Negotiating Reality Podcast

Welcome back to Negotiating Reality. I’m your host, Eric Hekler.

Last time we did a wandering exploration around reciprocity, anchored mostly in my own little story from about 2016 to the present day. Somewhere in there I promised that I’d come back with more about maps and why I think they matter. So here we are. This is the maps episode.

Of course, I’m using maps as a metaphor. I’m really talking about concepts, stories, and any symbols of reality that help us navigate. They are absolutely essential, as I brought up last time with the idea that we create the stories, and the stories create us. What I want to do today is explore that a bit more. How do stories create us? And I want to do it through the metaphor of maps, and in particular through that anchoring idea that a map is not the territory.

A map is not the territory

Where did that line come from? It’s from a thinker named Alfred Korzybski, around 1931, and I want to give you the longer version, because the longer version is doing more work than the short one:

A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.

There are a few things floating around in there that I want to unpack. One is the notion of usefulness. A map is for something. The other is that a map is structured like the territory, but it isn’t the territory. Those two things together are really important.

So before we get into the three kinds of maps, I want you to hold onto this basic point: maps are drawn by somebody, from where they stand, and they are oriented to where that somebody wants to go. And because of that, maps reveal things partly by hiding other things. They make choices about what to focus on in relation to where they want to be navigating toward.

That’s what makes the map such a good metaphor. It’s true of pretty much any symbol of reality: any representational tool, any concept, any object, our notions of objectivity and otherwise. All of them reveal by hiding. That’s what we’ll be playing around with today.

In particular, I want to walk through three kinds of maps, or stories, or concepts. The first is literally a schematic, like a schematic diagram. The second is stories, because that’s the big one: creation stories, stories about the future, predictions. And the third is the way I’m planning to use maps this season, which is more like a network. Think about satellites helping your phone tune in so that it can give you GPS coordinates, know where you are, and help you get where you want to go. That third type, GPS and network satellites, is the style I’m working with. The idea is to keep zooming out and asking: what if I look at the world from this satellite, or, in the language I used last time, from this situated perspective? And then from that one? Always coming back to that basic GPS question of, where am I, right now?

Harry Beck and the Tube

Before we get into the three maps, though, I want to give you a concrete historical example.

This is the story of Harry Beck, who designed the London Underground map in 1931. If you’ve never seen it, I’d invite you to look it up. It’s a real classic in urban planning. I know about it partly because my dad, Herb Hekler, was an urban planner. I remember visiting him in his office as a kid, and it was just covered in all these different maps. As the kid of an urban planner, I think I’ve always had a real appreciation for maps, and this is one of the stories my dad told me. I think it’s pretty cool.

So why is it a cool story? If you look at the London Underground map, it doesn’t really match the London that’s above ground. Why? Because Beck wasn’t trying to make a map to navigate the world above. He was trying to make a map to navigate the world underneath: the Underground, the Tube. So he cut out all the details that weren’t relevant for riding the Tube. He made the lines straight. He spaced the stations evenly so it was easy to read, one stop to the next. He blew up the center, where there was a lot going on, so it got bigger, and he squeezed the edges, where there wasn’t as much happening from a Tube rider’s perspective.

At first, the folks choosing which map to use said something like, this is radical and crazy, no way. But then they prototyped it, they tried it, and the public loved it. Why? It gave them just the information they needed to ride the Tube. It was brilliant. It was simple for its intended purpose.

Now, the key thing to remember. If you’ve ever been to London, you might have tried this. I actually did, a long while ago. I tried to navigate above ground using the Tube map, and long story short, it’s crappy. It’s horrible. Why? Because it wasn’t designed for that territory. It was designed to navigate below, not above. And how did it do that? By hiding the things that don’t matter underground, like the actual distances you travel. Whole neighborhoods just disappear from the map because there isn’t a Tube stop there.

That is the thing I want you to hold onto for any story, any concept, any time you create a representation of reality. There is the holistic phenomenon you’re trying to care about. And then there is the concept, the object, the story, which is only a partial representation of it. The holistic phenomenon is always so much bigger than the representation you’re working from. And that’s by design. That’s a good thing. That’s how concepts and stories work. Keep that in mind as we flow through all this.

Some questions to ask any map

So with that, here’s a little heuristic I’d invite you to use. Some questions you can ask about any map, story, concept, notion, object, or any other representation of reality:

* What was it made for?

* What does it hide in order to help you navigate?

* Where is it anchored in spacetime? Is it drawn from the past? Is it a hope for the future? Is it about right here?

* And critically, who made it, and what were their purposes?

I guess that’s more than three questions, but you get the idea. These are the kinds of questions I’d really like you to start asking.

This is also why we care about maps, concepts, and symbols of reality in the first place. The podcast is called Negotiating Reality, right? So eventually we have to get into how we actually do that. And part of the answer is recognizing that we are always communicating through words and concepts, and we need to learn how to interrogate when to trust them. That’s what we’re getting into now.

The first map: the schematic

Think of a repair manual, a blueprint, a wiring diagram, a diagram of a bicycle. A schematic is all about helping you see the parts and their interconnections inside its own little contained world. And when you look at a schematic diagram, you are very much looking down at a thing that you, as a human, can have complete control over. It’s the machine. It’s the view of the world as if it were a machine.

Of course, schematic diagrams are amazing. They are a critical part of what allows contemporary life to exist. Without them it would be very hard to build bridges, insulin pumps, cars, computers. Basically all of our machines require some kind of schematic to know how to build them, recreate them, and do so with precision.

In my world, in public health and psychology, I think the closest analogy is the logic model. A logic model lays out your inputs and your setting, then the processes you’re going to engage in, then your short-term outputs and outcomes, and then your long-term ones. You’re mapping out how you think things will work: I’m going to do these things, and if I do them, we’ll get this output. Handy. Really valuable. Honestly, it’s usually the first framework I teach students when they’re building a research plan, because it helps you get a sense of how you’re thinking these things will play out over time.

Here’s what I want you to tag about this style of map. It’s extremely common, and it leans on a metaphor that was especially popular before and during the Enlightenment: the world as a mecha…

Introduction

Hey everyone. Welcome back to Negotiating Reality. I’m your host, Eric Hekler.

It’s been a little while since the last episode of what I now think of as the end of Season 1. That last episode, at least for me, felt like a good closure of what I was trying to do when I first started developing this podcast.

While I haven’t been recording, I have been doing, and attuning. I’ve been reading and listening, meditating and contemplating, chatting and exploring — and, perhaps most critically, working toward a sense of settling.

I’ve been waiting until I felt like I could settle into a still point — one that would let me attune to the “firehose” of perspectives and experiences I’ve been trying to explore here in Negotiating Reality, and in my life more generally.

Waiting for when it feels right, as you might guess, doesn’t work on a timeline. It happens when it happens, and one just needs to have patience, and faith that it will come when it should.

And lo and behold, I’m finding myself increasingly in this still point. Though I should say this right now: a still point is not a place you arrive at and stay. It is a practice one cultivates, and continually tunes in and out of. So it’s more like a place I’m learning to return to. And I’m finding my way back to it more and more.

A still point about what, you might ask? And you might also be wondering: what the heck do I even mean by a still point?

