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 organisms — but a rainforest has properties no single species possesses.

And here is the critical insight: these emergent possibilities are entirely dependent on the systems beneath them continuing to function. Life cannot exist without the physical conditions that support it. A rainforest cannot exist without the soil, the water cycles, the atmospheric conditions, the thousands of species interactions that sustain it.

You cannot plant a rainforest. It can only exist when the preconditions across physical, life, and ecological systems align. And if those preconditions are disrupted, the rainforest doesn’t just decline — it collapses. And you can’t simply bring it back.

I wrote about this years ago in a piece exploring a systems-centered creation story, and it was reimagined in Episode 2, Life Breathes. What Said’s work helped me see is how this logic applies to cultural evolution.

Here’s the move: human cultures are emergent phenomena, just like rainforests. They arise when certain conditions are met — when the underlying harmonics of social life are functioning well enough to support the emergence of more complex forms of organization. And just like rainforests, when cultures nurture only their most complex, most emergent expressions while neglecting the foundational cycles they depend upon, they set up the conditions for their own collapse.

This is where the frame of emergence does something “development” alone cannot. Development tells us to keep climbing. Emergence tells us that the higher you go, the more you need to understand, tend to, and attune to what’s beneath you.

Three Cultural Harmonics — A Hypothesis

With this shift from stages to cycles, from development to emergence, the six “stages” of what Said calls First Sapiens can be reframed as three polarities — three harmonics in dynamic tension. I offer these as a hypothesis, a starting point for dialogue and refinement, not a settled framework.

Kinship: the harmonic between individual survival and belonging. The breath between self-preservation and connection to others. Every culture must navigate this. Without individual survival instincts, we perish. Without bonds of belonging, we’re alone and vulnerable. The health of a culture depends on how well it holds this tension — not resolving it, but breathing with it.

Governance: the harmonic between dynamic leadership and stable institutions. The breath between the energy of individuals who step forward to lead and the structures that organize collective life across time. Too much of either and the system breaks — either into chaos or rigidity.

Stewardship: the harmonic between innovative creativity and collective care. The breath between the Promethean fire of human ingenuity and the responsibility to tend to the whole. Between the drive to create, build, and transform — and the wisdom to ask: does this serve life?

Each of these harmonics, when held in healthy tension, creates the conditions for the next to emerge. Kinship creates the foundation for Governance. Governance creates the foundation for Stewardship. And all three together create the conditions for something beyond them.

I want to name clearly: these three are a hypothesis about common functions that healthy cultures need. Whether these are exactly the right three, whether there are others, whether they should be carved differently — this is precisely the kind of question I hope can be explored through continued dialogue. Said and I have been exchanging ideas about this, and he’s been encouraging. But I’d love to see a broader conversation — perhaps even something like a humanity-wide science of cultural evolution — that examines what functional harmonics cultures need to be healthy, particularly including perspectives from non-Western traditions so we don’t fall into the old trap of Orientalism. What does a culture need to keep breathing?

Two Songs — Promethean and Gaian

This is where Said’s work opened something profound for me, particularly as he described it in this interview.

There’s another dimension beyond the three cultural harmonics. It’s not a higher stage. It’s not more emergence. It’s a different song.

Said grounds his framework in mythology: Prometheus and Gaia. Prometheus represents human ingenuity — the fire we stole from the gods, the forethought that gave us science, technology, modernity. Gaia represents the intelligence of Earth herself — 3.5 billion years of evolutionary wisdom encoded in every ecosystem, every organism, every cycle of water and carbon and nitrogen and breath.

In the framing I’ve been developing, the three cultural harmonics — Kinship, Governance, Stewardship — are all expressions of the Promethean song. They’re the harmonics of human social reality. They’re our anthrophony — the sounds we make, the cultures we construct, the shared meanings we create through our remarkable cognitive and social capacities.

But beneath all of this — always, always beneath it — is the Gaian song. The biophony. The harmonics of physical systems, life systems, and ecosystems that were playing for billions of years before humans arrived, and that must continue playing for any of our cultural creations to exist.

This brought me to the work of Bernie Krause, the soundscape ecologist. In a TED Talk I’ll link in the show notes, Krause distinguishes between the anthrophony — the sounds humans make — and the biophony — the soundscape of nature, the living world’s own music.

He tells a story that haunts me. At Mono Lake in California, thousands of spadefoot toads gather each spring to vocalize in synchronized choruses. They sing together, in pulsating synchronicity, as protection — when they’re all singing as one, predators can’t pick off individuals.

But U.S. Navy jets train over Mono Lake. And when a jet screams overhead, the chorus breaks. The toads fall out of sync. It takes them 45 minutes to regain their synchronicity. And during that time, Krause watched as coyotes and owls moved in and picked off the vulnerable ones.

The anthrophony — our Promethean noise — literally disrupted the biophony. It broke the song that kept them alive.

We’ve been like those jets. Flying over the living world, drowning out its music with our own noise, often without even knowing the music was there.

And here’s what’s both tragic and tender: in a follow-up interview on the TED Radio Hour, Krause described how humanity fell in love with our own voices — particularly once we created cathedrals. In those spaces, we’re enveloped in human-created, Promethean beauty. And as someone who loves singing in cathedrals and has had transcendent experiences there, I feel that. Our voices are beautiful.

But we fell so in love with our own song that we stopped hearing the larger song we’re part of. Matt Biggar, in my earlier conversation with him, put it this way: we’re now better at recognizing corporate logos than the native plants and species that share our place.

We built ever more complex and beautiful Promethean harmonics — and each layer drew our attention further up and further away from the Gaian harmonics that make all of it possible. The more emergent our cultures became, the more we needed to connect deeply to the foundations. And instead, we forgot them.

This is why collapse is predictable — not mysterious, not inevitable, but the natural consequence of cultures that stop listening to all the harmonics they depend upon.

Indigenous Cultures as Gaian-Attuned

This is where I want to make a speculative but important move.

What if Indigenous cultures — particularly those rooted in what Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvaez call the Kinship Worldview — aren’t “earlier stages” of development, as some frameworks unfortunately imply?

Within the frame of emergence, here’s what I think we can see: these are cultures that may have developed all three harmonics — Kinship, Governance, Stewardship — but whose Promethean song was always nested within, and responsive to, the Gaian song. Their anthrophony was part of the larger music, not drowning it out.

Their human ingenuity — their technologies, their innovations, their social structures — were oriented by deep, sustained attunement to the living systems they were part of. The mutualisms that Rob Dunn described in my conversation with him, the deep reciprocal relationships that Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about so beautifully — these aren’t primitive practices from an earlier stage. They’re expressions of cultures that never forgot the foundational harmonics.

If that’s true, then Indigenous knowledge systems aren’t just “nice to include” in our conversations about the future. They may be precisely where we find models for what healthy cultural attunement looks like — cultures that kept listening to all the harmonics, cultures that held forms embodying not only kinship between humans but kinship with the living Earth.

This has been an underlying thread throughout Negotiating Reality. Said’s framework, combined with this shift from linearity to cycles as the foundation, helps make explicit why this matters so deeply.

The Water We Swim In and Learning to Listen

So if the path forward involves reattunement — learning to hear and tend all the harmonics, from the Gaian foundations through the Promethean expressions — then there are two complementary callings. One cultural. One individual.

The cultural calling is about changing the water we swim in.

David Foster Wallace opened his famous commencement address with a joke: two young fish are swimming along, and an older fish swims by and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish look at each other and say, “What the hell is water?”

The water is the anthrophony. It’s the Promethean song that’s so pervasive, so constant, so loud, so deeply woven into our shared social reality that we don’t even notice it. It’s the concepts, the stories, the unexamined assumptions about progress and development and upward and more. It shapes what we pay attention to and what we don’t. And right now, for much of the modern world, that water — that song — is drowning out the Gaian music we desperately need to hear and attune to.

Changing the water means collectively shifting which harmonics our cultures are attuned to. And the fastest on-ramp may be exactly what Matt Biggar names: connect to place. The same wisdom Indigenous peoples have practiced for generations. Let go of the abstractions that have separated us from life, from relationship, from the living world. Stop being jets. Start listening to the synchronized frogs.

But there’s a second calling — an individual one — that’s equally essential.

This is about nurturing each person’s capacity to distinguish the cultural water from their own inner harmonics. To hear the difference between what the culture is singing and what your own conscience knows.

Here, the metaphor of the symphony returns in a different way. If cultural evolution is about the emergence and attunement of shared harmonics — the social realities that shape how a culture breathes — then individual growth is about something related but distinct. It’s about learning to listen to the symphony with discernment. Developing the capacity to hear each section — the Gaian harmonics, the Kinship harmonics, the Governance harmonics, the Stewardship harmonics, and the transcendent harmonics — and to notice when one is being drowned out. To cultivate a kind of inner ear for what is true, what is healthy, what serves life, even and particularly when the cultural water is pulling in a different direction, inviting us to fall in love with our own voices.

This is what John Kesler’s Integral Polarity Practice cultivates — an attunement to the transcendent that can anchor us when the cultural song around us is dissonant. It’s what contemplative traditions across the world have always pointed toward: the nurturing of conscience, of discernment, of the capacity to hear harmonics attuned to the transcendent, especially when the culture isn’t yet attuned to those deeper harmonics. Learning to attune, in each moment, to walking in sacred beauty — as John says — and cultivating the capacity to live into life, love, and light.

These two callings — the cultural and the individual — are mutually reinforcing. The more individuals develop discernment, the more they can contribute to shifting the cultural song. And the more the cultural song shifts toward attunement, the easier it becomes for individuals to hear what matters.

An Invitation to Breathe

So let me end where I began. With breath.

Breathe in. Feel the oxygen. The life force given to you by our brethren plants. Feel how it nurtures our Promethean fire — our capacity for building, creating, transforming.

And breathe out. Feel the release. The letting go. Our offering of carbon dioxide to our plant brethren — closing the cycle we are held in, as one, together.

This is the pattern. This is the fractal. Individual survival and belonging — breath. Dynamic leadership and stable institutions — breath. Creative genius and collective care — breath. Promethean cultural songs and Gaian synchronicity — breath.

We’ve been holding our breath for a long time. Breathing in, in, in. Accumulating. Growing. Expanding. Hoarding. And now we’re gasping.

The invitation is simple, and probably impossibly hard: let go of the need to keep expanding.

And maybe, as a first step, just... listen. Listen to the harmonics within yourself. Listen for the difference between the cultural song and what your conscience knows to be true. Listen for the biophony underneath the anthrophony. Listen for Gaia’s song, which has been playing for 3.5 billion years, waiting for us to remember we’re part of it.

If any of this resonates, please explore Said’s book, Second Sapiens. There was so much we didn’t cover — his analysis of economics and degrowth, his mapping of healthy and unhealthy expressions, his examination of AI. Check the show notes for all references.

And as always, I offer these reflections not as answers but as invitations. This is a hypothesis being developed in dialogue. If I’ve extended the synthesis too far, I genuinely want to know. That’s what this is about — negotiating reality together, finding our way forward together.

Thank you for listening.

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, it’s like, oh, we want more of this. They were able to integrate it into Parisians’ lives enough that this is good, we want it to continue.

Eric: That’s great, and it sort of feels reminiscent of your title for your book, right? Connected to Place. It sounds like there were enough people connected to this place and this sort of vision of what their place could become that they are supporting it. That’s helpful. And I definitely want to get into the, okay, then how the heck do we learn about this in the U.S.? Because it seems like we’re in such a weird, different place. But we’ll get to all that.

The Crisis of Disconnection

Eric: Continuing with this, a key thing that I’ve been exploring in this podcast is the ways in which we’ve been disconnected. I frame it as our civic, spiritual, and natural processes that tether us to reality are breaking down, and we’re trying to figure out how to bring them back together. You flagged, particularly, an alienation from nature. You flag how we spend 87% of our lives in buildings, 5% in cars, and only 8% outdoors. It’s really depressing, honestly, to read it and to hear it. So unpack that a little bit more. How did you come to that recognition? What does that mean for you as you think about taking part in helping us to better connect to these things and grow into the future together?

Matt: Sure. Yeah, and I know you explored in some of your work in other episodes that this is a very small blip of human history. So much has transformed. Those statistics you just threw out—not that long ago, in the arc of human history, were the total reverse. Almost all the time was outdoors. I’m not going to say that some of this change hasn’t been beneficial to humans in terms of our health and stability and so forth, but it’s come at a huge cost. I think that trying to draw lines between this disconnectedness and the bigger crisis we face is a part of this book and a part of the work.

I think there are many links to it. There’s just a ton of parallel developments that have happened here. On one level, we are facing these very serious interrelated crises: climate, of course, biodiversity loss, and then on the social side, economic side, the widening economic inequality, the widening social division that’s been so politically exploited, especially in our country. At the same time, people are not doing well. There’s just study after study of anxiety and stress and depression and this decline of well-being.

I hope part of this is just a change in consciousness. Like, what are we doing here? How have we constructed society in such a way that it’s doing this? I think when it just comes down to it, our bodies and minds ultimately can tell us a lot about how to get out of this. It is something I think we all experience to one extent or another, this disconnectedness to nature in daily life. There was just so much documentation about how that’s changed. There was a recent big study that tried to document that human connection to nature is down 60% over the course of the last 200 years.

Disconnection from community—Bowling Alone was a real seminal work by Robert Putnam 25 years ago, and it talked about the decline of civic life. Bowling leagues, church and community centers, just activities—this has been a real retreat from in-person community.

I’d also add a couple other layers of it that I think then start to speak more directly to the crises: separation from people of different lived experience, how much residential segregation has taken place, communities with very different resources, and this lack of understanding. When communities are exclusive and people aren’t intersecting in daily life—if you’re not riding the bus or you’re not getting out in public space, even if your community is not super diverse, there’s still a lot of diversity there.

And then the final piece is all the things that we bring into our lives—some of them are very much needs, some of them are more wants, but it’s certainly food, energy, and consumer goods. The fact that we have this global economy and it’s really hard to know the nature, the people, the communities that made it possible for you to have these things. All these things come at a big cost to the environment in terms of emissions and resource use.

The disconnectedness is very much related to these crises in the ways I’ve talked about, but even at a deeper level: I like to think of, we love and protect what we know. We love and protect our family and our friends because we’re with them, we know them. That’s not the case as much anymore with nature, with in-person community, with our food. So this connection that we need to bring back into our lives is our way out of these crises, in my view.

Eric: Yeah, I love that phrase: we love and protect what we know. So it sounds like a key thing you’re inviting us is how do we start to rekindle and connect with all those relationships that matter?

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. What’s happened is there’s either all these other pulling forces that have pulled us away from those connections in our daily life that we can talk about. But there’s also the exclusion of things from our places that has happened. If you have... we’re no longer producing much food close by, so we’re excluded from that. But it’s also on the social front, where the whole nature of all the history of redlining and zoning says this community’s only... we’re excluding human diversity from this community to our detriment. So there’s less in our places that is diverse and sustaining and what we need.

