Avocados and I

This morning, I ate an avocado. It needed about 300l (80 gallon) of water to become an avocado. It probably travelled from South America, causing CO2 emissions for every mile it moved. Because it likes to be cool while travelling, cooling added to the emissions. To be planted, ancient, diverse forests were cut down and abamectin (a pesticide) had to be used - harming the environment and the workers on the plantation. In the store, it almost went to waste. In my body it does wonders. The peal and the pit travel again. To the landfill. Emitting more CO2. Maybe they are composted, maybe they will be used for biogas.

We are inescapably entwined and entangled with others, even when we cannot track or directly perceive this entanglement. Even if don’t want to cause suffering, destruction, and death, merely by living, buying things, throwing things away, I implicate myself in terrible effects on ecosystems. If we want a world with less suffering and more flourishing, it would be useful - instead of following an object oriented ontology in which we merely focus on never eating avocados - to embrace a relational ontology which perceives complexity and inevitable complicity as the constitutive situation of our lives.