Good questions. Let me try to explain.

Over the past several years, I’ve come to realize that I’ve been trying to reach a felt, embodied, practical capacity to live into one key word.

Reciprocity.

It’s a lovely word. You can hear its shape in the Latin roots — re-, back, and pro-, forward. So the word’s original sense points toward a physical back-and-forth, a rising-and-falling motion, like a wave — or, to reach back to an analogy I used a lot in Season 1, like a breath.

And, of course, the most common definition of reciprocity is something like: a process of dynamic exchange oriented toward mutual benefit. I give to you, you give back to me, and we’re both better for it. That definition is true, and it’s a real and healthy facet of reciprocity — it’s the reciprocity of good friendships, good partnerships, fair trades.

And, as I’ve been sitting with this word, I keep feeling how much more there is to it. Because reciprocity, as I’ve come to experience it, doesn’t only flow back and forth; it flows through as well. A gift can keep moving — onward, through and across a whole web of relations — nourishing beings the original giver will never meet and never be repaid by. So there’s a ledger kind of reciprocity, real and useful, that wants to come back into balance. And there’s a river kind of reciprocity, which is more like a gift that keeps on flowing. I’m more and more interested in the never-ending-flow type of reciprocity.

But notice — that’s still just the word. The signifier.

The word carries a lovely poetry that a gifted poet like Robin Wall Kimmerer, or my friend Donna Spruijt-Metz, can do wonders with.

And as beautiful as it is as a signifier, the word itself isn’t quite what I’m after.

What I’ve been trying to understand, and to learn to live in accordance with, is what the word reciprocity represents. That facet of reality. That’s going to be the focus of Season 2.

Why?

To cut to the chase: my gut tells me that the more of us who become capable of living reciprocity — with ourselves, with our lineages, and with the other people and living beings coming from lineages different than our own — the more likely it is we’ll find a new way for humanity to live together.

When I find the still point — that calm, peaceful, serene, embodied sense of knowing — and I attune from there to what the word reciprocity signifies, I feel a compass. One I can orient by, moment to moment. A compass that helps me live in a way that’s filled with integrity, grace, and gratitude.

So… if the word reciprocity is a signifier, the question is: what does it signify?

That is what I want to explore in Season 2 of Negotiating Reality. And I want to be upfront about how I plan to explore it. I could define the word — I just did, a moment ago — and if a definition were enough, we’d be good and done. So instead of defining it, I want to invite you to walk around it with me.

To borrow a metaphor from the phenomenologists: imagine reciprocity as a die — a little six-sided cube. Here’s the thing about a die. You can never see all six faces at once. From wherever you’re standing, the faces you can see are hiding the ones you can’t. To get the whole of it, you need different situated perspectives, each looking at a different part. That’s pretty much what I want to do — though not around a physical object like a die, but around a living practice. Reciprocity.

So I want to look at the living practice that the word reciprocity represents from as many situated perspectives, across as many lineages and cultures, as I can — because I don’t think anyone can see the whole of what this word points to from any one vantage. It’s like standing at that die, only ever seeing the faces turned toward you.

For Season 2 of Negotiating Reality, I’m going to take a 360-degree-and-then-some tour, seeking to feel out and live into reciprocity from as many situated perspectives as I can, holding each one with as much integrity as I can manage.

Situating my own perspective

Doing that requires you to get a bit more of my perspective, because my vantage colors and filters everything I see, and so everything I can offer. I want you to be able to tell when a perspective is more of my own lens, and when it’s a different perspective I’m drawing on to see a different face of the practice of reciprocity.

So I’d like to go back to around 2016 — when I think I really started to take seriously what I now think of as a journey around reciprocity. Though, to be clear, I had no idea in 2016 that that’s what I was doing.

2016 was when Donald Trump won his, at the time, surprising victory to become President of the United States. And there’s one small piece of that moment I want to point at, because it turned out to matter more to me than I knew. All the major prediction models — Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, Nate Cohn at the New York Times — were pointing to a Clinton win, some more confidently than others.

The maps all said one thing. And the territory did another. If that doesn’t make sense to you, don’t worry about it. It’s a theme, though, that will keep coming up as we do our little walk around reciprocity.

Returning to the story…

around then — about ten years ago now — I was really struggling with how to be a good person. Just to help illustrate this, I remember a friend saying to me once, something like: “You’re such a good person.” And my honest answer was: “No I’m not. I’m someone who commits to trying to be a good person. Whether I actually am one won’t be clear until the moment I die.” So, for me, I didn’t think I had the right to think of myself as a good person, until the moment I die, when the full ledger of my life could be reviewed and judgment could be made.

That reaction gives you a glimpse of where my head was. I so badly wanted to do the right thing, and at the same time the task felt basically impossible. It felt overwhelming to live into my responsibilities, especially in a culture that had just elected Donald Trump — someone who, from my vantage at the time, seemed to have this superpower of being completely shameless and completely selfish at the same time. And I’ll be honest: back then, I couldn’t see him with an ounce of compassion. From where I stood he was like a black hole — just pulling more and more into himself, at the direct cost of so many other people, communities, and living beings.

And I’ll be even more honest… this is something I’m still deeply grappling with. I’m working toward compassion here, and I am not there. Part of why I’m doing this season is the hope — honestly, the faith — that walking this walk will get m…

We need a level of consciousness we don't yet have to solve problems our current consciousness created. So where do we start?

We’ll be exploring that today in this episode.

Key Books from Said Dawlabani

MEMEnomics (2013)

Second Sapiens: The Rise of the Planetary Mind and the Future of Humanity.

Key References from Said:

Valuematch.net.

Said’s MEMEnomics website.

Ken Wilber’s A Theory of Everything,

Spiral Dynamics in Action

Ones Eric Brought up at the end:

You cannot plant a rainforest article I wrote at Medium.

Episode 2, Life Breathes.

Edward Said’s Orientalism.

TED Talk of Bernie Krause

TED Radio Hour Episode featuring Bernie Krause

Rob Dunn described in my conversation with him,

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s, The ServiceBerry

David Foster Wallace opened his famous commencement address

Matt Biggar names: Connected to Place.

John Kesler’s Integral Polarity Practice

Introduction

Welcome back to Negotiating Reality. I’m your host, Eric Hekler.

Today’s guest is Said Dawlabani, a human evolution theorist and a leading thinker on cultural evolution.

Twenty-five years ago, Said was a successful real estate developer and investment advisor — by his own description, “master of his own universe,” living the American dream. Then a divorce cracked that dream open and started to surface bigger questions about purpose and meaning.

He met his now-late wife, Elza, who was a human rights attorney and activist for Middle East peace. Through Elza, Said connected with Don Beck, a key developer of the model Spiral Dynamics.

For those unfamiliar, Don Beck built on the work of Clare Graves, a psychologist and contemporary of Maslow, who spent decades studying how human value systems evolve. Beck took Graves’ initial ideas and tried to simplify and make them more accessible through the framework of Spiral Dynamics. He then applied this model to contribute toward the transition from apartheid in South Africa.

Said became Beck’s close associate, and working with Elza, they founded the Center for Human Emergence of the Middle East, applying this framework to the intractable challenge of peace between Palestine and Israel — something we touch on in this conversation, though it deserves its own episode entirely.