Diversity, Relationality, and Capitalism

Eric: Maybe linking this a little bit—I know a key area that you particularly put your finger on is the influence of corporate capitalism. I want to come back to that, but I want to also just play with this a little bit. The more we’re talking, the more I’m hearing other conversations I’ve had in this space, and I want to bring some of that wisdom into here.

I can hear how important diversity is to you, and also to place. I’m thinking about Rob Dunn, and when I was interviewing him and building on his books as an ecologist. In one of his key books, he talks about the critical importance of diversity to create a stable ecosystem and ecology. Healthy evolution requires a certain degree of diversity and resonance and all these different beings living together in a healthy, mutualistic relationship, which was a key part of his second book, Never Home Alone.

I’m hearing a lot of that articulated here. And in contrast, something that’s coming to my mind as I’m hearing us talk out loud—let me know if this resonates or not, I’m just trying to play connection, but it doesn’t mean it is connected, it’s more playful space. I’m also now thinking about what I was hearing from Marsha Bjornerud as a geoscientist. One of the key things she brought up is Newtonian thinking versus Darwinian thinking. What she was saying was not really Newton or Darwin, but more exemplars of people showing up with a different style of how you know things—coming back to you love what you know, right?

She was very much framing a Newtonian form of science, which tends to be reductivism. You’re looking for those Platonic ideals, these idealized and perfect forms—ultimately, everything is to try to cut out all the variants until you find that ideal form. Versus Darwinian thinking, which is all about honoring people, place, time, and in particular, having that long time trajectory. Her book was called Timefulness, all about how do you actually connect deeply with people, place, and time and actually be guided by that? It draws you into this relationality.

As I’m hearing you talk, what I’m wondering is, is there something here where it’s almost like we have these wonderful ideals that we’ve set up, but we’ve almost idealized them so much that we’ve turned them into weird, transactional things that tear us apart? Because it doesn’t allow us to actually have that—well, we’re living beings, we’re in relationship, we need to be constantly negotiating with each other, flowing, all that complexity, but we don’t know how to do that. We have everything now functionally outsourced to some other place, some other corporation, some other group. Most of the things that we’re reliant upon have been kind of idealized into these corporate structures. Do you feel like some of that wisdom from geoscience and ecology is valuable to bring into this conversation as we think about connecting to place?

Matt: It’s interesting to hear all that, and if I understood it correctly, definitely the Darwinian side is this connection to place, people, and our interconnectedness that, to me, that’s my orientation. And I don’t think you can possibly be place-based without an orientation of relationality.

I would say that capitalism—I will speak out loud, and people have different reactions to the word capitalism—but capitalism, in my view, is driven by a profit motive. It’s going to disregard the planet, disregard humans, because it’s all about making money for the people at the top of these organizations and the shareholders.

The whole corporate structure that we live within is designed to concentrate wealth. It’s designed to not care about the places where that wealth is extracted from. Most of the American public does not see it that way. There’s not widespread consciousness about the extent to which we’re all kind of pawns in this game.

I think we need more of a consciousness shift, not necessarily to think of ourselves as pawns, but to recognize we’re participants in an addictive system. I mean, that’s what I think capitalism is. It’s an addiction system, and we’ve all got to overcome that a little bit. I struggle with it greatly. I make plenty of consumer purchases I don’t need to make.

It’s very difficult because so much of it is like drinking salt water. You drink more, you get thirstier. It’s not satisfying us. If you think about, just in our lifetimes—and I’m older than you—but just the extent to which our material abundance has grown. Has our happiness grown?

Eric: No.

Matt: We’re more depressed, we’re more anxious.

Eric: Totally.

Matt: So I would say a lot of this is we’re not getting that loving connection that we need. I hold strong compassion for us, how hard this can be. A lot of it is just to raise the level of awareness. This is why these discussions like this are so important. I will also say, on a practical level, I will not tell anybody that the way to live connected to place is to go off the grid and, you know, completely get out of capitalism. That’s not practical for folks. But I do think we can all take steps to live more connected to place, and that’s personally meaningful.

There’s lots of data on how connecting to nature, connecting to community is really healthy for us. I mean, just time in nature in particular is really healthy. Knowing people who don’t look like you, think like you, that’s healthy. Encouragement and support to move in that direction is so much needed.

It does require personal change. We’re part of systems, so I do want to explain how simple living connected to place can be, and then we’ll get into deeper layers of its complexity.

Practical Steps to Connect to Place

Matt: It’s sitting on your front porch, just making time to do that. If you have something like that, or just going out in the front of your house. Maybe you have—even if you’re in an apartment—you can grow some vegetables, or if you have a backyard or a front yard, these are ways to just start connecting to what’s out with you and reducing the use of that time, increasing that 8% outdoor time a little bit. But then, how our time gets sucked into other things so much with the constraints we talked about.

A lot of folks are going to be in car-dependent communities. It’s not going to be easy to get around without a car at all. But that just goes to simple things like trip chaining, where you’re a little more thoughtful about your car trips. As opposed to running out for this one time or that time, let me combine my trips into one trip as much as I can. I know it’s a bigger challenge with families. I’ve raised kids, it’s not all easy, but there’s something that we can all do there.

And social media—I picked this up from other podcast hosts recently—he basically said, I love this phrase: get in and get out. Just go in with, like, alright, I know I want to see a couple things, and then I’m going to get out. Easier said than done. But these are kind of just the ways to start to think about what is my relationship to place and how am I being pulled away from it? How can I grow it?

One of the challenges—I think it does relate to some of the other speakers too—is there’s a knowledge piece to this. We can challenge ourselves to learn something more about our place that we don’t already know. For me, a lot of times it comes down to what are native plants? What’s the native vegetation? What was grown here for millennia before we’ve changed a lot of it? How can I recognize native plants as much as I recognize corporate logos? That would be a huge change for a lot of us. I’m still working on that. I’m not there, but I try to get there.

One other thing I want to add to it as a way to enter into place-based thinking is our identities. Really think about what’s going on in our country right now. Certainly in the headlines, in the news, it’s so much political identity. Clearly, it’s Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals, far-right, far-left, all these things that people’s identity is becoming based on. Let’s work towards a place-based identity, because that goes back to reality, what we’re talking about. Who we are—we are people of place. We are people of a place.

You can look at your neighborhood, your city, your region. There’s so many ways to start to identify yourself in those ways. If you decide, I’m really just a resident of this neighborhood, that is the center of what I am, well then, if you can free up some time—less tech time, less car time—maybe you can spend a little bit of time doing something in your neighborhood that would be very rewarding and would really nourish you, as well as nourish your community.

Living connected to place is not about sacrifice. In behavioral science, I recognize fully from my dissertation I did years ago that it’s self-interest. If we’re asking people to change how they live, which is what this is, it has to align with self-interest. I feel connected to place does, because it’s where we’re living in line with nature more.

Personal Stories of Connection

Eric: I appreciate that. I appreciate you also bringing up that invitation to know. It’s always bothered me—so I have a house, and I have my backyard, and going up, I have a hill behind my house. I’m literally looking at it right now. I know enough to know that almost everything on that hill is an invasive species. It kind of pains me. I actually went to someone who does indigenous gardening to replant the whole thing. When we brought him out, he said, “I’d have to tear out this entire thing and start fresh to get the mycelial network growing properly and stuff, because otherwise all these invasive species will just kill the native plants.” But he’s like, it’s possible, but it’ll cost you $75,000.

Matt: Wow.

Eric: That’s a big one. But honestly, it’s something that’s in my heart. If I had that amount of money, it’s one of the things I would spend my money on more so than a lot of other things. I want to feel a connection. Honestly, I look at this hill and I dream weird thoughts. One is redesigning it to be a bit like Torrey Pines, because that’s our native plants and flora and fauna of where I live.

But then I started thinking, well, we actually always have all this mist, so I started looking into mist collectors so I could actually get water, because that would be a critical part. Torrey Pines is on the ocean, we’re sort of a little bit off the ocean. Then I started thinking, well, actually, it’s a hill. I could actually start thinking about water collections and then actually using this functionally as a battery source to start to get energy. When I have solar on my house, I can pump the water up to the top, and then at night, I can let it run down and have a turbine function with it.

I’m kind of bringing this up as a bit of a playful example, but I’m curious, like, is this kind of in the spirit of what you’re getting at, connecting to place?

Matt: Absolutely. Oh, it’s a wonderful example, I love it, and I love how you thought about it. I feel like you’re going to make progress on that over time. It could just be starting with a small plot and then going from there. It sounds like there’s a passion there, and it is the nourishment that you get from it.

It doesn’t have to be there, maybe it’s some other place. For example, I happen to live really blessed to be here in San Francisco, and I have a very large hill behind us. It’s like 900 feet high, we’re close to sea level. It’s called Twin Peaks. It’s a popular tourist destination in San Francisco. What I love about it is they have been doing tons of native plant restoration. This is public land, so the government has found resources to do it. There’s an effort to really bring in Indigenous voices into it and to start to rediscover some of the history of Twin Peaks. It’s speculated that it was kind of like a hunting lookout space for the Ohlone, but there’s not a lot known. There’s a road that was built across it, and now half of that road is open to people and closed to cars. There’s this revitalization happening there that’s really beautiful.

Having to do it as an individual is kind of overwhelming. But the bottom line is it’s almost like a spiritual connection to the place there. That’s what I feel like on Twin Peaks, so I get to bike up there. I call it my spiritual center. Something that just pulls me there. It’s an amazing—I mean, I’m blessed, again, to have it, but I think that exists everywhere we are, there’s that connection that can pull us in.

Eric: Yeah, maybe just to come back to that. You’re exactly right, there actually is an association that I’m a member of called Friends of Rose Canyon. Every year, my son and my wife and I, we go and we rip out all of the mustard seeds and all these other weird—honestly, they look kind of beautiful, they’re like these interesting radish flowers. They honestly look nice, but they’re totally invasive, and they kill everything, so we’re ripping all these things out and planting all things appropriate, particularly starting with live oaks as sort of an anchor species.

It’s really been great to see over the years we’ve lived here, because it was originally just all mustard, these big yellow flowers. And now you can start to see the original, the native and indigenous landscape starting to come back, but it’s been taking years upon years. Every year, we just go out, we rip out a certain section, we plant something else. And I love that you named that as a spiritual praxis, because that is very much my experience.

I’m lucky enough to have Rose Canyon and then San Clemente Canyon, and I basically go on a run a few times a week in these canyons. One of my favorite places to go is very much a spiritual spot. It’s this beautiful old oak. I honestly have no idea how old this tree is—at least 100, 200 years old. It is just an amazingly huge tree. Every time I run by it, I stop and I pause and I give a prayer. My son and I affectionately call it Fangorn, from Lord of the Rings.

The Story of Oaks: Culture and Connection

Eric: Obviously I’m feeling you on the place space thing, but I just wanted to play and bring it to life a bit. It sounds like a key part of that is not just that practicality of place, but really that spiritual connection to space—seeing the life around us as sacred and therefore treating it as such. Am I overgeneralizing or overextending that?

Matt: Oh, no, no, I think it gets into this change of consciousness that is, again, society’s pulling us so much in a different direction right now. You are doing it in so many ways. I like to tell folks, living connected to the place is something a lot of us practice in some ways. It’s just not possible to do it as much as maybe we need to. The participation with that canyon restoration sounds awesome, and this connection to what’s there. It’s a constant journey for myself. I don’t pretend to be doing it all the time, but definitely gravitating in those directions is wonderful.

You brought up the oak trees, which I think does get back to larger society things because it connected me to a story I read and I referenced in my book around restoration of oaks in Silicon Valley. We’re in different parts of California, but not so much in San Francisco, but down on the peninsula, there’s a lot of native oaks everywhere. There’s a lot of invasive eucalyptus trees that have been planted in the peninsula, and they’re starting to die, probably in San Diego, too.

Eric: That’s what’s on my hill! The eucalyptus—I see them dying off.

Matt: So, interestingly, this woman I profiled in the book, her name is Cindy Roessler, and she worked for Acterra, which is a conservation organization. She was starting to have this conversation with more folks about oak restoration because you have this great opportunity: eucalyptus are dying, we have a chance to replace it with oaks. But on one level, it’s technical, which is restoration. But she was very clear, like, we need to invite a lot more people into understanding and appreciating oaks.

So she did this whole campaign called Know Your Oaks. It started with all these different factoids and stories about oaks. It was just talking about the history and sharing information about them. So just increasing that awareness. But it took it to another level. She introduced an idea of a County Oak Ambassador program and started getting volunteers. She ultimately had several thousand volunteers, I believe. Maybe thousands is an exaggeration, but hundreds at the very least. These are folks that she could then call on and say, “Hey, can you help with an event? Can you help spread the word?”

She went about this in this integrated way, and it’s very much about place-based identity and changing culture. But she didn’t stop at that level. She then went out and was talking to city councils around the Bay Area, ultimately getting engaged with counties, and working with them. We need to think about oaks as we’re thinking about land use change and how we’re developing and planning for the future. This is a regional asset that needs to be preserved and expanded.

It was a systems-level approach that was personal, social, and political. To me, it’s a beautiful, beautiful example. It just came to mind with Twin Peaks and Rose Canyon.

Eric: That’s great. I love that story because it really does flesh it out. I want to come back to some of the systemic stuff in just a moment. I’d love to maybe pull in two more examples that I know you brought up. You brought up the Detroit work, and you’ve brought up this idea of creating networks.

Detroit: Food Sovereignty as Systems Change

Eric: Maybe start with Detroit. I’d love you to tell us more about what you were playing with. What were they doing and what’s working and how are they changing systems?

Matt: Yes, definitely. There’s two nonprofits. One is called the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. The other is called Keep Growing Detroit, and they’ve been around for about 20 years. They have overlapping missions, but in different ways. They’ve got different structures and they’re both doing amazing work. They’ve really collaborated very powerfully for 20 years, which is pretty rare. Usually, collaborations kind of fall apart.

Eric: That’s really cool.

Matt: But they’ve got, again, a common vision, which is to create—I’m probably going to state this incorrectly, but I want to say it from memory—a food sovereign Black Detroit that has total control over their fruits and vegetable needs. Just imagine Detroit as a city producing all its own fruits and vegetables. That is the long-term vision, and having it be very much Black-owned and operated, given Detroit’s history and population. So just that mission, that vision is very clear, very powerful, and very unifying.

Then they work—Keep Growing Detroit has supported 1,700 gardens over the years. They give out seeds and plants and support. The other organization, the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, has created a seven-acre urban farm that has been incredibly productive. I mean, you think, wow, you can do a lot on seven acres. I was amazed. They have hoop houses, which are basically greenhouses but not quite as expensive, so they get more use out of them.

But then they also got political around issues. There were property taxes levied on gardens, and they organized and got those removed. So they’ve been pulling at political levers as well. It’s not just the personal work of people growing food in their backyards or in a community garden. It’s political, policy advocacy. Then you get into the cultural piece. These are creating pride in African Americans in Detroit to sort of reclaim their heritage, their connection to land. They bring in African American history around land, and how that was taken away from them and needs to be reclaimed.

