“The denial of oneself as having an essential self, a perspective that will be defined and developed further in this piece – implied by egoism is the basis of this ecological worldview, as one’s sense of self expands to subsume and be subsumed by one’s habitat and symbiotes. Through such an analysis, one steers clear of the twin alienations of, on the one hand, the tiny self, that is, the self as an independent, enclosed, free-willed subject who remains relatively stable through space and time and who interacts with a world of objects; and, on the other hand, the reification of the non-human world, that is, the construal of nonhuman organisms as a more or less unified whole that acts collectively for the good and into which one can dissolve oneself or to which one can swear allegiance….”— Bellamy Fitzpatrick, “Symbiogenetic Desire: an egoist conception of ecology”