Said’s first book, MEMEnomics (2013), took this cultural evolutionary and developmental lens to our financial systems and economics, particularly in the wake of the financial crisis, arguing that the unhealthy expression of “only money matters” was creating enormous problems.

But that’s not primarily what we discussed here. What we really talked about was his new book, Second Sapiens: The Rise of the Planetary Mind and the Future of Humanity.

In it, Said did something bold. Invited in part by Don Beck himself, he reimagined the entire Spiral Dynamics framework through the lens of our current planetary crisis. The key question: What kind of intelligence is required when you’re living in a moment when seven of the nine planetary boundaries have been crossed?

His answer became a fundamental reorientation. He moved from what he calls Promethean intelligence — the stuff of First Sapiens, our human ingenuity and capacity for science and technology — to Second Sapiens intelligence, grounded in Gaian intelligence, the wisdom of Earth and her living systems.

This conversation goes deep into that framework, exploring it from many angles. If you have an interest in Spiral Dynamics as a lens for understanding cultural evolution, this is for you. If you sense that our current systems are reaching their limits, if you’re drawn to developmental frameworks but wondering how to apply them in this existential moment, or if you’re looking for a map that honors both human potential and planetary boundaries — this conversation is for you.

I want to acknowledge: this is a rich, complex conversation. It’s the longest episode I’ve made. I also get into an extended reflection afterward, because there’s just so much here. But I think to properly respect the wisdom and insights Said is bringing, it takes the time. So rather than cutting it down, I wanted you to hear the whole thing. If you need to pause and come back in chunks, please do.

With that, let’s dive in.

The Interview

Full transcript is available from the video or audio files. Go there for to read through the actual interview.

Valuematch.net.

MEMEnomics.

Wilber’s A Theory of Everything,

Spiral Dynamics in Action,

Closing Reflection

Thank you, Said. What an amazing conversation.

I want to start and end this reflection with breath.

In our conversation, Said described the pair of opposites that govern existence — light and dark, expansion and contraction, action and reaction. I offered breath as a metaphor, one we’ve been using throughout this podcast since Episode 2, Life Breathes.

Breathing in is good. Oxygen. Life. But if you only breathe in, you create a problem. CO₂ builds up. You need to exhale. And the exhale isn’t the bad part — it’s the completion. It creates the polarity, the cycle, that makes the whole thing work.

Said lit up. He said, “That is the perfect example, Eric.”

What I want to explore in this reflection is how that pattern — that cycle, that harmonic — is a fractal. It repeats at every scale. And if we learn to see it, feel it, attune to it, it might be a key to understanding cultural evolution itself.

From Stages to Cycles

Said’s walkthrough of Spiral Dynamics was a master class — I won’t rehash it here, but I’d invite you to relisten. What I want to offer is something that stirred in me during our conversation and has been forming since. Call it a synthesis delusion binge if you will. I’ve shared an earlier version of these ideas with Said, and it resonated with him, which gives me some confidence this direction has legs. But I offer it as a hypothesis, not a conclusion — in the spirit of continuing dialogue.

Said mentioned that Graves himself used the metaphor of a symphony — different instruments representing different stages of development, coming together to create music. The beauty isn’t in one instrument alone, but in the instruments playing together.

This made me wonder: what if the primary frame isn’t stages but cycles?

When we talk about cultural evolution, we’re talking about our species’ superpower — the capacity to invent social realities. As I explored in Episode 4, this seems inherent to our biology: our capacity for creativity, communication, copying, collaboration, and compression. We construct shared concepts, beliefs, norms, stories, and rituals — the invisible architecture of our cultures.

The stages framing makes sense if you’re looking at things linearly — first this, then that. But what if we shift to cycles as the foundational orientation? Which is exactly what Said invited us to do by evoking the pair of opposites, and for which breath serves as an embodied anchor.

If we make that shift, a different word becomes more appropriate than “development.” That word is emergence.

Emergence, Not Development

I want to be explicit about this reframe, because I think it matters.

The concept of “development” carries with it an almost gravitational pull toward hierarchy — toward “higher” being “better.” Stage 7 is more developed than Stage 3. Integral consciousness transcends and includes what came before. And there is something true here — real differences in complexity and perspective-taking. I want to flag that I’ll return to this when thinking specifically about individual growth.

But here’s the hypothesis for cultural evolution: What if we replace the frame of development with the frame of emergence? And in doing so, honor everything the developmental lens illuminates while gaining something crucial that it misses?

Emergence gives us this: when conditions are right, new possibilities come into being that have properties beyond what the underlying systems alone could produce. Life emerged from physical and chemical processes — but life has properties that physics and chemistry alone don’t predict. Ecosystems emerged from the interplay of living…

NOTE:

I mistakenly attributed a quote to Thomas Merton that was actually from Bruno Barnhart! Here’s a reference to the actual quote!

https://www.awakin.org/v2/read/view.php?tid=2416&sso_checked=1

Introduction

Welcome to Negotiating Reality, where we explore how our civic, spiritual, and natural processes tethering us to reality are breaking down, and what we might do about it.

I’m Eric Hekler. Today, I’d like to invite you into a conversation I had with Matt Biggar, author of Connected to Place: Regenerating Nature, Communities, and Local Economies Through Systems Change.

Matt is the founder and principal of Connected to Place, a strategy consulting firm. He has over three decades of experience in facilitating systems change in communities and organizations.

Preview of Key Ideas

I want to give you a sneak preview of some of the key ideas Matt and I explored together.

Early in the conversation, Matt asks a really great question: Can I recognize native plants as easily as logos? Just think about that for a moment. Can you? How well can you? It’s such a simple question, but it really cuts to the heart of our profound disconnection. How well do we really feel connected with the nature, with the communities, with the places that we actually inhabit?

Matt’s key insight is this: we love and connect with what we know. Right now, what we seem to really know are the products and services that are literally designed to capture our attention and pull more dollars. This disconnection is very, very real. Matt offers data showing we spend 87% of our lives in buildings, 5% in cars, and only 8% outdoors. This has been, of course, a very recent development in human history.

At the heart of Matt’s diagnosis of the problem is this disconnection to place—hence the core thesis of his book. He frames this as a central facet that is really at the heart of all of these interconnected issues we’re dealing with: climate change, biodiversity loss, economic inequality, and social division.

But critically, this is not a conversation about despair. It’s grounded in real-world examples and offers a framework to help guide us through this.

In the beginning, he tells us about these amazing changes that are happening in Paris—it’s pretty cool, some pretty amazing stuff, and you’ll hear about it soon enough. He also flags how he’s seeing patterns of system change levers: shifting power, resetting culture, transforming land use, and leveraging interconnected systems as a way to break down silos.

And he doesn’t just give us the Paris example. He talks about some of his own work and the great work that’s happening in Detroit, particularly on advancing food sovereignty. He brings up this idea that there is a goal advanced by Black farmers in the area to really establish Detroit as having food sovereignty over their fruits and vegetables, which I just think is so cool. Or how half of metro cities in the United States could probably produce all of the food that they need within a 155-mile radius, and that could increase if we actually move towards a plant-based diet.

