Summary
Separation is the assumption that we exist apart: from one another, from the rest of the living world, and from those who come before and after us. Many thinkers treat it as a root of today’s crises. The writer Charles Eisenstein popularised the phrase ‘Story of Separation’ in ‘The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible’ (2013). The Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective speaks of ‘separability’ – “the attempt to deny our entanglement with the earth, the cosmos and each other” – as the foundation of their ‘house of modernity’.
Accounts of its origins differ. Eisenstein traces it to the emergence of agriculture; the collective ties it to modernity and colonialism.
Rationale
Part 1 calls the move away from this “one key reorientation” our research kept highlighting, and leaves open whether separation sits alongside individualism and anthrosupremacy or beneath them.