Cultural, social, political, personal—you got all these dimensions that are working, and that’s systems change.

The Power of Networks and Collaboration

Eric: That’s really helpful. Maybe I play in just a slightly different framework, and I’m curious if this resonates at all. I’ve been playing in sort of this civic, spiritual, and natural patterns. I can hear the civic in there a lot, for sure. I can hear the natural—that’s pretty obvious. Then I can hear the spiritual in terms of that identity-rooted reclaiming of heritage.

It’s this recognition of the ways in which the Africans, prior to going into slavery, were connected to land, and then that was ripped from them, and they were literally made to function as part of machines rather than as human beings. All of that erasure has happened, and now you’re seeing the re-emerging, the reclaiming of that by leaning into, okay, let’s connect back to the land. Is that part of what’s happening?

Matt: Oh, yeah. What you just articulated was really great. I think when the civic, spiritual, and natural overlap—and I would say a fourth layer is just you personally in it, how it makes you personally feel—when those things are all aligned, that’s the power. I think that’s what’s happening in Detroit. That’s what’s happening in Paris. It’s civic, spiritual, natural, and personal.

Eric: That’s beautiful.

Matt: I want to be clear, I didn’t do the Detroit work. I’m reporting it. I know the folks who are, and I’ve talked to them. They don’t actually get into spiritual. I’m sort of inferring that that’s part of this.

Eric: That makes sense. Maybe part of the reason why I brought that up is because I’m trying to flag, okay, there’s probably a very different way, right? You’re orienting with your systems change levers—shifting power, resetting culture, transforming land use, and leveraging interconnected systems. There’s a very different way that I’ve been trying to talk through civic, spiritual, and natural, orienting to that frame. But I do think there’s a potential high degree of overlap. Does that seem to resonate here in your work? If this is the how, well, how do we actually do that in real-world context?

Matt: Yes. We really do need a lot of people with what we call a network mindset. These might be the most important people as we talk about this work—those who can start to see the different things that are taking place, the different organizations, the different initiatives, and bring them together.

The Four Systems Change Levers

Eric: Let’s lean into the four system change levers you brought up: shifting power, transforming land use, resetting culture, leveraging systems together. This is the “what,” so to speak. And then the “how” that I was hearing you pick up were what you called catalysts: collaboration, systems-oriented governance or government model, place-based education, and then personal change. Let’s start right where you just brought up with a very concrete example in San Francisco.

There’s a lot of folks who are showing up in good faith, goodwill, good intention, and want to collaborate, and yet we don’t. Help us understand how these catalysts work in real-world context.

Matt: Yeah, for sure. I do want to talk about the systems change catalysts because it’s tricky. We talked about the vision, which is really important—what are we trying to do? The vision of increasing the quality and quantity of connection in people’s lives to me is a very unifying vision. It’s not climate action, it’s not social justice. Those are things I believe in very strongly, but they don’t necessarily build the big tent that we need. I think we gotta hold that there, and that can also inform collaboration because it may then lead to inviting more people to the table with diverse perspectives that can build something bigger.

The “what” of systems change is the levers. When we talk about systems change, what do we mean? That’s a big reason I wrote this book—to demystify systems change. There’s lots of great systems literature, but it’s really hard to apply to existing projects and initiatives. I tested this out. I’ve worked with several groups. I’ve learned so much from them, and that’s how this framework came from both the research that I’ve done on the initiatives, but also this real life. We’re trying to work on a one-year project to increase safe routes to school. How do we use systems change levers?

In that particular project and most of the projects I work on, the first of the four—the systems change catalysts, the “how”—who’s pulling the levers? How do we pull the levers? That’s strategic collaboration. The other ones, as you’ve referenced, are systems-oriented government, place-based education in multiple ways, and then we’re back to personal change.

If we’re going to have systems change, if we really are going to sink into it, we’ve got to have that direction, we’ve got to have the four levers working, and we’ve got to have the four catalysts pulling those levers.

The Art of Strategic Collaboration

Matt: Strategic collaboration is very challenging. I’ve been doing it for years, and I’m in a new alliance right now, and it’s still very challenging to get really well-intentioned people to work together on something and to do it in a way that feels like we’re getting productive. That’s why I’ve written a chapter and done other stuff on what is effective collaboration. Almost the universal experience of collaboration is kind of negative. Some people come into the room like, oh gosh, especially if you’re talking about community leaders, institutional leaders, we’ve been on so many different things. Most of it just doesn’t lead anywhere. Particularly at the community level, there’s a feeling of their voice being invited into conversations again and again, and yet nothing really happening, no change really happening.

I’ll just highlight—you wrote a book, so obviously this is an invitation for folks to engage more deeply in your work. But the more you can help folks make it concrete, tell us from your real-life examples: when did a collaboration work? When does it fall apart? What works and what doesn’t work with collaboration for this type of systems change?

Eric: Absolutely. Yeah.

Matt: I think there’s three categories that are helpful. Definitely focus on relationships. When you say what leads to things falling apart, it’s almost always relationships. There’s a break in trust, there’s a break in value for each other.

The second piece is a common agenda. Just like we talked about overall systems change, having a direction that people really believe in and they want to put themselves and their organization into. I like to work mostly at the organizational level. When people come to the table, I really like to be very intentional: you’re not here just as an individual, you’re here as someone who can go back to an organization and bring this back to your organization. Then your organization will keep taking things back here. Instantly, we’re making it bigger by centering—we’re not saying organizations are just here to talk, we’re actually here to do something together.

That requires a common agenda that people feel really good about. That’s the vision piece, but it’s also a commitment to an approach. What I’m arguing is the systems change approach. That’s what I’ve been doing with the groups over at least the last few years: let’s talk about how this group, how we can shift power, how we can reset culture, how we can transform land use—which is often going to be a lot through government influence. Obviously, the breaking down of silos is a big one, and it’s resonated in a lot of different ways.

So we’ve got the relationships and the common agenda, which is both the vision and an approach that we agree to. If we can get those foundations right, wow, the sky’s the limit. That’s a strong foundation. It usually takes a series of meetings. For example, the Streets Alliance that I’ve been helping work on in San Francisco, we’ve been meeting for eight months. It’s just two or three hours a month, but that’s what we’ve been building.

Now, the challenge—and you get a lot of different opinions on this—is how we got to focus on implementation and adaptation. There’s components in that around alignment, around shared accountability, and around kind of our joint governance. I’m one who’s not terribly patient. I love doing research when I did it, but I’m too impatient for it. I have so much gratitude for all the wonderful academics that I know. When people are getting impatient, I’m particularly sensitive to that. Let’s do it. Let’s do something.

But there’s a tension between planning and action that has to be there. You’ve got to lean into the implementation early on in small ways, but make sure you’re setting up a really good process for that to happen.

I will drill down on relationships just a little bit more, because without that, the whole thing falls apart.

Eric: It was. I can hear how this is coming all the way back to the beginning. If you don’t actually live in right relationship, it’s very hard for these things to go. That’s where the externalities come—that’s where, coming all the way back to your diagnosis, that externality is basically a lack of relation. Yes, let’s lean into the relationship more.

The Science of Relationships and Trust

Matt: Great. Yeah, I think this can be really interesting because I’m going to explain the network science behind relationships. It makes me think about where is nature guiding these things? I think it is, but I haven’t thought as much about that.

Eric: Let’s come back to that, particularly—we’ll come into Rob Dunn’s orientations around mutualisms. I think that might be a fun place to start exploring, but we can come to that after we’ve been here with this relational part for your side and the network structure. So tell us about it.

Matt: Yeah, so I referenced trust and value in relationships. There’s an organization called Visible Network Labs that has presented a framework that I’ve found very useful. They’re a network science organization, and they essentially delineate three factors that build trust among organizations and individuals and three factors that build value. When trust is high and value is high, they actually have surveys. I’ve dealt with some collaboratives, we’ve measured this, which is really interesting. I’m hoping someday to have more funding to do this in a lot more depth with some collaboratives that are ready for it.

The three factors of trust: one is mission congruence. That sounds jargony, but it basically means we’re in this room because we believe we have the same mission. When do these things fall apart? It’s when a couple people are in the room because they have a different mission, and they’re kind of there to keep an eye on it. They’re not really there to roll up their sleeves and help build this.

The second trust factor is competency. Do I trust you because you’re actually good at this? Because you’re invested in it? You’ve demonstrated that you’re here to be working on this. And how you show up—are you showing up with energy? Are you showing up with presence? That builds trust or breaks trust.

The third one that I found really interesting—it’s called presumed innocence. It’s this idea that you’re going to assume the best of me, even if I might do something or say something that might rub you wrong or you’re not fully supportive of. But you’re going to be like, oh, Matt’s doing his best, he’s trying. I’m going to assume that. I think when we come into a group, we need to actually speak to those norms: we’re going to assume that everyone’s here in good faith. That doesn’t mean I can’t call Matt out on some stuff, but it means I’m going to assume he’s got a good heart.

Then there’s the three value factors. One is shared activities. Are there things that we’re doing together that we’re finding valuable for ourselves, for our organization? That could be things we talk about as issues, problems. It could be opportunities we share together. It’s learning from each other, it’s supporting each other. That’s the value piece.

The second is resource exchange. Are there things we can provide each other with? That’s at the organizational level. Are there connections that we can make? We can share our networks? We can share some sort of more traditional support, like funding or space or access to things.

And the third is called strategic importance. That’s sort of at an existential level. Is this collaboration important to my organization’s mission, important to my personal mission? Or is it just kind of a nice thing to do but not really essential? When it gets to that strategic importance level for a lot of folks in the room, that’s when things actually can work.

I’m very grateful to this Visible Network Labs framework because it really teases this out for me. It’s just in the last couple years I started using this.

Eric: That’s great, that’s super helpful. I can hear some of the overlap with what I was hearing from Staci Haines and her book The Politics of Trauma and the work she does around somatics. Similar logic there of really getting to the sort of, how do you navigate these trust dynamics in group systems? It’s really great work. I’m a huge fan of Staci Haines’ work, so I’ve taken her classes, I’ve read her books, and so it was really good.

Island-Shaped Economics: Nested Systems of Place

Eric: Let’s play, knowing that we’re getting close to the end of time. I’d love to just play with this idea. One of the key things, coming to this podcast, is I’m slowly trying to build out that network logic. That’s partially what I’m trying to do in this space of negotiating reality—try to find those spots where different cultures and different places and different people might be using different words or forms or concepts, but they might have some degree of connectivity. How do we do that translation such that, oh wait, that pattern took this very different form in this human system, but actually we could learn a lot from ecology, or we could learn a lot from nature systems.

I’ve been trying to create those connections to help us really feel on many layers. It’s what you protect what you know. If you know that literally volcanism is required for you to live, maybe you’ll want to love our Mother Earth a little bit more—that kind of orientation is where my head’s been going.

Coming back to this, particularly as I think about what you’re describing in the work of Rob Dunn, which was summarized in Episode 3. I called it “Island Sculpt,” and now I’m changing it to “Island-Shaped” after some peer review from Keith Bezzoli. Basically this idea that we live in these layers of relationality. We are both islands that have beings living within us—microbiome—and we live upon islands: our cities and our bioregional areas and our continents, and then eventually Mother Earth as the largest planet, at least that we’re robustly, relationally living with.

I would love to hear how you played and explored this, heard a little bit of Rob’s interview. What are those spots where you might be starting to notice some parallels and some lessons learned that we might be able to pull from ecology or otherwise?

Matt: Sure, no, it was fascinating. I love that work that he’s done, and I want to learn more about it. Yeah, for sure. There are so many perspectives and language, as you said, to describe what’s going on, but there are these fundamental realities of who we are and being nature.

I find place as a valuable way to make it concrete and as a way to restore things. Indigenous wisdom comes into play a lot, ecology of course, but also economic thriving. So much of the imbalance of wealth and how much concentrated wealth in these multi-billionaires that are living so disconnected from a lot of people who are just struggling to get by. If we have a place-based economy, that could really narrow those things. It’s basically limiting ownership of vast amounts of land by a small number of entities, and not just land, of course—capital and technologies and all the things that make up the economy—and saying, no, we’re going to mostly need to produce this regionally and locally. It’s going to connect us to place, but it’s also going to create so many more ownership opportunities, so many more ways to have a share of the economy, shared prosperity.

I don’t know how you have shared prosperity in a global economy. There are certainly certain things that can be done at the federal level, but I feel like we can really build—not just from the connection to place spiritually, socially, our well-being, but also our financial security, our shared prosperity. To me, place can bring all those things together.

The island piece—I love it in the sense of the economic system parallel too, and how our lives are shaped by it. Just a very quick thought I had about that. I say place, but also connection—those two ideas. There’s concentric circles in an economic system that is truly place-based, which I advocate for in the book and delineate in the book. It goes from the hyper-local to the regional. There’s these concentric circles, or islands, of economics and how we live that are about interdependence, they’re about interactions.

Am I home here, or in my apartment building, whatever it may be? I can have rooftop solar, I can have heat pumps. There’s a whole other conversation, but those are technologies—and a lot of this is technology is not going to help us. Those are technologies that connect us to nature in some really cool ways as we think about it. But it’s also maybe having a small garden, whether it’s on my windowsill in my apartment or it’s in my backyard. Then there’s a homesteading idea that was really one of the silver linings of the pandemic: I’m making my own bread, I’m jarring pickles and other things. There’s that very place-based piece that you can do there.

Then it goes out to the next island, and I think this parallels the neighborhood, where in a place-based system, I’m walking, I’m doing local shopping, community gardens, community solar, libraries, parks, all those things that create this system. It’s not—I say it’s economic, but it’s obviously socio-economic. But I think we need to flow our economic resources in these directions. Economics is what drives so much of everything.

Then at the city level, we get into biking networks, we get into the Detroit urban farms, local manufacturing, local business districts. It’s just the next level out.

And then regional, which I really enjoy talking a lot about because that gets really into the bioregional and the more nature perspective. The parallels to watersheds—what we need in place-based systems are food sheds and energy sheds and making sheds and fiber sheds. That culture and nature interaction that could be so powerful.

The last thing I’ll say is these things are more possible than we’ve been led to believe. The existing sources of power will suggest these are ridiculous—there’s no way you could do it. But there was one study I love to share, and it fits right into this. It was in 2020, a group of Cornell researchers did this very exhaustive study of the potential of agricultural productivity in 378 U.S. metro areas. They found that basically half of them pretty much already had the existing land to produce all the food they need within a 155-mile radius. And then if you shift to more plant-based diets, you actually increase that.

Eric: Wow, yeah.

Matt: Things are possible, and we need to put those stories out there. I’ve kind of gone on a little bit of a tangent here, but I think the islands is a really helpful way to think through this.