Or even the idea of cultivating true place-based identity, where we really feel part of our culture. He brings up these really interesting examples of oaks—what would it mean to re-engage with oaks? I hope you listen to actually hear the depths of this.

What I really loved about this conversation was Matt’s approach, which was both systemic and compassionate. On a systems level, he’s naming how capitalism might actually just be an addiction problem for all of us. And at the same time, engaging with deep compassion and recognizing that we’re all navigating this, and we’re all trying to work through this. He very much holds this sort of both-and dynamic of personal and systemic change as an infinity loop that we need to be navigating together.

Not only that, I was really grateful Matt played through what I originally called “Island Sculpt” (and now I’m starting to think of as “Island-Shaped” from Episode 3). He played with it and showed how this could actually be a valuable heuristic for thinking about place-based economics, from hyper-local gardening into organizing towards watersheds, food sheds, fiber sheds, and other sheds. He was really flagging that these are not abstract ideas, but they’re actually emerging realities on how to be living in right relationship and towards interdependence.

And then, last but not least, he was really flagging the critical importance of those who take a network mindset.

I don’t want to give too much more away because I want you to jump into this. With that, let’s dive in.

Interview with Matt Biggar

The Paris Transformation: Proof That Change is Possible

Eric: Alright, welcome, Matt! I’m so glad you’re here. Thank you for joining us today.

Matt: It’s great to be here with you, Eric. Thank you.

Eric: Cool. So, let’s start with how you opened your book, because I really loved it. And honestly, as someone that pays attention to climate and sustainability issues, I didn’t know how much changed in ten years in Paris. You were flagging closing 100 streets for motor vehicles, removing 50,000 parking spots, creating 800 miles of bike lanes, and by 2024, almost 3-to-1 more people were biking than driving in the city center. That’s really cool! I’d love to invite you to tell us more about that and why you started your book with that sort of orientation.

Matt: Yeah, great. There are few examples of such dramatic change within a decade, and that’s definitely why I started it—just how it grabbed you, it grabbed me as I learned more about the story. I had to find out more, and guess what? The story continues beyond the book. In just March of this year, Parisians voted to open about 500 more streets. I noticed I used the word “open,” right? I think that is the thinking around a lot of this: yes, it’s closed to cars, but it’s open to people doing all sorts of other ways to experience streets and get around.

Eric: I love that.

Matt: Yeah, so opening 500 more streets was what they voted to do. That includes removing 10% more of the parking and fewer car lanes. And the vision that they have embedded in this is 5 to 8 streets that are pedestrianized in each neighborhood in Paris. They really got into this transformation, which I would call systems change in a lot of ways.

It teaches us a ton. I mean, the fact that this amount of change is possible—it’s not just about the physical changes that have happened there, and we’ll explore this more, but it’s the impact it’s had on people: the amount of cycling relative to car driving, and how people are experiencing the nature and the communities in Paris are changing. The connections are stronger.

But this doesn’t happen without real intention, right? Without a real sustained use of what I call the systems change levers, which we’ll talk about. Those have been kind of derived from real-world examples like Paris.

Eric: Yeah, that’s great, that’s really helpful. Maybe before we get into the frameworks, I’d love to hear what’s something that, as you studied this Paris example, really surprised you?

Matt: Mayor Hidalgo, Anne Hidalgo, is the one whose administration came in and has really led this change. And one of the surprises is she was re-elected in the middle of this. Like a lot of American cities, when there’s been changes attempted on streets, there’s a lot of political backlash. Even here in San Francisco, there’s a supervisor who recently lost his position, was actually recalled, and it had a lot to do with street transformation that had actually happened.

The fact is—and this is worthy of an entire book to itself, maybe someday I can actually do a case study—there’s definitely a buildup of power to support the mayor. This is a democratic election that put her back into office, put her in office originally. There was a lot of advocates working very strongly on these changes and were able to bring people along and see that this is something that they want to support. Once it was experienced, i…

Episode Summary

In today’s episode I interviewed John Kesler. John brings together decades of contemplative wisdom and leadership experience across multiple sectors in this deeply personal conversation. From his early discovery as a young atheist in Hamburg, Germany—where he found a foundational “physical resonance” through silence and stillness—to his journey through Columbia Law School grappling with language’s ephemeral nature, to re-engaging with his Mormon roots and training with Zen master Genpo Roshi, John’s path has been one of integrating seemingly contradictory ways of knowing. Over the past 20 years, he has developed Integral Polarity Practice, a framework for holding together opposites like transcendent and imminent, personal and collective, theoretical and practical. In this episode, Eric reflects on his own teacher-student relationship with John and explores the tension between our love of “pure imagination”—the conceptual frameworks and digital worlds that captivate modern minds—and the need to stay tethered to embodied reality, relationships, and the more-than-human world. The conversation ultimately invites listeners to walk in “sacred beauty” by finding stillness in non-dual wholeness.

(And you’ll see, I’m trying out making these as videos as well so you can choose either video or audio engagement with the work! Let me know what you think!)

John Kesler’s Work:

* Living into Sacred Beauty: The Origins and Emergence of Integral Polarity Practice

* Integral Polarity Practice: In Service of Leadership for Flourishing

* IPP Institute

* YOUnify Initiative

* Another Way Forward Leadership Movement

* Here is a pdf describing the course; if you are interested in taking the course discussed during the episode related to this, please email John at [email protected].

Global Flourishing Resources

* https://globalflourishingstudy.com

* Jim Ritchie-Dunham, Agreements: Your Choice

* “Leadership for Flourishing” (Oxford University Press)

Introduction

Welcome back to Negotiating Reality, where we explore how we understand our world and reckon with the possibility that many of our deeply held truths just might be delusions. I'm your host, Eric Hekler.

Throughout Season 1, we've been building a framework for understanding the fundamental nature of reality—what philosophers call metaphysics. We've discovered that "Life Breathes" together across vast scales of space and time, that "Islands Sculpt" each other in endless webs of relationship, and that "Beings Adapt" by consciously constructing reality through cultural concepts and social agreements.

Today, I'm thrilled to explore these ideas with Dr. Rob Dunn, a scientist whose work beautifully illustrates why this framework matters for humanity's future.

Rob is a professor of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University, where he also serves as Senior Vice Provost. He's the author of eight books that span from the hidden biodiversity in our homes to the evolution of human taste to the future of life on Earth. His research has taken him from studying ants in Bolivian rainforests to investigating the microbes living in our belly buttons—and everywhere in between.

What makes Rob's work so compelling for our conversation is how it reveals the profound disconnect between how we think the world works and how it actually works. His research consistently shows that we're not separate from nature—we ARE nature, embedded in relationships with countless other species whether we realize it or not.

In his book "A Natural History of the Future," Rob argues that biological laws will shape our destiny regardless of human intentions. Through fascinating examples—from bacteria evolving antibiotic resistance in days to cities becoming evolutionary laboratories—he shows how our attempts to control nature often backfire spectacularly, creating the very problems we're trying to solve. It was the key book that grounded Episode 3.

