last. To stop adding rings isn’t to hold still. It’s to die.

That’s the shape of a self that has taken the arrow seriously all the way out. It doesn’t 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 doesn’t 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 real care 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 shoving 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).