Closing the Conversation

Eric: That’s great, and I appreciate it. I know we’re getting to the end of time, so I just want to thank you for playing with those and exploring, and I’m just really grateful for your work and the ways in which you’re trying to invite us to dream differently. To create that different model in line with the Buckminster Fuller quote that you used—that was such a good quote. You need to dream that alternative model such that the old one becomes obsolete.

What I hear you dreaming is: let’s be better connected with each other, better connected with nature, and basically be guided by caring and loving for each other. That seems like a pretty nice thing to be dreaming into existence, and so I’m grateful you’re doing this work.

Maybe as a final question that I tend to like to ask: what are three resources? Could be books, prayers, anything that you’d like to offer to the audience. Beyond, of course, your great book, which I would highly recommend.

Matt: Sure, yeah, so many great writers out there and podcasters like yourself. I’m going to share ones that are in short form, shorter form, they’re not books, because I hope people actually read them or listen to them.

Someone on Substack I’ve come across who I will not miss anything she writes—I’ve even watched her do a video—her name is Rosie Spinks. She has a Substack that’s “What Do We Do Now That We Are Here?” But the specific article I call your attention to actually came out right after Trump’s election in November, and it was about how I became collapse-aware. It sounds dreary, but she talks about living in the two states, and it really resonated with me because I think for those of us who are dreaming, like you as well, it’s a struggle because the dream can feel very far from reality a lot of times.

She says living there is the current world—infinite growth, shareholder value. It’s everything that’s geared up around that. But here is recognizing that this world is actually collapsing. We see a need for systemic change, and that’s where we find the beauty and the hope. I like to think of—none of us control where everything’s going, but she’s talking about, to me, planting seeds, leaning into that as much as you can, but not being hard on yourself and realizing that you have to be in the other world too that is so much present in our lives.

Then for podcasts, one I’ve come across recently, one episode in particular. Tech Can’t Save Us—certainly something that we need to be thinking about. It’s by a Canadian, Paris Marx. I honestly just really love this episode I heard. What I loved about it was his critical assessment of tech, but in a balanced way. But also his perspective on the U.S. I think it’s really helpful for us—I need to seek more of this myself—giving perspectives outside of our country on these problems, and in particular on U.S. corporations, I think could be super valuable to shifting our consciousness. This particular show is called, I think, “We Need to Cut Our Dependence on U.S. Tech. Here’s How to Start.” It explores both systemic and personal aspects of that. It’s very interesting, and I have a thirst for just learning more about that.

The final one is another podcast called Green Dreamer. It’s specifically with a professor emeritus from Notre Dame. The guest on this podcast is Darcia Narvaez. It’s called “Cultivating Nestedness,” or that was the general part of the title, for children and future generations. To me, it was just very eye-opening in the sense of—as she talked about early childhood, it’s all about connecting to the nature that’s in ourselves and in others. She just tells the story, it beautifully flows into what’s happening in the world, the problems that you and I have been discussing. She’s just very eloquent, and you can just feel the wisdom from all of her work over the years.

Eric: That’s great. I think—it might be wrong, but I’d heard her say it in an audiobook, it was Darcia Narvaez. She wrote The Kinship Worldview. Is that the same person?

Matt: Yes, it’s the same person.

Eric: Yeah, great Indigenous wisdom, co-authored in partnership with Four Arrows. No, I love that, Darcia, if she just came up in this conversation, that’s awesome.

Matt: Cool.

Eric: Great, Matt. Well, this was super fun, and I’m really grateful for all of your work and the time. This has been just a real joy to have this conversation with you. Thank you.

Matt: Yeah, it was great talking to you, Eric. I appreciate what you’re doing and how you’re framing things, and just nice to have this time to really chat with you in depth about it.

Eric: Thank you.

Matt: Thank you.

Closing Reflections

What a really rich and beautiful conversation that Matt and I just had.

Matt’s vision is simpler and more challenging than we probably expect. It reminds me of a quote I’ve recently heard from my friend Thomas McConkie, from Bruno Barnhart (NOTE: in the audio I said Thomas Merton… I was wrong! That’s Thomas McConkie for correcting me!) that goes something like this:

“People would rather live with manageable complexity than learn to live with unmanageable simplicity.”

NOTE:

Here’s a reference to the actual quote!

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

I think in many ways, that captures what Matt is inviting us into.

The Unmanageable Simplicity

Because at its core, Matt’s message is really quite simple. It’s beautiful. Connect to place. Recognize the native plants as easily as logos. Make nature part of your human culture. Develop a place-based identity.

So there’s the simplicity of it. But why is it unmanageable? Well, you can’t optimize it, you can’t control it, can’t reduce it into some sort of five-step plan. It’s asking us to be in relationship with land, with neighbors, with the more-than-human world. And honestly, our current systems are not designed for this. They’re designed for maximizing profit, efficiency, and growth that must keep on growing.

And so there, with it, is the paradox of our moment. The invitation is simple: connect to place. Living into that, in our current reality, is really hard. Really, really hard.

The Chrysalis Metaphor

This reminds me of another thing that a friend and colleague of mine, Kabir Kadre, who’s the lead of a nonprofit that I’m part of, the Open Field Awakening, which I’ve mentioned before—this chrysalis metaphor that we’ve been using to understand our current moment.

A caterpillar goes into a chrysalis, and then they become a butterfly, and that’s beautiful. The key thing that I think we need to think about is that chrysalis moment. When a caterpillar goes into that chrysalis, they literally dissolve into protein soup before being reorganized as a butterfly, and there’s all these imaginal cells that guide that protein soup to both break down and to be reimagined into something else.

It seems like I’m not the only one to recognize, and we’re not the only ones to recognize that, it’s a pretty good metaphor of where we are collectively. Our old systems are breaking down. This was, of course, mentioned by one of the key references that Matt offered at the end—Rosie Spinks—that two worlds. Here it is, we’re just saying in a slightly different way, but it’s getting at the same pattern that we’re all seeing. The old system’s breaking down, many of us can feel it. We’re in this protein soup phase.

And it’s really hard to see what’s emerging, and particularly many of us probably just feel like this is a time of chaos and loss, and everything that we love and care about is disappearing.

The key part is to tune into: okay, what does that mean to then be an imaginal cell? They’re there in the protein soup, they’re carrying the pattern of the butterfly. The more and more imaginal cells are activating, the easier it does for that pattern to start to emerge with others. It becomes a reinforcing feedback loop, such that the breakdown can end and the emerging can come into existence.

Being the Imaginal Cells

For me, I think about Matt’s work in that sense as basically he’s activating the imaginal cells and doing his part of activating those imaginal cells. He shares these dramatic changes are possible: the story of Paris being transformed in a decade, or the really cool story of what’s going on in Detroit with the Black farmer collectives and this cultivation and movement towards food sovereignty of their vegetables and fruits, to half of the U.S. metro areas actually being able to produce all of their food within a 155-mile radius, and potentially more if we move towards a plant-based diet. Each one of these is tagging to the idea that these are not distant dreams. They are emerging realities.

And beyond that, Matt’s work is giving us a bit of a handle on how to be the imaginal cells. It’s not just sitting into that unmanageable simplicity, which of course is the core invitation. But it’s working how to manage through that complexity that we currently exist in, the breaking down of that caterpillar.

So what did he give us? These four system change levers:

* Shifting power

* Resetting culture

* Transforming land use

* Leveraging interconnected systems

They all work together. You can’t just change land use without addressing some issues about power. You can’t just shift culture without transforming the physical space, and so forth. This is the work of the imaginal cells within our chrysalis moment. It’s difficult and necessary reorganizing.

Getting Back to Simplicity

So the simple thing—ultimately, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to get us back to that unmanageable simplicity. Connect to place. But doing that in our current moment is really hard. We spend too much time indoors and separated. Our economic systems are pushing us towards extraction rather than relationship. Our political systems are rewarding short-term thinking over long-term care. And our narratives are all about infinite growth and how they’re not just possible, but actually necessary.

And yet, and yet, when Matt talks about connecting to place, it resonates deeply. There’s a hunger for this, a longing. I can share my own personal examples of how I’m completely feeling this. I shared the work of working on and dreaming for reimagining the hillside, which is currently filled with invasive species. How could I re-indigenize that area, feeling a sense of commitment to this land because it is part of where I connect to our great, beautiful Mother Earth? Or the Rose Canyon Restoration, or how I have a weekly meditation to go visit the Great Oak on the other side of the canyons that I’ve affectionately think of as Fangorn.

These aren’t grand gestures. They’re just the ways in which I’m showing up and trying to be in right relationship with this beautiful part of our beautiful living Mother Earth that happens to be holding me.

This is the unmanageable simplicity of connecting to place. And with it, I can just tell you personally, it shifts something. It’s not just what I do and what I know, but who I am, and even sort of dissolving a little bit of that notion of the egoic I-self and really feeling how I am part of and connected with her, Great Mother Earth.

Converging Ways of Knowing

I also hope you can see that these are parallels that we’ve been playing around with. The beginning episodes of this were really all about trying to—for those who have a strong scientific mind and really feel a deep connection with our objective ways of knowing, which I do too as a scientist—I wanted to set up and say these are pointing in a common direction as well.

From the Life Breathe episodes, organizing from geoscience and physics, about understanding the interconnected nature and the ways in which there’s just constant exchange in the universe, to the way that Island-Shaped, from an ecology perspective, how we are both islands that are shaping and being shaped by all these nested interrelationships, to ultimately how we are beings that are adapting and connecting with each other.

All of them, in my mind—the conclusion I was landing on—is that all of them are drawing us towards a shift in what we know as being good: towards living in right relationship. And that feels highly consonant. It’s different ways of knowing. Why? Because this is what Indigenous wisdom has been telling us all along. We’re just rediscovering what people have known for thousands of years. And I think Matt is doing a beautiful job of doing his part as an imaginal cell, to play the metaphor into this, emerging from all these different ways of knowing, these different epistemologies. We’re starting to find and re-anchor into perhaps a shared morality: let’s live in right relationship.

The Invitation Forward

And so with that, we’re holding all of that. I just really love Matt’s invitation. It’s so concrete and simple. Connect to place. Live in right relationship. Sit in that unmanageable simplicity.

Of course, it resonates with the work of Keith Bezzoli and the bioregional work that we talked about in a previous episode. It’s really inviting us to be aware of not just our watersheds, but our food sheds and all the other sheds that Matt was playing with.

And then last, of course, also bringing in those two states that Rosie Spinks brought up, that Matt brought into our conversation. State one is basically the world of the infinite growth in the shareholder value and the way in which that’s collapsing. Put it back into the metaphor I offered, that’s the caterpillar. And then there’s this state two, this imaginal cell, this chrysalis state—the protein soup, where we are literally sitting in the space of recognizing the collapse, but knowing as imaginal cells that we need to be planting the seeds for regeneration, the seeds for that future generation.

And I hope you can then hear the Seventh Fire Prophecy. Our task as the Seventh Fire People is not to actually step into the green grass. This is Episode 1, and from, of course, Robin Wall Kimmerer and that lineage. We’re not necessarily the people that are going to be able to enjoy the green grass, but we’re the ones that are responsible to allow future life to do so.

And just to sit with that and know that. That’s what’s being asked of us.

And so, for me, I just really love Matt’s advice: lean into planting seeds as much as you can while also remembering not to be too hard on yourself, because you are part of the protein soup. We are the people that have to be living in both worlds right now. That’s just the reality of being protein soup. It’s just the cards that have been dealt. It’s just like Gandalf sitting around with Frodo, and Frodo’s like, “I wish the ring had never come to me,” and Gandalf says, “So do all who live to see such times, but that’s not for you to decide. All you can do is decide what to do with what’s been given to you.”

We’re the Seventh Fire People, we’re the protein soup. We gotta figure this out.

The More We See the Pattern

So, with this, that’s what I’m picking up from this. I’m just so appreciative for Matt for kind of giving this and making it so beautiful, simplistic, and orienting. And with this, the more of this pattern, the more we can hold this tension, the more that we can see the butterfly pattern and grow into it while allowing the caterpillar to be dissolved, the more others will be able to see this, and the easier and easier this will start to be.

So for you, just imagine this as an invitation to connect to your specific place:

* Learn your native plants

* Join restoration projects

* Support community gardens

* Do what helps you connect to the people and place and the community

In so doing, grow into your role as one of the many imaginal cells, that networking group that Matt ended with, saying it was the most critical.

And for me, I would just say, and Matt and I both play with this, this is not just civic, this is civic and spiritual. And of course, it’s natural, so we’re back to the civic, spiritual, and natural processes that tether us to reality are breaking down.

Here it is, another way to say that: when we transform our streets, we are transforming our relationships. When we’re reconnecting to place, we are rebuilding our democratic capacity. When we center in care and love as we do systems change, we help to cultivate what matters most.

A Simple Practice to Begin

So with this, that unmanageably simple invitation: connect to place.

Try it. Start somewhere. Start small if needed. Learn one native plant, walk your neighborhood differently, or pulling in a conversation from Rob Dunn, pay attention to what your dog sniffs. They are connected to place in ways that you can’t. They have sensory capacities. Listen to the more-than-human world, build healthy relation. Let other living beings be your guide. Notice the watersheds and the other sheds that are feeding you. Join others in doing the work. And with this, we can all start to grow and nurture the people who have this network mindset, living the embodiment of this imaginal cell moment that we need.

Just in summary:

* The invitation is simple: Connect to place.

* The honest acknowledgement: The current systems make this hard.

* The hopeful truth: Transformation is possible, and happening, and you can be part of it.

* The deeper wisdom: This is how we learn to live in right relationship, and that right relationship is the unmanageable simplicity that this moment is calling from us.

Resources and Gratitude

So with this, thank you for listening. Thank you, Matt, for the conversation and your amazing work. And thank you, listener, for being willing to see the butterfly while we are in the protein soup. For being willing to connect with place, even when it’s hard. For growing into being the imaginal cell of this great transformation.

May you deepen connection to the part of our living, breathing Mother Earth that is holding you right now, and always will be holding you and all of us.

Resources Mentioned

Books & Authors

* Matt Biggar’s website:

* Website: https://www.connectedtoplace.com

* Book: Connected to Place: Regenerating Nature, Communities, and Local Economies Through Systems Change

* Darcia Narvaez - Restoring the Kinship Worldview (co-authored with Four Arrows)

* Robert Putnam - Bowling Alone

* Robin Wall Kimmerer - Seventh Fire Prophecy and Indigenous wisdom from Braiding Sweetgrass

* Rob Dunn - A Natural History of the Future and The Call of the Honeyguide (see prior episodes including Episode 3 and 4a for more details)

* Marsha Bjornerud - Timefulness (and Episodes 2 and 2c)

* Keith Pezzoli - Bioregional Center

* Staci Haines - The Politics of Trauma and somatics work

Articles & Substacks

* Maya MacGuineas - The Atlantic’s Capitalism’s Addiction Problem

* Rosie Spinks - Substack: ““What Do We Do Now That We Are Here?“

* Specific article: “How I Became Collapse-Aware” (post-November 2024 election) (and I noticed she has a follow-up on this post, which can be found here:

* the “Tech Can’t Save Us” podcast by Paris Marx, especially the episode “We Need to Cut Our Dependence on U.S. Tech—Here’s How to Start.” Matt highlighted how valuable it is to seek perspectives from outside the U.S. on American corporations and technology.