And Rob's more recent work takes us into some of the shared territory I explored in episode 4 and, in particular, questions about what humanity is striving for. In "The Call of the Honeyguide," he explores how Western science has systematically overlooked mutualistic relationships—partnerships where different species help each other flourish. From the bacteria in our guts that keep us healthy to the intricate relationships between trees and fungi, to the extinct partnership between honeyguide birds and humans, Rob reveals a hidden world of cooperation that challenges our culture's obsession with competition and control.

What I find most exciting about Rob's trajectory is how it mirrors the journey of Season 1 itself. He's moved from documenting biological laws that constrain us to revealing mutualistic possibilities we could consciously cultivate. It's a shift from "here's what we must accept" to "here's how we could participate more wisely."

Today, Rob will walk us through some of ecology's foundational principles—like how the size of any "island" determines what species can thrive there, whether we're talking about actual islands, crop fields, or the cities we've built. We'll discover why our urban corridors are accidentally creating superhighways for exactly the species we don't want—pathogens and other species that, as Rob said “chew on us”- as they exploit human environments.

Rob will explain what he calls the "law of escape"—how species can temporarily outrun their natural enemies by moving to new places, and why this matters for everything from global rubber production to human civilization itself. We'll explore why most people can't identify the plants outside their own windows, and what this disconnection means for our capacity to make wise choices about our shared future.

We'll dive deep into the fascinating world of mutualisms—cooperative relationships between species that challenge our assumptions about nature being "red in tooth and claw." Rob will reveal why even cooperative relationships involve constant attempts at cheating, why trees are essentially "ecological Ferraris" competing to smother their neighbors, and what our relationships with cats and dogs might teach us about partnership and attention.

Perhaps most intriguingly, we'll explore Rob's call for a "smell revolution"—his argument that our neglect of olfactory experience represents a massive blind spot that, if addressed, could fundamentally rewire how we understand ourselves and our world. And we'll discover his hypothesis about why walking dogs might literally be extending human lifespans in ways that have nothing to do with exercise.

This isn't just academic. Rob's work suggests we're at a critical juncture where humanity must learn to work with biological laws rather than against them, while simultaneously discovering entirely new forms of partnership with the rest of life. Throughout this episode, Rob also repeatedly called out the importance of artists and others who can take these ideas, dream about them, and, from that, create new art to help humanity grow into these new possibilities. It's exactly the kind of thinking we need as we face unprecedented challenges that require unprecedented forms of cooperation—not just among humans, but with the entire community of life we depend on.

Let's begin.

Recap

Thank you, Rob, for this fascinating conversation. We covered a lot so let’s do a quick recap.

Ecological Laws That Shape Our World

Rob explained how his books evolved from recognizing that "ecologists know a lot of things about the living world that are not in our daily conversations" while "our technology gets louder" and "the observations of ecologists become quieter."

He started this discussion by grounding us in the species-area law: larger islands support more species. And, in A Natural History of the Future, Rob describes how this applies everywhere—crop fields, cities, even our bodies. As he put it, "The species that we're favoring are the ones that can chew on us." Our urban corridors and agricultural systems inadvertently create ideal conditions for pests, pathogens, and invasive species.

Rob also explained the law of escape—how species moving to new areas temporarily escape their natural enemies. This benefited human migration and crops for millennia, but "we're out of places to escape to." His rubber tree example illustrates our vulnerability: most rubber comes from Asian plantations that escaped South American pathogens. If those pathogens catch up, global tire production faces disruption.

Rob identified how human psychology limits ecological awareness. We "preferentially notice and conserve things that look like us"—a "cave painting" approach focusing on charismatic megafauna rather than insects and microbes that run ecosystems. He noted our techno-utopian blind spots: space stations where "fungi grew over the windows" and "feces is packed down to Earth." We have "the aura of grandeur and omnipotence" but "the reality of a nearly chimp brain."

Mutualisms: Nature's Complex Partnerships

Rob's work on mutualisms—cooperative relationships between species—highlights both an opportunity for healthy cultural evolution and growth as well as inviting us to not fall into any idealized or romantic notions of harmony. In brief, nature is messy.

Dunn offered some key tendencies of mutualisms including that mutualistic relationships between species tend to be local, that species can monitor if their partners are fulfilling their part of the arrangement, that they can sanction and break relationships when they detect cheating, and, that it is critical to recognize that mutualisms can easily shift into parasitism, if the species are not diligent.

With this, while mutualisms are very likely the key driver of evolution, as described at length in The Call of the Honeyguide, and they do in deed focus on mutually beneficial relationships between species, they also, at the same time, involve recognition that "each partner is trying to cheat the other."

His playful cat example ill…

Introduction

Hello, and welcome back to the Negotiating Reality Podcast. I'm your host, Eric Hekler.

We've been on a three-part journey exploring the fundamental assumptions we make about the nature of reality—what philosophers call metaphysics. Today, we reach one that may initially feel disorienting, but as you grow into it, I hope you'll find it truly liberating and inspiring for navigating our current moment (and the need for it was perfectly set up in my discussion with colleagues, Mai Nguyen and Keith Pezzoli, check it out here).

In Episode 1, we explored the challenges of our present moment and discovered that different cultures undergo great transitions when one way of organizing breaks down and another emerges—and that during transitions, we must learn to be responsible, truly learning from our ancestors while attuning to where we are being drawn into becoming. I then asked my mentor, colleague, and friend, Dr. Donna Spruijt-Metz to do a bit a peer review on this where we explored the sort of process we’d need to navigate this moment wisdom-seeking and authentic cross-cultural dialogue. Donna aligned wit the general framing of this being a moment of transformation when the spiritual, civic, and natural infrastructure and processes that are tethering us to reality are breaking down. A large part of this involve how to navigate both honoring the relationships and communities one have while also looking to connect, learn, and grow into healthy relationships with others, without falling into the trap of appropriation.

In Episode 2, "Life Breathes," we discovered how we're embedded in a living, exchanging universe where cosmic, geologic, and biological processes breathe together across vast scales of spacetime. I then discussed this episode, first with a theologian and pastor, Dr. Christopher Carter and then with a geoscientist, Dr. Marcia Bjornerud.

In the discussion with Christopher, he emphasized that creation stories historically emerge during times of captivity and displacement—like the Genesis accounts written during Babylonian exile—to help communities make sense of their identity and provide direction for future generations. Carter identified how the destructive Babylonian myth of redemptive violence (where the male deity Marduk creates the world by violently dismembering the female deity Tiamat) has been incorporated into Western thinking, creating a "might makes right" logic that justifies conquest, capitalism, and ecological destruction through the false belief that violence can be salvific. With this in mind, his assessment of my offered "Life Breathes Together" creation story represents a necessary corrective to these harmful narratives, offering an alternative grounded in relationship and interconnectedness rather than dominance, which becomes especially critical as communities recognize that their current guiding stories have become disconnected from sacred truths and are leading toward collective harm.

