One question has followed me throughout my life: how is it possible that humanity knows so much about the living world, yet feels so profoundly disconnected from it, from one another, and even from ourselves?
My doctoral research examined Eurocentric and utilitarian assumptions that often treat relationships as secondary to transactions. Over time I came to see that the deeper problem lies in the fragmentation of knowledge itself. We possess more information than any previous generation, yet struggle to perceive the relationships that give that knowledge coherence. I call this ecological illiteracy: the habit of treating knowledge as discrete facts or siloed fragments rather than a joined-up expression of the relational order that sustains life. Knowledge, in this fuller sense, is not merely the accumulation of information but the capacity to recognise one’s place within an interconnected world and to act responsibly within it.
Many Indigenous knowledge traditions do not separate knowing from ethics, ecology, community, or practice. They rest on relational ontologies in which relationships precede entities and beings emerge through them. Oneness, in these traditions, is not an abstract metaphysical claim but a practical orientation that allows people to see themselves, others, and the natural world as fundamentally interconnected. Nature itself continually expresses this relational intelligence through the cyclical processes that sustain life.
In Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, King Charles III names this underlying order the “grammar of harmony.” He argues that the recurring patterns of proportion, balance, and interdependence running through the natural world suggest that creation is not a random collection of parts but a coherent whole constituted through relationships. When we lose sight of that grammar, we also lose the lens that keeps knowing, being, and belonging connected. This is a deeper “great divorce”: the separation of humanity from nature, of knowledge from being, and of self from other.
The politics of relationships is the social expression of this same grammar. Fragmented knowledge tends to produce a transactional politics in which people become instruments, communities become markets, and care is rendered conditional. Knowledge grounded in relationality, by contrast, makes possible a politics of kinship in which relationships are reciprocal and others are recognised as participants in a shared human condition and destiny. Such a politics does not require utopian institutions; it begins wherever people refuse to let hierarchy, distance, or economic difference decide who is worthy of care. It is realised in the ordinary practices of mutual recognition that already exist in communities that still remember how to hold one another.
I have repeatedly seen this grammar lived out among members of the Tuko Sawa Society of Harmony Practitioners. Tuko sawa, meaning “we are equal,” does not deny differences in wealth, status, or circumstance. It simply affirms that these distinctions are secondary to a more fundamental equality rooted in our shared humanity: we are born, we live, and we die. One occasion made this especially clear. In October 2024, Shangazi Namtasha, a respected member living in Los Angeles, lost her husband, Professor Bunting, to cancer. He was buried in Arusha, Tanzania. Although many members of the Society live modestly, they did not let distance or economic constraints diminish their sense of responsibility to her. They organised the customary mkeka wa rambirambi, a collective contribution offered in solidarity. Their collective contribution enabled six practitioners to travel to the funeral, where they presented a hand-crafted wreath alongside traditional khanga and kitenge cloth—honouring her as a widow and affirming her enduring place within the circle of kinship.
Here, oneness becomes visible as a lived reality. While contemporary discourse often organises the world through distinctions of rich and poor, developed and developing, harmony practitioners begin from what precedes those categories: the equal dignity that belongs to every person by virtue of existing. The same relational order that sustains ecological systems also underpins human communities. When knowledge is reoriented towards that order, ecological literacy becomes a way of seeing through which humanity recognises itself as belonging within, rather than apart from, the wider community of life.
The question that has accompanied me for so long is beginning to find a provisional answer. Human disconnection is not inevitable. It arises when we lose the relational grammar through which we recognise ourselves in one another and in the wider community of life. Recovering that grammar begins with practising, again and again, the simple recognition that we are already bound together.