* the “Green Dreamer” podcast episode featuring Darcia Narvaez on “Cultivating Nestedness,” which beautifully connects early childhood development, our connection to nature, and the systemic challenges we face. This is the same Darcia Narvaez who co-authored Restoring the Kinship Worldview with Four Arrows—offering Indigenous wisdom about our relationships with each other and the more-than-human world, which has been mentioned already in this podcast

Podcasts

* Paris Marx - Tech Can’t Save Us

* Episode: “We Need to Cut Our Dependence on U.S. Tech. Here’s How to Start”

* Green Dreamer

* Episode on “Cultivating Nestedness” with Darcia Narvaez

Organizations & Initiatives

* Detroit Black Community Food Security Network - Working on food sovereignty in Detroit

* Keep Growing Detroit - Supporting 1,700+ gardens in Detroit

* Visible Network Labs - Network science framework for trust and value in collaboration

* Acterra - Conservation organization (Cindy Roessler’s work on oak restoration)

* Friends of Rose Canyon - San Diego restoration work

* Open Field Awakening - Led by Kabir Kadre

Case Studies

* Paris, France - Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s street transformation

* Twin Peaks, San Francisco - Native plant restoration

* Silicon Valley - Know Your Oaks campaign and County Oak Ambassador program

* Detroit - Urban farming and food sovereignty movement

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 illustrates this complexity. While dogs show measurable health benefits for humans, cats' benefits remain unmeasurable. Rob speculates cats might fulfill our "morbid curiosity"—they're "like a dangerous animal, but then not."

Rob emphasized that "the actual world is messy." Even trees, which seem majestic, are out-competing grasses: "trees are jerks" because they "compete with each other to get to the sun." A tree trunk is "the gas tank and tires of a Ferrari"—designed to "smother other plants." With that though, these trees do create the conditions for a range of other niches to emerge, hence the messiness of it all. This seems to be another both-and example of the need for a healthy balance between cooperation and, within contexts of mutualism, competition.

The Cultural Knowledge Crisis

A key point Rob kept hitting on was our disconnection from the living world. Working with administrators, he found "none of them know any of the plants outside our building." We've "outsourced" biological knowledge to museum curators—"monks making sense of the world" who are "trained to be monastic."

This creates a fundamental problem: "How are we going to make choices about which species, which relationships" when we no longer have "that layer of social, cultural, learned knowledge about goods and bads"?

The all caps recommendation he landed on for psychologists and philosophers?

Pay attention to smell! He made a compelling case for paying attention to smell, noting it "would rewire our understanding of the world." Our brains have inherited a variety of smell categories, like the smell of bread, and linked that with good or bad, but this is all just our cultural inheritance. Given what we are learning from neuroscience, there is a real opportunity for us to cultivate the “culturally embedded knowledge that we are not fully aware of" but could be with new concepts.

Dogs as Guides to Better Attention

Rob ended with a hopeful hypothesis: beyond cardiovascular benefits, dogs "force humans to pay attention" when they "pause to smell stinks." In our world where "we are so distant from a world in which we pay attention," these moments provide "that little hint" where "you might look around"—and "that is enough to make your life better and longer."

Connecting the Dots

Returning again to the Life Breathes episode, Rob expressed interest and support in playing with the boundaries on what life is and is not and seemed to really appreciate the life breathes aphorism, while also connecting with the wisdom offered by Marcia and geology more generally. As he shared his work and describing insights from a Natural History of the Future,, my sense is that the Islands Sculpt summary of Rob’s work did hold up. And, Rob reinforced how the foci on Beings Adapt, particularly when supported by insights from Lisa Feldman Barrett and neuroscience more broadly, are pointing us both towards the need for and the possibility of healthy cultural evolution. On that front, Rob offered us a series of explorations and questions he explored about mutualisms, getting deep into the true reality of it all, not just the abstracted and idealized notions of mutualisms, such as the current fad of focusing on rhizomal networks, which are cool, but, critically, not the whole story. He tagged the importance of really having the time to build meaningful, real-world relationships with other living beings as a key part of this and, going back to the intro, the challenges of doing this in a culture that keeps drawing us to towards technological pace. Rob offered a range of explorations and meditations that can be used as possible starting points for healthy cultural evolution towards mutualisms.

A Call to Artists, Designers, and others

And, throughout all of this, Rob kept calling for artists, designers, and others who can help us all dream together to listen, understand, and then build out and play. His humility and clear modeling of both showing up to do is part AND recognizing that we need to figure out how to do this together was such a breath of fresh air for me. I also just want to tag that Rob and I barely scratched the surface of his book, the Call of the Honeyguide. There was so much more in there that I wanted to explore, such as his explorations into thinking about the Industrial Revolution and its impact on agriculture, his mapping out of a range of different mutualisms in different areas, and otherwise. I want to reinforce this because, coming to this call for artists, if you are looking for inspiration on new ways to think and engage and help humanity navigate this moment, The Call of the Honeyguide is a great start!

Thank you, Rob, for this conversation and your books "A Natural History of the Future" and "The Call of the Honey Guide."

The next time your dog pauses to smell something, consider it an invitation to pay attention to the larger world we're embedded in.

Book Recommendations

* Alexis Rockman's "A Fable for Tomorrow" (paintings with commentary)

* Annie Dillard "On Writing"

* Paul Theroux travel writing essays

* Bruce Chatwin's "Songlines" and Patagonia work

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 different reality.

You might think: "Obviously, he made a mistake. His brain corrected itself." But here's Barrett's revolutionary insight: There was no mistake. His brain was doing exactly what brains always do—constructing reality from incomplete information, guided by past experience and current context, all in service of keeping him alive.

Your Brain: A Magnificent Predictor in Service of Life

Barrett's and other neuroscientists’ decades of research reveal something that challenges our deepest assumptions: Your brain isn't primarily set up for thinking and reason. It's set up for body budgeting through prediction-guided action.

Your brain's primary job isn't to represent the world accurately—it's primary job seems to be to keep you alive by predicting what's going to happen next and preparing your body to respond. It's running a constant predictive simulation of reality, asking: Based on everything I've learned, what's most likely happening right now, and what should I do about it?

Think about our veteran again. His brain had cycled through countless experiences where certain visual patterns preceded life-threatening situations. When similar patterns appeared, his prediction system activated responses that had proven adaptive in previous cycles. This isn't just individual learning—it's the brain honoring accumulated wisdom of past experiences that stretch back across his life and culture.

This process is so fundamental that we are wired to act first and sense second. Your brain initiates actions before the sensory information needed to correct prediction errors arrives. By the time our veteran "saw" the guerrilla fighter, his nervous system had already begun preparing for combat.

This isn't poor design. It's both a survival feature and an elegant solution to massive metabolic constraints. In a world where the difference between predator and prey can be milliseconds, the brain that hesitates doesn't make it to the next cycle. And, in the bodies we have, if we were constantly sensing, and, from that sensory information fully constructing a complete pictures of reality (like a video recording capturing every last bit of details), and then responding to this full picture of reality, then our brains would require more energy than, metabolically speaking, is possible in the bodies we have.

The Dark Skull Challenge

Barrett's vivid way of understanding the challenge is this: Your brain is trapped in a dark skull, trying to figure out what's happening in the world based on electrical signals. It never directly experiences light, sound, touch, or smell—only patterns of electrical activity from your sensory and other organs. From this limited information, it must construct your entire experienced reality.

So how does your brain transform this barrage of meaningless electrical patterns into meaningful experience? Through prediction and concept-making.

Concepts: Your Reality Construction Toolkit

Barrett reveals that without concepts, you are experientially blind. Concepts aren't just mental categories—they're the tools your brain uses to transform meaningless sensory input into coherent, actionable experience.

When our veteran's brain encountered those visual patterns, it didn't passively register "figures in the distance." It actively constructed his experience based on which concept won the prediction competition. Enemy soldiers? Playing children? The concept that got selected shaped not just what he "saw" but how his entire body-mind system prepared to respond.

This process honors cycles of learning that span far beyond individual experience. The concepts available to our veteran came from his military training, his cultural background, his personal history—accumulated wisdom from countless cycles of human learning about survival, threat recognition, and appropriate response.

But concepts aren't fixed. They can evolve and transform as we move through new cycles of experience. The moment his comrade offered a different concept—"children"—new neural patterns activated, and his brain constructed an entirely different reality from the same sensory input.

Where do these concepts come from? Our cultural inheritance. The emotions you can feel, the distinctions you can make, even the colors you can perceive—all depend on the concepts your culture has developed through its own cycles of collective learning.

Consider the Dutch emotion concept "gezellig"—a particular kind of warm, cozy comfort experienced with friends that has no direct English translation. Dutch speakers don't just have a word for this feeling; they can literally experience something that English speakers might not fully notice because our culture's learning cycles haven't crystallized this concept in the same way.

The Architecture of Experience

Barrett emphasizes that we are architects of our own experience—not because we control what happens to us, but because we participate actively in constructing what we experience from what happens to us.

Our veteran couldn't control the visual input he received, but his brain's conceptual toolkit shaped how that input became experience. When new concepts became available through his comrade's words, new experiences became possible from the same situation.

This leads to an important point. Responsibility here doesn't mean fault for past experiences. We inherit our initial conceptual toolkits through cultural cycles we didn't choose. But responsibility does mean recognizing that we are the only ones who can influence what we do next—how we might expand our concepts, refine our predictions, and participate more consciously in the ongoing cycles of experience construction, aligned towards our collective intentions.

Think about how this applies to our current challenges described in episode 1. If we're constructing reality based on predictions drawn from past cycles, but our current challenges are unprecedented, we might be trying to navigate 21st-century problems with prediction software developed during earlier cultural cycles. Our concepts may need conscious evolution to meet present realities.

This new view doesn’t just have implications for how you understand yourself and your experience of reality, it also has implications for how we create reality together.

Part 2: The Magic and Responsibility of Social Reality Creation

If individual reality construction seems remarkable, human social reality creation is truly amazing. Barrett identifies what she calls the "5 C's" that make human social reality possible: Creativity, Communication, Copying, Collaboration, and Compression.

From Individual to Collective Construction

Our veteran's experience wasn't purely individual. The concepts that shaped his perception—"enemy," "threat," "children," "safety"—were social realities created through cycles of collective human agreement. These concepts exist because communities of people, across generations of cultural evolution, developed shared understandings about what different patterns mean and how to respond to them.

"Enemy" isn't just a personal concept—it's a socially constructed category that emerges from collective agreements about group identity, territorial boundaries, and appropriate defensive responses. These agreements develop through cultural cycles of conflict, cooperation, learning, and adaptation.

Let's examine money, as another example, to understand how social realities work. A twenty-dollar bill is just paper and ink—that's its physical reality. You could analyze its chemical composition or burn it for warmth. These properties exist regardless of human thoughts.

But money's real power comes from social reality. When communities collectively agree that this piece of paper represents $20 of value, that paper transforms into something that can buy lunch. The paper didn't change physically, but shared belief gave it an entirely new function.

Social realities emerge when groups assign new meanings to things through collective intentionality. They exist only because people communicate, participate, and maintain agreement. But notice something deeper: Money as a social reality enables cycles of exchange that would be impossible through physical reality alone.

Barrett's 5 C's: Building Social Reality

These 5 C's work together to create and maintain social realities like money:

Creativity is our capacity to imagine new functions for existing things. When humans first looked at metal or paper and imagined it could represent value beyond its physical properties, they used creativity to invent function independent of form.

Communication allows sharing these invented meanings. For social reality to exist, multiple people must understand and agree to new functions.

Copying enables invented functions to spread. When people observe others treating paper money as valuable and begin doing the same, they're copying social behavior that maintains this reality.

Collaboration transforms individual acceptance into collective reality. Money works only because millions of people collaborate in treating it as valuable.

Compression allows us to recognize shared functions despite physical differences. You understand that paper bills, credit cards, digital transfers, and cryptocurrency can all serve the same function—representing value—despite being completely different physically.

Other species demonstrate some capacity for most, if not all of these C's, but humans may be unique in our ability to use all five together, particularly in our sophisticated compression abilities that create abstract functional linkages spanning physical and social domains.

An interesting example of this is actually the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Here’s the first Amendment, with each section labeled with some facet of the 5 C’s:

“Congress shall make no law (Compression) respecting an establishment of religion (Creativity and Compression), or prohibiting the free exercise thereof (Copying & Collaboration); or abridging the freedom of speech (Communication), or of the press (Communication and Compression); or the right of the people peaceably to assemble (Communication, Copying, & Collaboration), and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances (Creativity, Communication, Collaboration, & Compression).”

How Social Realities Build Through Cycles

Social realities don't exist in isolation—they build upon each other through ongoing evolutionary cycles guided by the 5 C's.

Let me trace this using group identity concepts:

Family Identity: Most cultures develop concepts distinguishing family from non-family. This proves valuable for early development, helping people understand who is committed to supporting their safety and belonging.

Community Identity: From family orientation, broader categories emerge distinguishing "our community" from others. This enables collections of families to coordinate as larger groups.

Ethnic Identity: When communities with different languages and customs encounter each other, higher-order concepts like "ethnic groups" can form.

National Identity: When ethnic groups commit to sharing geographic regions and governance structures, yet another layer emerges—"nations." This modern concept enables millions of strangers to coordinate under shared identity.

Each layer creates new subcategories. The nation concept enables distinctions like "citizens," "foreigners," "legal immigrants," "undocumented migrants." These categories, maintained through cycles of communication, copying, and collaboration, can profoundly impact lives by determining who has rights to influence policies and who receives different social treatments.

Emotional Concepts as Cultural Cycles

Here's where Barrett's work becomes truly revolutionary, and is discussed in her book, How Emotions are Made: The emotions you can feel aren't hardwired—they're cultural concepts learned through social interaction, particularly through language. This is central to Barrett's Theory of Constructed Emotions.

As a grad student, Barrett conducted multiple studies trying to find replicate prior work that treated anxiety and depression and “fingerprints in the brain” that people should be able to distinguish because conventional scientific wisdom said she should be able to find them. The problem was that her research wasn't producing expected findings. Through deeper investigations, she began debunking the seeming universality of emotions (see the full length text only or read her books for the details).

Here's one example: traditional research gave people choices to identify facial expressions, and when those choices were provided, people across cultures could identify them. But when Barrett showed those same pictures without offering options—just asking an open-ended question—this universality disappeared.

Her systematic line of work, which is a master class of being a robust scientist in my view, led Barrett to construct the Theory of Constructed Emotions. The bottom line: Barrett systematically disproved the classical theory that emotions are universal "fingerprints in the brain."