In the discussion with Marcia, she provided generous scientific validation for the "Life Breathes" creation story, finding it both scientifically accurate and humanly compelling, while helping refine the breathing metaphor to acknowledge that lung-and-gill breathing represents only recent evolutionary development—that said, the exchange of matter and energy, with breathing being one type and, given we do it, a good metaphor to help us to feel this exchange, is a viable way of understanding that which could be seen has having animacy and, thus, a sort of life on its own terms. She contextualized this work within geology's remarkable intellectual achievement of mapping Earth's 4+ billion year history through diverse collaborative minds, and explained how the field has quietly evolved from its extractive origins toward embracing concepts that might once have seemed "new agey"—including the recognition that most geoscientists, if pressed, would acknowledge that Earth is alive in some meaningful sense on its own terms, not ours. The conversation explored the tension between Newtonian thinking (seeking timeless universal laws) and Darwinian thinking (embracing time and evolutionary complexity), with Bjornerud arguing that our culture's dysfunctional relationship with time and tendency toward "adolescent pugilistic" relationships with nature requires us to become "law-abiding biogeochemical citizens" who work within planetary rhythms rather than against them.

In Episode 3, "Islands Sculpt," we explored how every context shapes us while we shape it back—from the microbes in our gut to the cities we build, each relationship carving new possibilities.

In my conversation with urban planning colleagues Drs. Mai Nguyen and Keith Pezzoli from UC San Diego's Design Lab, we examined how the "Islands Sculpt" framework applies to the built environment—and discovered both its power and its limitations. Mai revealed the uncomfortable truth that American cities were designed from inception to segregate and exclude, with zoning laws originally created not just for health and safety but explicitly to concentrate wealth and power in white neighborhoods. Keith traced four decades of planning theory evolution, from rational comprehensive approaches through advocacy and feminist planning to today's bioregional frameworks that seek to bridge urban-rural divides. Their peer review highlighted a critical gap: while the ecological insights of islands sculpting each other capture important truths about how places shape people and vice versa, the framework remained largely apolitical in a field where, as Mai emphasized, "planning is inherently political." Every decision about infrastructure, housing, and land use emerges from networks of human relationships, irrational constituencies, and power dynamics that don't follow ecological patterns. Keith suggested the metaphor of "sculpting" itself might be limiting, evoking a chiseling away rather than the connective, relationship-building work actually needed. Both stressed that authentic community engagement requires moving from planning for people to planning with them—a shift that demands we grapple not just with how contexts shape us, but with who gets to construct stories and theories of change that determine which contexts are even possible.

All of this was critical set up for today’s episode.

Today, in "Beings Adapt," we dive into perhaps the most humbling and liberating insight of all: We don't perceive reality as it is. We construct it together. And that construction is both our greatest superpower and our most delicate responsibility.

This episode draws extensively from Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett's revolutionary work. Dr. Barrett is a psychologist and neuroscientist, Professor at Northeastern University, and one of the most highly cited scientists in the world. Her research fundamentally shifts our understanding of human nature toward something far more dynamic and relational than our cultural inheritance might suggest.

This episode is based on Barrett’s work, including my understanding of her work based on reading the original scientific papers but, even more so, the way she frames her work in her popular press books, Seven and a Half Lessons About your Brain and How Emotions are Made.

The aphorism guiding today's exploration: "Beings Adapt."

Ready to have your reality gently transformed? Let's begin.

Part 1: The Humbling Truth About Your Brain

Let me start with a story that will become our touchstone today—one Dr. Barrett shares in Seven and a Half Lessons About Your Brain.

A Vietnam veteran was on patrol in the jungle when he saw a line of men in military fatigues carrying rifles, lurking around a corner. His heart raced, his body prepared for combat. He raised his weapon, finger on the trigger, ready to fire—when his comrade said, "Wait, those are just children."

In that instant, the guerilla fighters transformed into children walking in line, playing together.

Same visual input. Completely dif…

Episode Summary

Reckoning & Reimagining Urban Planning

In this rich conversation, Drs. Mai Nguyen and Keith Pezzoli join me to explore how urban planning shapes our communities - and how communities can shape back.

The Historical Reckoning

Mai opens with a stark truth: American cities were designed from their inception to discriminate and segregate. The first zoning ordinances around 1908 in LA, for example, weren't just about separating residential from industrial uses - they were explicitly crafted to exclude minorities from certain neighborhoods and concentrate wealth in single-family zones where white families lived.

This historical legacy continues today through exclusionary zoning practices that perpetuate wealth inequality. However, Mai points to hope: cities like Minneapolis eliminated single-family zoning in 2018, sparking a movement toward understanding how land use policies concentrate power and wealth.

Evolution of Planning Theory

Keith, with his four-decade perspective, traces the evolution of planning theory from rational comprehensive planning through incremental planning, advocacy planning, feminist planning, and now emerging approaches like bioregional planning. He emphasizes how planning theory has evolved alongside broader theories of development - from modernization theory to dependency theory to what he is advocating for, bioregionalism.

The conversation reveals how the field of planning is evolving away from its historical roots in top-down, expert-driven approaches toward more participatory methods that recognize community knowledge and agency that both honor people (Mai’s work) and ecology (Keith’s work).

Design Thinking Meets Urban Planning

Mai explains how design thinking brings crucial elements often missing from traditional planning: authentic community engagement, prototyping solutions that might not have existed before, and designing WITH communities rather than FOR them. She contrasts this with traditional planning processes that often discourage community engagement by making processes longer and more complex.

Bioregional Futures

Keith introduces the concept of bioregional planning as a "third attractor" beyond both the Expert-driven Modern Globalization Movements and now the reactionary nostalgic backlash. As climate change forces localization of food, water, and energy systems, Keith share’s his vision on how bioregional approaches may be a key approach to help bridge current urban-rural divides and restore care economies of mutual benefit.

He shares examples from water infrastructure, contrasting expensive centralized systems (desalination, massive reservoirs) with localized alternatives like rainwater harvesting and greywater recycling that connect people more directly to their resources.

The Political Reality

Mai emphasizes that planning is inherently political: "Everything we do is shaped by politics. You can go through the most rigorous planning process using the best technology, the best data, provide recommendations to your city council. And then they go with something completely different... because they have a constituency that wants something else."

This political dimension requires understanding that markets aren't neutral or free - they're designed by some people with some others in mind and, often, this sets up responses, whether done intentionally or not, to exclude others and to set them up as being in a structural disadvantage in a given market. With this, Mai is advocating for us to deconstruct and reconstruct our perspective and approaches to markets.

Community Engagement and Hope

Both guests emphasize authentic community engagement that listens to meaningfully learn with communities rather than extracting information from them. Mai shares examples of communities that have reversed gentrification, shut down harmful policing programs, and built affordable housing with wraparound services by leveraging community talents and abundance.

The conversation concludes with hope grounded in education and the next generation. As educators, both Mai and Keith see their role in equipping students with skills to dismantle harmful systems while building more just alternatives.

Peer Review of “Islands Sculpt”

Keith and Mai both highlight strengths and areas that need additional discussion in their review. Keith highlighted the ways in which the fictional story of Lyla helped to illustrate a wide range of concepts that were in resonance with bioregionalism and the ways in which we are linked together. Mai found the general structure and ways of recognizing the ways in which our contexts influence as valuable but also cautioned us not to forget that all of these urban landscapes are social realities. They are made up by us and thus can be changed by us, but it requires different ways of engaging in discussions and re-imagining our futures together that will likely require us to de-construct some critical elements of the past. With this, I then offered the broader framework of Life Breathes, Islands Sculpt, and Beings Adapt and flagged how, for me, all six words are needed to actually have a good understanding or the nature of reality. With this, many of the elements Mai was asking for will be coming up in the next episode, which was foreshadowed a bit during this interview discussion as well as quick narrative discussion about my intentionality on how I saw these creating a view of reality that is emergent and, I hope, larger than the sum of its parts (but still requiring each of the parts to be worked through).