The emotions your culture provides literally shape what you can experience through cycles of learning and reinforcement, giving you cultural inheritance that provides emotional concepts as starting points for body budgeting in your ecological and social contexts. If your culture has rich vocabulary for different types of love, you can feel distinctions invisible to someone whose language has only one word for love.

Barrett offers the notion of emotional granularity—precision in distinguishing different emotional experiences - as a scientifically observable phenomenon that, based on the theory of constructed emotions, should be valuable for helping people to adapt more effectively to their contexts. And, lo and behold, that is what she and others have found. People with higher emotional granularity tend to be more resilient, have better relationships, and make better decisions. Why? More precise concepts provide more response options for understanding and adapting to experience.

Our veteran's emotional experience was shaped by conceptual tools his culture provided through military training, combat preparation, and post-service support (or lack thereof). The concepts available to him for categorizing his internal states—hypervigilance, combat stress, survival mode—influenced what experiences were possible and what responses seemed available.

When Social Reality Becomes Destructive

The power of social reality creation can become dangerous when we construct concepts misaligned with the contexts we are in, healthy adaptation, and mutual flourishing.

Consider race. There's no biological basis for racial categories humans have created. Based on the systematic work of Dr. Dorothy Roberts, race was socially and politically constructed through specific historical cycles of colonization, slavery, and economic exploitation. But because people collectively agreed these categories were real, they became real in their effects, shaping laws, opportunities, wealth distribution, and health outcomes across generations. A point that my colleague Mai brought up in our discussions about the history of urban planning.

This points toward something both humbling and hopeful: If we created these realities through cycles of collective agreement, we can create different ones through conscious cycles of cultural evolution.

Part 3: Understanding Cultural Adaptation—Healthy and Otherwise

We've seen that we construct reality together through prediction and social agreement. The crucial question becomes: Are we constructing wisely? Are our cultural cycles supporting healthy adaptation?

This brings us to a foundational issue that neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett addresses—and that I want to extend: the widespread belief that reason represents the apex of human evolution. This notion is not only unsupported by evidence, but actively undermines our capacity for healthy cultural evolution.

The Evidence Against the Triune Brain Myth

For decades, we've been told we have three brains in conflict: the "reptilian brain" (survival), "mammalian brain" (emotion), and "human brain" (reason). This "triune brain" hypothesis suggests that reason and emotion are at war, with our "higher" rational brain needing to control our "lower" emotional impulses.

Barrett's and others research demolishes this myth. When we examine vertebrate genetics, all brains use the same basic instructions for building the same core structures. Physical differences come from variations in development timing, not fundamentally different evolutionary components. Instead of separate warring systems, the brain operates through "degeneracy"—multiple neural pathways producing the same outcomes, via individual neurons capable of performing multiple functions.

This means rational and emotional concepts emerge from the same integrated neural networks. Our veteran's rapid threat assessment wasn't "emotion overriding reason"—it was his whole system integrating body signals, memory patterns, social training, and environmental cues into a unified adaptive response.

The Deeper Cultural Pattern

The "reason over emotion" myth reflects a much larger pattern in Western culture: material essentialism—the belief that things have fixed, unchanging essences with hierarchical value.

Let me acknowledge what this cultural inheritance gave us: Essentialist thinking drove our ancestors toward scientific reductionism, enabling us to perceive ever-smaller aspects of reality—from atoms to quantum mechanics, and this enabled a range of technologies, from machines, to smartphones, to today's generative AI. This quest produced remarkably predictive theories and transformative technologies.

But essentialism also created a maladaptive teleological pattern—a deep story about reality that shapes our sense of purpose and meaning. Specifically: humans + rationality + technology = the objective of life. We've been taught to see ourselves as evolution's peak achievement, the ultimate goal toward which everything builds.

This story provided cosmic significance for our ancestors, much like a child needs to feel they matter to their parents. But everything we've explored—physics, geology, ecology, neuroscience—reveals this story is not true.

We are not the apex of evolution. This point has been reinforced throughout all prior episodes but to try and unpack why this is not true, consider this. In Dr. Rob Dunn's recent book, The Call of the Honeyguide, he highlights an interesting pattern that betrays essentialist thinking in how we’ve crafted narratives such as the one Harrari offered in Sapiens and later Homo Deus. In brief, iid you construct a story by going backward from the present to discover its origins, you can create a straight linear story structure, like a classic hero’s journey. BUT, if you pick any point in history - the Big Bang, the formation of Earth, the first homo species - and try and tell a story describing time moving forward, that straight line disappears and is replaced with branches. The story structure becomes like branches on an expanding and contracting river, each with countless forms exploring countless ways of being, becoming, and doing. When the full picture of those branches can be seen, the notion that we are the apex of anything, and the justification for telling a linear story that puts us as an apex, disappears.

Image generated by Google Gemini.

Our Cultural Reality Bubble

If a more accurate story structure is, metaphorically speaking, like an ever shifting expanding and contracting network of branches of flowing water, why is a linear, beginning, middle, and end, structure so common in our culture? To understand how we got here, let's examine key narratives that created Western culture's "social reality bubble":

Foundational Stories

* Genesis Creation: Positioned humans as having "dominion" over Earth, suggesting we rule rather than participate

* Plato's Allegory of the Cave: Elevated abstract thinking as humanity's highest achievement—the further from embodied reality, the closer to truth

* Anthropomorphizing Time: Western culture has strong individualistic orientation which, temporally speaking, sets us up towards assuming the way we experience time, from birth through life and ending in death, is true for everything else. With this, a linear story structure may be a subtle form of anthropomorphism deeply baked into Western culture. Critically, this narrative structure is not universal across cultures; there are many examples of cultures that orient around other ways of relating to time, particularly relating to time as, first and foremost, cyclical.

Modern Reinforcements

* The Triune Brain hypothesis: Suggested we evolved by building reason atop "primitive" emotions (now thoroughly debunked)

* Survival of the Fittest: Spencer's phrase (not Darwin's) that reduced evolution to competitive struggle, ignoring cooperation and mutualism, which are increasingly seen as more central drivers of evolution. Critically, this is an important role in life for competition that cannot be denied. But that competition needs to occur within a broader structure of relationship and mutualism. For example, while individuals predators and prey are clearly competing against one another for survival, they are, simultaneously, reliant upon one another to exist. Or, in a human context, competition drives us to the more true in science, the more beautiful in art, and the more good in life, when that competition is contained. Think, for example, of the fierce competition between scientists within the broader container of the scientific community, with its capacity to adjudicate truth claims via comparison of alternatives to the totality of relevant evidence. Or, more simply, think of the fierce competition between John Lennon and Paul McCartney that was situated in a relationship of care and concern oriented towards producing great music. Or even think of healthy competition between companies that compete on better serving their customers without falling into the trap of cutting corners. Competition only works in broader containers of mutualisms.

* Orientalism: Assumed Western culture's inherent superiority, justifying domination as enlightenment and “saving the heathens.”

Even brilliant critics who saw this pattern clearly ended up, in their later work, falling into the same trap. For example, Nietzsche exposed Christianity's life-denying tendencies aligned to giving up on life in service of an promised afterlife and detached God in The Gay Science, then proposed his own human superiority story—the Übermensch and "Will to Power"—in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

The Technology Narrative

The Industrial Revolution created stories where progress means increasing power over nature through technology. This story has been re-imagined and retold in a range of forms by many thinkers such as Fukuyama, Hararri, and, in Silicon Valley today, Andreessen, Thiel, and others. This, despite evidence illustrating that, even at the time of the start of the Industrial Revolution, this dominance of technology was likely a fiction and how any narrative of technological progress requires one to focus in on only the part of life that is of interest. When one zooms out to see the unintended consequences of technological progress, these progress narratives come off as immature at best, without proper acknowledgement of externalities and other costs.

The common pattern: Humans (specifically Western humans guided by reason and capable of building technology) are evolution's greatest achievement because of our rational-technological capacities. Therefore, our purpose is developing superior rational-technological power.

The Deep Irony

Here's the profound contradiction: Elevating reason above everything else is proving deeply maladaptive.

When we use reason to examine our broader reality—drawing from indigenous wisdom, physics, ecology, neuroscience, and spiritual traditions rather than just Western science and technological cultural inheritance—we see how this teleology orients us toward competing for superiority while destroying the relationships that sustain us.

We're using our remarkable rational capacities to unravel the web of life we depend on. This is only "rational" within the narrow reality bubble that taught us we're separate from and superior to the rest of life. From the broader perspective we’ve cultivated across the podcast, it is deeply maladaptive.

A Different Pattern of Purpose

Does abandoning human exceptionalism mean life lacks purpose? Not at all, though I think it can be highly disorienting to a person raised in a Western/Occidental Culture. In my view, this is a plausible partial explanation for the rise in depression, social isolation, anxiety, or nihilism that so many people seem to be experiencing today. If we aren’t trying to be the top of the hierarchy, then what’s the point? We are struggling because we are confused with what our purpose is. There is an alternative purpose we can align to as individuals and humanity.

Across every way of knowing we've explored—indigenous wisdom, physics, ecology, neuroscience, psychology—a different pattern emerges: living in right relationship with all of life. We can measure success not by how much we dominate, but by the quality of our relationships within the web of life, contributing to what ecologists call "mutualism"—relationships where different forms of life support each other's flourishing.

What if this shift—from seeing ourselves as separate and superior to recognizing ourselves as participants in the larger community of life—is the fundamental reorientation humanity is navigating right now? What if this explains why so many civic, spiritual, and natural institutions feel like they're breaking down?

Understanding How We Actually Work

Instead of battling imaginary internal wars, Barrett shows us how we actually function. Your emotions aren't primitive impulses requiring control—they're sophisticated information systems helping you navigate reality.

Affect—your moment-to-moment sense of how you're doing—is, metaphorically speaking, your "body budget barometer." Pleasant or unpleasant, calm or agitated, these feelings provide crucial information about your internal state and relationship to your environment. Learning to read affect skillfully transforms it into a navigation system for healthy adaptation.

Barrett offers this critical insight: "Our nature requires nurture." We're not blank slates or fully determined beings. We're creatures whose nature is to be shaped by cultural and relational environments through ongoing cycles of interaction and co-regulation. Why? Because it makes us incredibly adaptive beings.

This reveals there isn't one human nature, but many. We can adapt to vastly different ecologies and develop different emotional repertoires based on the cultural cycles we participate in. This variability isn't a flaw—it's the feature enabling human communities to thrive across radically different circumstances.

When Adaptation Gets Stuck

This adaptability creates challenges too. If you develop where hypervigilance was necessary for survival, your brain might continue constructing threat even in safer contexts. In contrast, if you develop in places of perceived abundance where you never need to know how your actions hurt others, then it is easy to get addicted to patterns that, from a broader perspective hurt others and, eventually, potentially even yourself. Cycles that created adaptive responses in one environment can become maladaptive when circumstances change, including changes that happen because of something that only can be seen as maladaptive after enough time has passed and the harms can really be seen and felt.

The hopeful insight: The same neuroplasticity that can trap us in outdated cycles can free us through conscious participation in new learning cycles. Barrett emphasizes that "over time you can change your trajectory" through patient engagement with new experiences and concepts.

Our Cultural Moment

Barrett's insights illuminate our broader challenges. We face unprecedented problems—climate change, biodiversity loss, social fragmentation—using prediction systems evolved for different contexts.

Our cultural inheritance provided concepts, norms, and institutions crystallized around the teleology that technology equals progress. These served some previous generations well (and greatly harmed others in their wake). Right now though? we need to address threats most of us haven't experienced directly, coordinate with billions of strangers, and think across timescales that dwarf individual lives.

It's like navigating 21st-century realities using conceptual software from the 1940s.

The Invitation Forward

The question before us: Can we use our genuine gifts—including complex reasoning aligned to healthy adaptation of all life—not to transcend our embeddedness in life, but to participate more skillfully within it? Can we shift from "How can we control?" to "How can we belong?" From "How can we win?" to "How can we contribute to the flourishing of the whole?"

This isn't about abandoning reason, nor is about returning to an imagined past. It's about integrating our rational capacities within a larger understanding of what it means to be alive, related, and responsive to the world that made us and sustains us.

Barrett's work suggests we're not doomed to repeat old patterns. We have capacity for conscious cultural evolution—deliberately updating our predictive models and the social realities they create through intentional cycles of learning, experimentation, and refinement. But that capacity can only happen when we consciously choose to use it as individuals and collectives.

Part 4: Practices for Conscious Adaptation

If we're architects of experience living in a world requiring new forms of adaptation, how do we participate consciously in reality construction?

Barrett's work provides scientific foundation for practices that meditative and contemplative traditions have explored for centuries. I've found the most transformative approaches integrate what Barrett calls emotional granularity with what I term "Spirit's Way"—approaches to knowing that create space for questions like: What else might be true? How do you know? What concepts aren't serving well? What response options exist here?

Below is a brief summary of 6 practices, three focused on what you can do as an individual and three oriented toward what we can do as groups, to consciously facilitate cultural evolution of our social reality.

Individual Practices

Practice 1: Expanding Perceptual Range

Barrett's emotional granularity research confirms what contemplative traditions have long fostered: expanding capacity to distinguish subtle internal states enhances adaptive flexibility.

This practice involves both learning new emotional concepts and developing embodied sensitivity through meditation, yoga, or mindful movement. The goal isn't just cognitive sophistication but lived capacity to feel the full spectrum of signals available to you. Like learning music or sports, this requires sustained practice across cycles of attention and refinement. For insights on how to do this, I invite you read the end of Barrett’s book, How Emotions are Made.

Practice 2: Compassion For Self and Others

I use "bubble" as metaphor for what Barrett calls your affective niche—signals you perceive, concepts you use to interpret them, actions you believe available, and pressures you feel from context.

When you notice anxiety, depression, or reactivity, the practice isn't judging these as wrong but compassionately investigating: Given my history, current context, and inherited concepts, how is this response rational within the reality I'm experiencing?

This isn't about excusing harmful behavior but creating internal conditions for adaptive shifts. Conscious adaptation requires freedom from defensive prediction patterns, which compassion helps provide.

This bubble awareness work extends outward, learning to see others "on their own terms." When someone's actions trigger your prediction errors, the practice becomes: How can I understand their bubble in ways that honor both who they are and who I am?

If our veteran's comrade had simply said "You're wrong" rather than offering the alternative concept "children," the moment might have unfolded differently. Instead, he participated in expanding conceptual possibilities without attacking existing predictions.

For guidance on how to do this, I recommend Dr. Frank Roger’s excellent book, Practicing Compassion, and, in particular, his PULSE technique, which includes focus both on self-compassion and compassion for others to create, in my words, a shared bubble of reality.

Practice 3: Nurturing the Four Immeasurables

Buddhism's Four Immeasurables—compassion, loving-kindness, sympathetic joy, and equanimity—offer structured retraining of your affective niche, shifting default predictions from ego-centered to life-centered orientations.