Key Takeaways

* Urban planning's legacy of exclusion requires active dismantling, not just good intentions

* Design thinking emphasizes prototyping and community co-creation over expert-driven solutions

* Bioregional approaches offer alternatives to both globalism and reactionary nostalgia

* Authentic community engagement means planning WITH people, not FOR them

* Political realities shape planning outcomes more than technical expertise alone

* Hope lies in educating changemakers and supporting community-driven solutions

* And, in line with the intentions and overall thrust of Season 1 of this podcast, we need to be able to recreate our stories, explanations, and approaches, recognizing both guidance for how life systems and ecosystems actually work while also recognizing that we have the super power of inventing social realities to do it.

The episode challenges listeners to see cities not as neutral spaces but as actively sculpted landscapes that both shape and are shaped by the communities within them - making the question of who gets to do the sculpting a fundamentally political and moral one.

Book Recommendations

Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou

Extended Urbanisation: Tracing Planetary Struggles Edited by Christian Schmid / Milica Topalovic

Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime by Bruno Latour

Creation Stories Landscapes and the Human Imagination by Anthony Aveni

Decolonizing Design by Elizabeth Dori Tunstall

Abundance by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson

Guide to California Planning, 6th Edition by William Fulton

Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam

Summary

In this mind-bending conversation, geoscientist Dr. Marcia Bjornerud (author of Timefulness and Turning to Stone) and I explore the radical implications of thinking in geological time—and why our culture's "adolescent pugilistic relationship with nature" is literally threatening our survival.

We dive deep into the ramifications of taking an overly "Newtonian" worldview to science, examine the sobering parallels between today's climate crisis and the "slow-mo catastrophes" that caused Earth's prior great mass extinctions, and explore why mainstream geology just may be quietly aligning towards ideas that may have been dismissed as "new agey.” 

Dr. Bjornerud reveals how every steel building connects us to extinct rocks from a "never-to-be-repeated moment" in Earth's history, why Mars colonization fantasies reveal a stunning ignorance of just how much Planet Earth does for us, and how we might evolve from clever technologists into "law-abiding biogeochemical citizens."

And the verdict on my "Life Breathing Together" creation story? Nothing to correct—and some surprising scientific support for expanding and re-imagining the boundaries and corresponding definition of life and even extending the notion of breath beyond respiration (with caveats ;).

Introduction

Welcome back to Negotiating Reality! I'm your host, Eric Hekler.

Today we're diving deeper into the ideas from our "Life Breathes" episode—but this time with a geologist's eye. I'm thrilled to be joined by Dr. Marcia Bjornerud, Professor of Geology and author of Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World—a book that actually helped shape the creation story we explored.

Quick Recap

For those just joining us: In "Life Breathes," I attempted something a bit audacious—crafting a new creation story that could speak to our current moment while staying true to what we know from science, spirituality, and indigenous wisdom about living in right relationship with the natural world.

We've already explored this work through a theological lens with Dr. Christopher Carter, who reminded us about the seductive pull of creation stories built on redemptive violence and helped us understand why the conditions that originally sparked new creation stories in ancient times might be re-emerging today. (And yes, if you'd like to explore these ideas through other lenses—Buddhist, Islamic, indigenous, atheist, or otherwise—please reach out. All perspectives are welcome in this conversation.)

Why This Conversation Matters

Now I want to turn to the scientific side of things. Because let's be honest—in "Life Breathing Together," I made some moves that will raise eyebrows in certain academic circles. And that's exactly why we need this conversation.

Here are some of the big questions we're wrestling with:

First, the boundary problem: Is it scientifically defensible to extend our definition of "life" beyond biology to include geological and cosmic processes? I'm not just talking metaphorically here—I'm asking whether, ontologically speaking, we might need to expand what we mean by "alive" when biological life literally depends on these other self-regulating systems to exist.

Second, the relationship shift: What happens when we stop viewing cosmic, geological, and biological processes as commodities to be exploited and start seeing them as partners in relationship? Is this just feel-good spirituality, or does it point toward something scientifically important about how complex systems actually work?

Third, the breathing metaphor: I've stretched the notion of "breath" way beyond lungs—extending it to the multi-layered cycles and feedback loops that keep everything synchronized, from quantum mechanics to the cellular pacemakers in our hearts to the geological dance between volcanism and erosion that maintains our mountains to the dynamic relationship between our sun and the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. How far can we push this metaphor before it breaks?

What You'll Discover

As you'll hear, Dr. Bjornerud brings remarkable clarity to these questions—and her responses might surprise you. She'll walk us through what she calls the "geologic habit of mind" and explain why our culture's dysfunctional relationship with time is literally threatening our survival. We'll explore how geology, as a field’s, great intellectual achievement of mapping Earth's 4-billion-plus-year history required not just brilliant minds like Hutton and Darwin, but also "legions of hardy anonymous field mappers" who learned to "turn rocks into verbs."

You'll discover why Dr. Bjornerud believes we need to move beyond our "adolescent pugilistic relationship with nature" and become "law-abiding biogeochemical citizens." We'll examine the sobering parallels between today's environmental crises and the "slow-mo catastrophes" that caused most of Earth's prior great mass extinctions—and why those gradual collapses might be more relevant than asteroid impacts.

Perhaps most intriguingly, we'll venture into controversial territory: Can rocks breathe? Is Earth alive? Dr. Bjornerud will share how mainstream geology has quietly embraced ideas once dismissed as "new agey"—and why she thinks the average geoscientist, if really pushed, would say that "in some sense, yes, Earth is alive."

The Real Stakes

Here's what I think is really at stake: We keep having the wrong conversations about the biggest challenges of our time. We end up fighting because we're using different tools to understand different facets of reality—then talking past each other instead of first creating shared understanding.

The objective methods of science are incredibly powerful, but they have boundaries. Where are those boundaries? What lies beyond those boundaries? What else do we need to know to live well, and how do we learn it if not through scientific processes alone?

Dr. Bjornerud will help us navigate the tension between what has been labeled "Newtonian" thinking—which seeks timeless universal laws—and "Darwinian" thinking, which embraces time, evolution, and the messy complexity of systems that never reach equilibrium. As she puts it, we need "wisdom, not cleverness and technology."

These aren't simple questions, but they're essential ones.

Why Dr. Bjornerud

I'm deeply grateful that Dr. Bjornerud agreed to this conversation, because honestly, I couldn't have asked for a better guide through these questions. Reading Timefulness felt like discovering a kindred spirit—someone equally devoted to rigorous scientific practice and debate, yet clear-eyed about science's boundaries when it comes to living in right relationship with nature.

What captivated me about her book was how she weaves together so many threads: her deep respect for the scientific method as a tool for creating what she calls "the Atlas of Time," her accessible and beautifully clear explanations of geological knowledge, and her invitation into what she terms "the geologic habit of mind"—the practice of timefulness itself. This practice, as she shows, resonates remarkably with other ways of knowing, like the Seven Generation governance structure of the Iroquois/Haudenosaunee. I was also very excited to learn about her more recent book, Turning to Stone, which I am eager to pick up. 