These practices literally rewire the neural cycles that generate social reality construction, creating space for more inclusive and adaptive collective meanings to emerge.

For valuable practices on how to do this, I’d invite you to engage with Thupten Jinpa’s book, A Fearless Heart, and, in particular, look to the intention/dedication practices.

Collective Practices

Practice 4: Creating Trauma-Informed Containers

Barrett's research on mutual body budgeting reveals why social contexts profoundly influence individual adaptation. People's "difficult" behaviors often represent adaptive responses to unsafe conditions applied in contexts where those responses have become maladaptive.

Creating healing containers means establishing explicit agreements honoring everyone's needs for safety, belonging, and dignity while recognizing that people's prediction patterns were shaped by unique histories requiring different forms of support for healthy adaptation.

One option that I’ve appreciated is Staci Haines’ Self-Paced Course.

Practice 5: Compassionate Critique

This practice focuses on engaging differences without falling into essentialist thinking that labels perspectives as simply right or wrong.

Rather than debating who's correct, conversations become: For any given situation, when, where, and for whom might this perspective be beneficial, harmful, or irrelevant?

This honors Barrett's insight that all predictions are contextual while creating space for collective wisdom to emerge through cycles of respectful exploration.

For more details about this approach, which I co-created with my colleague, Dr. Elizabeth Eikey, please see these posts on the negotiating reality substack page: one about compassionate critique, another about the origins of compassionate critique, and a third about bubbles.

Practice 6: Re-constructing our Cultural Norms, Structures, and Institutions

This final practice is critical but, to be honest, I don't have a clear single reference to point you to. Instead, I want to offer a curated list of explorations organized around our epistemic structure: the Objective Way, Spirit's Way, and Nature's Way.

Objective Way

These efforts help diagnose the issues and are part of the solution, much like this episode and season. Key works include:

David Graeber and David Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything" makes the case that cultural variability was historically the norm, not the exception. They make the case that humanity has recently become stuck when three forms of power aligned: violence, charisma, and bureaucracy.

There's also the work I reviewed in episode one—James Davison Hunter, Neil Howe, and Timothy Snyder —which I invite you to review for more details.

Daniel Schmachtenberger's Consilience Project demonstrates how our technological progress narratives are immature.

Finally, several trusted friends point me to James Ritchie-Dunham's recent book "Agreements," though I haven't engaged deeply with this work yet.

Nature's Way

We have insights from ecology via Rob Dunn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and others as already mentioned, plus a wealth of wisdom from Indigenous peoples and scholars. This isn't surprising—Graeber and Wengrow made the case that Enlightenment shifts in Europe occurred partly through dialogue with Indigenous peoples from Turtle Island, offering Europeans a different vantage to shift away from feudalistic structures.

Critical Indigenous offerings include:

Robin Wall Kimmerer, already mentioned throughout this podcast.

Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvaez's "Restoring the Kinship Worldview" draws together Indigenous scholars, elders, and traditions, articulating the dominant Western worldview while offering a Kinship Worldview alternative with cultural shift suggestions.

Tyson Yunkaporta's Right Story, Wrong Story and Sand Talk provide strategies for decentering human exceptionalism narratives and offer Aboriginal wisdom.

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira's Hospicing Modernity challenges us to grow up, step up, and show up for ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth. She's created a chatbot trained on this tradition for dialogue.

Spirit's Way

I'll focus on efforts I have personal relationships with—not because they're the only way, but because I have intimacy with their value and alignment to these ideas.

John Kesler's Integral Polarity Practice Institute, which is prototyping a course on culturing mature leadership for collective flourishing next year, which I plan to take.

My colleague Kabir Kadre leads Open Field Awakening, which is working towards creating a Wisdom Cohort to help humanity navigate this moment.

My friend Richard Flyer's lifelong work on Symbiotic Culture, described in his recent book, pursues living guided by divine and transcendent love—particularly valuable for Christians.

Moving Forward

This area is ripe for continued exploration, connection, synthesis, and curation—particularly inviting these different ways of knowing to commune and strengthen one another. If you have other resources or ideas, I'd love to hear them! I'll definitely return to this in continued discussions this season and future seasons of Negotiating Reality.

Integration: From Individual to Collective Cycles

These practices align with Barrett's research on brain function while drawing from contemplative traditions that have functioned as "laboratories" for consciousness development across centuries from prior traditions including, from the above, Buddhist, Christian, and Indigenous practices.

The key insight: Individual and collective adaptation aren't separate processes but different aspects of the same dynamic flow. As you develop greater internal emotional granularity, you contribute to collective capacity for nuanced social reality construction. As you participate in creating trauma-informed collective containers, you provide contexts that support individual healing and growth.

And with this,"Beings Adapt" completes our three-part metaphysical framework:

"Life Breathes" established our foundation in a living, exchanging universe where cosmic and geological processes create conditions for biological emergence.

"Islands Sculpt" revealed our embeddedness in webs of relationship where every context shapes us while we shape it back.

"Beings Adapt" shows our unique capacity to participate consciously in ongoing reality construction while attuning to life cycles operating at every scale.

Together, these three aphorisms, coupled with the suggested practices, offer an alternative to essentialist and Newtonian thinking. Instead, we discover a process-based worldview where life continuously breathes, islands continuously sculpt, and beings continuously adapt—all within larger cycles that honor both individual expression and collective flourishing.

Recap

TL;DR: We don't perceive reality as it is—we construct it together through prediction and social agreement. This capacity is both our greatest evolutionary advantage and our most significant responsibility. In this moment, we are being called to shift our individual and collective social reality bubbles from ones that have been oriented towards human superiority towards, instead, living in right relationship with each other and all of life.

Part 1: How Your Brain Actually Works

The Vietnam Veteran Example: Same visual input, completely different constructed reality—demonstrating that brains work exactly as it is set up to do through prediction.

Key Discoveries:

* Your brain is set up for body budgeting through prediction, not accurate representation

* Brains act first and sense second to ensure survival while solving for massive metabolic constraints

* Concepts are reality construction tools—without them, you're experientially blind

* Cultural inheritance provides the conceptual toolkit that shapes possible experiences

* Response-ability: We can't control what we inherit, but we can influence what we do next

Part 2: Creating Social Reality Together

Barrett's 5 C's: Creativity, Communication, Copying, Collaboration, and Compression enable human social reality construction.

How Social Realities Build: From family → community → ethnic → national identity, each layer creates new subcategories that profoundly impact lives.

Emotional Concepts: Emotions aren't hardwired—they're cultural concepts learned through language. Higher emotional granularity leads to better adaptation.

The Danger: Social realities can become destructive when misaligned with mutual flourishing, but this means we can consciously create different ones.

Part 3: Understanding Adaptation

Dismantling the Rational-Emotional War: Barrett's research shows rationality and emotion operate through the same neural networks. The "triune brain" theory is scientifically debunked.

The Cultural Pattern: The rational-emotional war is part of a broader teleological orientation in Western culture that elevates human reason and technology as evolution's apex. This appears rational within Modern cultural reality but reveals itself as maladaptive when viewed from integrated perspectives offered across this season of Negotiating Reality that drew from a range of disciplines and perspectives.

How We Actually Function: Emotions are sophisticated information systems. Our "nature requires nurture"—we're shaped through ongoing cultural interaction cycles.

The Path Forward: Replace the teleology of human dominance with living in right relationship with all life and the consciously start to recreate our social reality bubble to make it easier for us as individuals and collectives to live in right relationship with each other and all of life.

Part 4: Practices for Conscious Adaptation

Individual: Expanding perceptual range, compassion for self and others, Four Immeasurables

Collective: Trauma-informed containers, compassionate critique, re-imagining our institutions, structures, and norms

Connecting the Three Episodes

* "Life Breathes": We're embedded in a living, exchanging universe

* "Islands Sculpt": We're always in relationship, shaping and being shaped

* "Beings Adapt": We consciously participate in ongoing reality construction

Together: A process-based worldview where life continuously breathes, islands continuously sculpt, and beings continuously adapt within larger cycles of emergence and renewal aligned to living in right relationship.

The Larger Invitation

What we've explored today is my contribution towards our collective responsibility of evolving humanity towards beings that live in right relationship with all of life. Healthy adaptation requires attunement not just to individual and cultural cycles, but to the full spectrum of life cycles we're embedded within.

Humanity exists within cycles of individual development, social institutions, ecological communities, geological processes, and stellar evolution. Our current cultural moment represents a transition between cycles—what Kimmerer and the 7th Fire prophecy called the time of choosing between the green grass and the scorched earth.

This doesn't require abandoning what's valuable from previous cycles. It's about learning what to nurture and what to compost to enable us to grow, together, into new cultural options aligned with living in right relationship with all of life.

The practices we've explored are tools for this larger work of conscious cultural evolution. They help us develop the response-ability needed to navigate transitions between cycles with wisdom rather than reactivity, creativity rather than rigidity, love rather than fear.

Thank you for joining me on this journey. Adapt consciously. The cycles of life we are reliant upon depend on our healthy participation together.

- Kabir Kadre provided critical review and feedback on earlier versions of this episode.

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 enough to honor the scientific method, humble enough to acknowledge its boundaries, and imaginative enough to help us find new ways forward.

Let's dig in.

Recap

That wraps up our rich exploration with Dr. Marcia Bjornerud - a conversation that tackled some of the most fundamental questions about how we understand and relate to our living planet.

Throughout our discussion, we grappled with critical tensions that shouldn't be simply resolved, but rather navigated thoughtfully. Take the challenge of using powerful metaphors like "breathing" to help people connect with geological and cosmic processes, while avoiding inappropriate anthropomorphism - or even "animalomorphism," as Dr. Bjornerud reminded us, since lung and gill breathing is a very recent development in geologic terms.

Her guidance here was illuminating: our language is inevitably "freighted with references to our bodies," but anthropomorphism isn't always dangerous. The key is awareness. We can see resonances with nature because we are part of nature, but we shouldn't impose ourselves as the authoritative template for everything. When we generalize the notion of breath into processes of exchange that could take nearly infinite forms - including our own relatively recent type of breathing - we can start to feel the connections between our breath and the breath of Planet Earth and beyond.

We also explored the boundaries of scientific knowledge - when objective methods are incredibly powerful tools, and when we need other ways of knowing to live well. Dr. Bjornerud 's offered distinction shared by Hart previously between "Newtonian" thinking, which seeks timeless universal laws, and "Darwinian" thinking, which embraces time and evolutionary complexity, helped illuminate why our technologies often fail when applied to evolving natural systems. This useful dichotomy kept helping us probe where an orientation towards the timeless might be creeping into our thinking when timefulness is actually what's needed.

Regarding the three core questions I posed at the beginning:

On extending definitions of life beyond biology - we found compelling scientific support for viewing Earth's self-regulatory systems as alive in meaningful ways, but critically, on their own terms. Just as with the anthropomorphism discussion, we can't simply translate how we or other biological life forms live and directly transfer that to the ways various processes on Planet Earth emerge into a type of animacy.

This led us to an emerging recognition from across multiple fields: there seem to be at least two complementary forces at work - one driving towards entropy and equilibrium, another driving towards complexity. The evolutionary dynamic interaction between these tensions, expressed differently at cosmic, geologic, and biological scales, provides a starting point for reimagining our notion of "life." As Dr. Bjornerud noted, most geoscientists, if pushed, would say Earth is alive in a sense - meaning on Earth's own terms, not ours. She described how rocks literally "breathe" through chemical exchanges with their environment - again, in their own sense, on their own terms.

On shifting from exploitation to relationship - we discovered this isn't just feel-good spirituality, but points toward how complex systems actually work. The goal, as she put it, is becoming "law-abiding biogeochemical citizens" rather than maintaining our "adolescent pugilistic relationship with nature."

And on the breathing metaphor - we found it holds up remarkably well when understood as the flow of resources and energy that creates synchrony across scales, from quantum mechanics to galactic dynamics. The key is understanding it as metaphor - we can't take everything true about lung and gill-based respiration and apply it to other types of exchanges. But when we use the breath metaphor properly, we can start to notice areas of synchrony and resonance.

Perhaps most importantly, we recognized that our definitions and models are provisional tools. As statistician George Box said, "All models are wrong, but some are useful." The question becomes: are our current definitions of life, progress, and our place in nature still useful for the challenges we face?

Both Dr. Bjornerud and I found ourselves open to an expanded definition of life that would build above the current biological taxonomy without diminishing what the biological sciences offer. And to state it explicitly, I feel drawn to this for teleological reasons that, my sense is, Dr. Bjornerud was open to as well - to help us understand our purpose and orient toward meaning in life. This reinforced the need for the "Life Breathing Together" creation story that sparked our entire discussion.

Thanks for joining us in this attempt to think more geologically about our moment in deep time.

Book Recommendations from Dr. Bjornerud

Dr. Marcia Bjornerud’s books Timefulness and Turning to Stone

Robert Hazin’s Symphony in C and The Story of Earth

Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain

Plus look up hyper local books about your local geology including field maps and otherwise to get to know your local geology

Look for your state and provincial geological survey and agency that will have free maps and guidebooks

Look up a series of Roadside Geology of [STATE].

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 eat their nestmates' feces after each molt to acquire essential gut bacteria. Without this microbial inheritance, they'd starve, even when surrounded by wood.

This sparked Lyla's curiosity about her own inner ecosystem. She learned about her microbiome, what it needed, and how to shape her personal island to be a healthy habitat for her microbial partners.

Now, Lyla tends her sourdough starter Bernard like a pet, recognizing that Bernard might be one of the most influential relationships in her life. When friends are inexplicably angry, she wonders: dysbiotic? When someone never gets sick: excellent microbial diversity?

The first lesson "Islands sculpt" taught Lyla: we need other living beings to exist. We are, quite literally, much like termites and their microbial partners.

This insight made Lyla skeptical of techno-utopianism. She questions Mars colonization plans that rarely discuss how we'll "carry the right islands" with us to survive. Which essential microbial species are they planning to pack? How will they do that? Are they even thinking about that, or do they assume technology is enough?

From Lyla's perspective, we still bring our waste back to Earth from the International Space Station. To her, this sounds like we haven't figured out how to manage basic biological processes in space... but sure, let's colonize Mars.

[MUSIC INTERLUDE]

Lyla's Apartment Island

Moving outward from her inner ecosystem, Lyla's apartment isn't just her home—it's a bustling metropolis for countless uninvited species. Research reveals our homes are biodiversity hotspots we happen to sleep in. The bigger your place, the more species it likely hosts, following MacArthur and Wilson's law.

When Lyla moved from her parents' home into her apartment, her allergies changed. Downsizing reshaped her entire domestic biodiversity portfolio, though that wasn't mentioned in the rental agreement.

Lyla now manages her apartment as an island habitat—for herself, her microbiome, and all the organisms evolving there. She shifted from daily microbial warfare to soap, vinegar, and natural cleaning products. Her plants aren't decorative; they're biodiversity ambassadors, bringing in beneficial organisms that can outcompete bed bugs and mites resistant to human chemical warfare. She even composts in a corner—establishing a soil embassy in urban territory.