Her arguments about learning to think like a geologist were so compelling that I tried to incorporate that geological perspective directly into the creation story we explored—and as you'll hear, she offers some generous and thoughtful feedback on that attempt.

Who better to help us navigate these big questions than someone who literally thinks in geological time—someone who understands both the power and the limits of scientific thinking when it comes to our relationship with this living planet? Someone who can help us see how steel buildings connect us to extinct rocks prior to the Great Oxygenation Event, and why "all models are wrong but some are useful"?

My sense is that we had exactly the kind of conversation our moment demands: rigorous en…

Introduction

Welcome to the Negotiating Reality podcast, where we explore how we understand our world and reckon with the possibility that many of our deeply held truths just might be delusions. I'm your host, Eric Hekler. This is part two of a three-part series on metaphysics—examining the fundamental nature and underlying assumptions we make about reality.

In our first episode in this series, "Life Breathes," we explored how all life is interconnected and interdependent. Today, we dive into understanding how context matters through the aphorism "Islands Sculpt."

"Context matters" is such a truism that it's practically meaningless. But what if we could understand how context matters? That's what "Islands Sculpt" attempts to capture—the essence of how our environments shape us, just as we shape them back.

What We'll Explore Today

Through the fictional story of Lyla, a 38-year-old urban planner who's also a student of ecology, we'll journey through multiple scales of how islands sculpt and are sculpted:

* How our own bodies are ecosystems shaped by microbial partners

* How our homes function as biodiversity hotspots that influence our health

* How neighborhoods demonstrate the tension between efficiency and resilience

* How cities become laboratories for unintentional evolution

* How institutions must adapt or face extinction like any other species

* And finally, how adopting a humble perspective reveals our relationship with nature.

We'll explore how islands exist both vertically—from bacteria to Mother Earth—and horizontally—how these islands constantly sculpt one another.

By the end, I hope you'll understand why we're all basically walking ecosystems who think we're individuals, living in cities we think are separate from nature, while life at every scale continues sculpting us whether we're paying attention or not—all while we're unintentionally sculpting nature to produce super bugs and other beings that will overcome our attempts to control them.

[MUSIC INTERLUDE]

The Science Behind "Islands Sculpt"

The Lyla narrative was inspired primarily by Rob Dunn's fascinating book A Natural History of the Future, along with some additional readings such as books by E.O. Wilson like The Future of Life, Consilience and The Creation, as well as Suzanne Simard's Finding the Mother Tree, Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life, and Ed Yong's I Contain Multitudes. If you'd like to go deeper into ecology, I invite you to read any of these books but, in particular Rob Dunn's excellent one, as it provided the overall structure for this episode. If anything seems off from the actual science, it was probably me not fully understanding Dunn's and others' work. I invite you to check my work and let me know where I got any of this wrong.

The "Islands Sculpt" aphorism springs from what's arguably ecology's foundational law, co-developed by Robert MacArthur and E.O. Wilson in the 1960s: the species-area law. Wilson, like other naturalists before him, had a hunch that the number of different species on an island directly relates to that island's size. Bigger island, more biodiversity. Simple enough... but why might that be the case? Could they turn this general observation into a predictive, scientific tool?

Wilson teamed up with Robert MacArthur, who brought the mathematical muscle to Wilson's biological insights. Together, they developed a formal model that could actually predict biodiversity on islands. Their collaboration culminated in The Theory of Island Biogeography in 1967, giving us this foundational law of ecology—born from observations of actual islands.

Their species-area model focuses on the equilibrium between immigration and extinction rates, understanding these rates through any given island's size and connectivity to other islands—like its proximity to the mainland. Extinction happens when every organism in a species dies out, while immigration involves new "arrivals" to the island. These arrivals come through various means: species literally swimming, flying, or hitchhiking their way to new homes, plus evolution doing its creative work of diversifying life into new forms.

To summarize: larger islands have both slower extinction rates and more arrivals. But extinctions and arrivals are also affected by connectivity—if an island sits close to other islands or the mainland, new arrivals are more likely to show up.

Critically, while MacArthur and Wilson developed their theory focusing on ocean islands, they anticipated it could generalize to other "island-like habitats"—such as mountain tops and lakes.

This law, coupled with Darwin's Theory of Evolution, gave ecology its paradigmatic, predictive foundation—a structure that could guide the field's inquiries and work. From this starting point, ecology has matured considerably, with experiments leveraging "island-like habitats" as key factors shaping evolutionary processes.

Future ecologists like Dunn have extended this notion of islands in many ways, which will be highlighted in Lyla's story.

Before we dive into Lyla's journey though, there's one more key concept central to ecology: niches. Niches are the specific environmental conditions that allow a species to survive. For our purposes of understanding how islands sculpt, it's important to keep in mind the species-area law, connectivity issues, and the difference between where a species could live (fundamental niche) and where it actually lives (realized niche). Usually, realized niches are smaller because suitable areas aren't connected by corridors that allow movement. Think of alpine pikas—adorable mountain dwellers who could live on multiple peaks but may not be able to cross a desert valley between them.

This issue of fundamental and realized niches is crucial for understanding climate adaptation. Projects like the Yellowstone to Yukon corridor help species move as their current homes become too hot. The idea is to create corridors that enable species to move to where their fundamental niches will be in the future.

But here's the twist: our urban corridors also help species move—including bedbugs, rats, and infectious diseases. We've accidentally created superhighways for whatever's clever enough to hitchhike with humans and, sadly, many of these species want to do us harm and actively benefit from us harming their competitors who happen to be protecting us from them.

All of these ideas really matter and are actively studied in the field of ecology. Again, check out Rob Dunn's book, A Natural History of the Future.

OK, with that overview of some key concepts from ecology, let's start weaving these ideas together in the fictional story about Lyla to illustrate how "Islands sculpt."

[MUSIC INTERLUDE]

Lyla's Island Self

Let's start with a humbling realization: Lyla isn't one organism. She's a walking United Nations of microorganisms who convinced themselves they're a single person.

Lyla hosts about 39 trillion microbial cells—roughly equal to her human cells. She literally cannot survive without them.

Each morning, Lyla reaches for coffee and yogurt, recognizing breakfast as an active negotiation between human Lyla and her microbial partners. The coffee's for her; the probiotics help beneficial microbes outcompete the harmful ones trying to colonize what we might call "Lyla Island."

Unfortunately, Lyla's microbiome had a rough start. Born via C-section, formula-fed, and raised in an antimicrobial-obsessed household, she missed nature's original welcome gift—a curated collection of beneficial microbes from her mother. Following the medical wisdom of the time, her parents sanitized everything, unknowingly creating an island habitat perfect for the most robust, potentially harmful microbes.

The result? Anxiety, gut issues, and a deadly peanut allergy. Her parents acted in good faith, following advice to "control nature and minimize risk."

Lyla's epiphany came when she learned a fascinating fact about termites—they're essentially cockroaches that partnered with microorganisms to digest wood. Termites must ea…