Her friends think she's lost it when she refers to "the island habitat formerly known as Studio 4B," but Lyla recognizes an important truth: she's not maintaining a home, she's co-managing an ecosystem that shapes her health and well-being.

This brings Lyla's second key insight: our strategy of thinking we're separate from and in control of nature is false. Our "nuclear" approach often kills what we need while creating perfect conditions for harmful organisms that overtake our defenses.

As a student of ecology, she knows about the famous "megaplate experiment." Scientists created a huge petri dish with zones of increasing antibiotic concentration. Bacteria with zero prior resistance evolved and conquered every defense in just 10-14 days. The lesson: the only choice is to live in right relationship with the rest of life, instead of trying to control it.

Lyla's approach offers good advice for all of us: stop killing everything and start understanding what's living with you. Learn what organisms care for you so you can protect them from the ones that want to hurt you.

[MUSIC INTERLUDE]

Lyla's Neighborhood Island

Expanding her perspective to the community level, Lyla's work as an urban planner reflects lessons learned from her childhood in classic Levittown suburbia—perfectly optimized for the "average" American family. While safe and comfortable, something felt off. The neighborhood was designed around one major employer. Everything was great until that company left, devastating the region.

This taught Lyla that optimization comes at a cost: the more efficient a community becomes through tools like zoning, the less resilient it becomes. As a student of ecology, Lyla knows what Dunn calls the diversity-stability law—diverse ecosystems are more stable and resilient to shocks.

When Lyla struck out on her own, she chose a beautifully chaotic neighborhood—small shops, odd apartments, light manufacturing, the kind of economic diversity economists call "resilient" and traditional urban planners see as messy. When the pandemic hit, this diversity proved its worth. The neighboring luxury condos collapsed when wealthy residents fled to the woods. Lyla's neighborhood? It was hit but bounced back stronger than ever, just like more diverse agricultural systems.

As an urban planner, Lyla advocates for "productive messiness"—development that encourages the complexity that makes planners nervous but communities resilient. The lesson: efficiency and resilience often exist in a healthy non-dual (i.e., a both-and, dynamic instead of an either-or dynamic) tension.

[MUSIC INTERLUDE]

Lyla's City Island and Climate Reality

Studying climate projections for her city, Lyla encounters sobering data: an estimated 1.5 to 3.5 billion people will be living outside the human climate niche by 2080. Six thousand years ago, humans were decent climate generalists. Now? We're specialists who built civilization around specific agricultural conditions—like evolving to live only in climate-controlled malls right before the power fails.

Lyla's southern city will soon have Venezuela's climate, becoming a fundamental niche for parasites that thrive there. With this knowledge, Lyla develops plans to keep out malaria-carrying mosquitoes while helping local species migrate north for survival. She focuses on partnering with other cities and creating natural corridors to help our fellow species survive the Anthropocene.

But Lyla is also aware of unintended consequences. Her subway ride is a corridor for anything that lives well with us. Cities aren't separate from nature—they're petri dishes with really good coffee shops. The megalopolis from DC to New York has resulted in pigeons interbreeding into a new subspecies. Our urban planning creates a version of the megaplate experiment, but now for species that move well with us: pigeons, rats, and various others.

The sobering realization: humanity has turned Earth into interconnected human-created islands that are breeding grounds for things that make us sick—viruses, mites, bugs, and rats. Every strategy we use to control other living beings often selects for organisms that can overcome these controls.

It's like building bigger levees to hold back floods while the floods get bigger and overtake our defenses.

This has led Lyla to approach urban planning differently. Instead of asking, "How do we control and fight forces that harm our city?" she asks, "How can we dance with nature to shape our island city in ways that nurture species we live well with and work with those species to protect us from those that harm us?"

[MUSIC INTERLUDE]

Lyla's Professional Crisis

Over her career, Lyla has developed a deeper realization about a fundamental problem. Her entire training focused on problem-solving—learning to notice that Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall and figuring out how to put Dumpty back together. But ecology taught her Rob Dunn's "Humpty Dumpty Challenge": it's easier to break something than rebuild it.

Lyla learned this firsthand early in her career. When the city faced deteriorating water quality, her boss chose technological solutions—treatment plants, industrial filters, chlorine. It worked, but over 15 years, this "solution" has required continual upgrades, increasing chemicals, and rising costs just to maintain the same water quality.

She began to see how any city is both an island AND part of a broader bioregional island that shapes the city. A watershed—where a city gets its water—provides a good starting point for understanding the broader bioregion. Cities like New York that focused on honoring and preserving natural ecosystems in the Catskill Mountains north of the city found that these natural processes did "the hard work" of creating clean, healthy drinking water. Care for the bioregional island and it will care for the city island within it.

But when urban planners treat their city as isolated from the broader ecosystem—cleaning water only after it reaches the city instead of caring for the bioregional island—the broader bioregion may decay as the city strains the island it depends upon.

Lyla learned about cities that chose to protect their watersheds instead of relying on technology. Those cities generally have fewer problems. Then she connected this to Dunn's Humpty-Dumpty idea.

If a bioregion is a healthy ecosystem working in harmony with the smaller island cities within, it's much easier, cheaper, and healthier to manage issues within the city itself. But the more degraded any natural system becomes, the harder it is to put the system back together again.

You can't just plant a rainforest. You also can't simply plant a watershed and its supporting ecosystem. It must be continually tended, nurtured, and lived with in right relationship. The less we do that, the bigger our problems become, and the harder it gets to "put Humpty Dumpty back together again."

Lyla started seeing this pattern everywhere—the default approach of many urban planners: break the natural system, attempt technological replacement, discover new problems, add more technology, repeat until you either spend more to maintain the status quo or give up and let the "solution" collapse.

Lyla's approach shifted from "How can we fix this?" to "What are the broader islands shaping our city and how can we support them in being healthy and vibrant?" Her focus now is working with natural systems rather than replacing them. Preserve wetlands instead of building sea walls. Create healthy urban tree canopies instead of trying to air condition our way to habitable cities.

[MUSIC INTERLUDE]

Lyla's Institutional Evolution

As Lyla's understanding deepened, she began examining her own professional environment through an ecological lens. Her department was designed when climate was stable and suburban sprawl was humanity's greatest achievement. But institutions, like species, must adapt to changing conditions or face extinction.

This realization crystallized when Lyla learned about the dusky seaside sparrow. This bird thrived in Florida marshes for 200,000 years until humans paved them for the space program and sprayed them with DDT. The last one died in 1987 at Disney World—which seems like dark humor from the Universe.

When Lyla looks at her department, even with amazing colleagues doing their best, she sees how rules, procedures, and approaches developed for a different era now limit their capacity. Institutionally speaking, they're like the dusky seaside sparrow—perfectly optimized for an ecosystem that no longer exists.

It's not about bad faith or ill will. It's the power of precedent, default options, and embedded patterns from institutions formed when optimization, efficiency, and technology ruled.

Lyla found inspiration in crows. Unlike the seaside sparrow, crows have amazing capacities to observe, understand, and adapt to changing island conditions. Crows exemplify resilience through ingenuity, resourcefulness, and adaptiveness.

For Lyla, this translates into constantly questioning her work and department: Why are we doing this? Are we just following how past colleagues solved problems? Are we living in the same island conditions? What's changed? How can we change with it? What are we ultimately trying to bring forth? How would we know if we're making progress? How would we know if our institutional approaches are no longer useful? What can be done to let go of old ways institutionally while still meeting our responsibilities?

Recognizing that she's part of an institutional island that shapes her and that she can shape, Lyla models what it looks like to be more like a crow than a dusky sparrow. She shares the sparrow's story as a metaphor for her department: Are we more like dusky sparrows or crows? Do we have the cognitive capacities to adapt to changing conditions, or will we keep doing what worked before until conditions change so much that our institutions collapse?

Her colleagues initially thought she was being dramatic, drawing weird analogies from birds unrelated to urban planning. That was until three "100-year" floods occurred in ten years. By the third time, they started thinking seriously about what they could learn from crows—not only as individuals but as an institutional island partially responsible for shaping the city and bioregional islands where they, their neighbors, and friends live.

[MUSIC INTERLUDE]

Lyla's realization: It’s not about us

Before we explore Lyla's integrating realization, let's pause to recap her journey. Through studying ecology, practicing healthy living, and working as an urban planner, Lyla has discovered that "Islands sculpt" operates at many scales: fromL the microbial communities within her body, to her apartment ecosystem, to her neighborhood's resilient diversity, to her city's role in global climate patterns, to her institution's need to adapt like any other species.

Each level has taught her the same fundamental lesson: we're not separate from nature—we're embedded within nested ecosystems that constantly shape us while we shape them back. The question isn't whether we'll be sculpted by our islands, but whether we'll participate consciously in healthy relationships or unconsciously create destructive patterns.

[and, as a quick aside, this has been known for quite some time in a number of indigenous cultures…for now, I’m focusing on what is learned from ecology; that, in no way, diminishes what has been known and how it was learned from other ways of knowing; we’ll return to this in future episodes]

Now, Lyla's final breakthrough from ecology is simultaneously the most ego-deflating and liberating: humans aren't Earth's protagonists. At best, we're recurring guest stars who get too attached to our own subplot and then try and make our story the main plot line.

Most life is nothing like us. Not only that….most of life doesn’t pay any heed to us at all. complete indifference. But here's the kicker—we absolutely need a good deal of other types of life to be healthy, including cosmic, geologic, and biological life. We depend on species we love and need. And yet, we're systematically destroying the very relationships that sustain us.

To illustrate, think about this… Even if we cause mass extinction, we won't eliminate biodiversity. Most biodiversity consists of ancient single-celled organisms that survived the five prior mass extinction events. When people worry about "the end of nature," they're really worried about the end of nature that looks like us and that is the part of nature that we love and need. What we risk isn't the eternal loss of biodiversity—it's killing ourselves along with all the life we love and depend on.

Lyla's perspective on humanity shifted when she started thinking about our species in relation to the typical life course of species. Our branch, homo, separated from apes about 17 million years ago. The climate conditions humanity is adapted to have only existed on Planet Earth for about 1.9 million years, a blink of an eye in geological timescales, as discussed n the previous episode. Homo sapiens appeared just 200,000 years ago, which is not even a blink of an eye. Given that species typically last 2 million years before going extinct, we're essentially toddlers—toddlers with nuclear weapons and delusions of grandeur, believing we hold dominion over Earth and all other life.

And, just like any toddler, that belief, at some point during development, just might have been healthy. It provided us, as a collective, an initial foundation in feeling valued, loved, and important in an infinite universe where, at those scales, we are radically small and insignificant. Still, just like toddlers need to, we, as a species need to grow up and find more stable and true beliefs that still allow us to feel our sense of worth without them coming at the cost of other beings.

This humility—recognizing it's not all about us—has created profound shifts in how Lyla approaches her work and life. She still asks questions like: "What do my community members want and need, and how can I support that as an urban planner?" But she also asks: "What can I do to nurture the life I am inextricably linked to? How can I live in right relationship with the rest of life? How can I support not just surviving but flourish in the islands I’m part of?

Through this broader lens, Lyla has learned that she, and indeed all of humanity, is not at the center of the universe, our planet, or even our biological community. AND… that doesn't mean we don't have a valuable role to play in living in healthy relationship with the rest of life.

From this understanding, Lyla has discovered that her value doesn't come from being "better than," "in control of," or any other narrative that places humans at the center of the universe or individuals above others. At the same time, life isn't meaningless just because it's not about you.

Through studying ecology, Lyla has recognized the black-and-white thinking deeply embedded in Western culture—what scholars like Edward Said have called the legacy of Orientalist thinking that creates rigid categories of "us versus them," "civilized versus primitive," "good versus bad." This cultural pattern says you're either the best or you're nobody. There's no in-between.

Lyla has learned an alternative way of understanding her worth. She has learned that her sense of worth, fulfillment, and growth is directly tied to the quality of her relationships. The more relationships she has that are healthy, reciprocal, honoring each other's strengths and balancing each other out, the happier and more fulfilled she is, becomes, and acts.

Beyond that, she's grown into a deep love and appreciation for life—all of life—and the ways in which, when living in right relationship, she can hold what might seem like contradiction, but is a non-dual whole (one of those both-and dynamics, instead of an either-or dynamic): On one hand, all beings—individual humans, animals, plants, insects, bacteria—have their own unique ways of manifesting the beauty and magnificence of life, expressed on their own terms. On the other hand, all beings are unconditionally and universally connected, drawn to one another in what Lyla can only understand as deep, sacred, eternal, and universal love. Both are true and reflect two sides of the same single coin.

This realization—that all flourishing is mutual and grows from living in right relationship with all other life, guided by love and nurtured through wisdom that can only mature through living—provides the foundational frame for all her actions.

(which, again, as a side note, is aligned with what a range of indigenous cultures have know for quite some time. Indeed, “All flourishing is mutual” is a direct quote from, surprise surprise, Robin Kimmerer. For me, I see this as an indicator of consilient resonance… an idea we will return to, but, if you are curious about it, read the text only supplement to the previous life breathes episode.

From her daily dance with her microbiome, to her rhythmic relations with the ecosystem living in her apartment, to her healthy relationships with friends and neighbors, to the ways she nurtures and sculpts her city to be in right relationship internally and with the broader bioregional island, to living in right relationship with colleagues and shaping her department to be more adaptable and effective.

All of this is supported by her recognition that we are all islands, and all islands sculpt and are sculpted. This sculpting is only healthy when it happens in right relationship in all directions—vertically, horizontally, and diagonally.

[MUSIC INTERLUDE]

Living the Aphorism

Through Lyla's story, I hope hope you can see how "Islands Sculpt" is more than description—it's a guide for living in right relationship with the rest of life.

Every boundary is a membrane letting some things through and others not. Every separation is a possible invitation into relationship.

Every individual is an ecosystem, every ecosystem an individual.

We're simultaneously sculptor and sculpted at every scale and connected vertically, horizontally, diagonally, and in any other direction one might go.

Lyla tends her microbiome like a garden, manages her home like a habitat, moves through the city as a conscious participant in evolution, advocates for institutional adaptation, and approaches everything with appropriate humility about the interdependencies she's embedded in.

She asks better questions like: "What kind of island are we creating? What will these islands sculpt? How can we design for healthy relationships rather than control?"

Living "Islands Sculpt" means approaching choices with an eye towards ecosystem management, designing for reciprocity over control, recognizing our influence while accepting our limits, and developing skills to participate in processes much larger than ourselves.

It also means laughing at the cosmic joke that humans, at least us Occidental “Westerners”, spent the past millennia trying to separate from nature, only to discover we ARE nature, nature IS us, and the joke was always on us. Thankfully, nature, is infinitely gracious and always ready to laugh and dance with us, once we turn towards living in right relation.

[MUSIC INTERLUDE]

Episode Recap: Key Insights from "Islands Sculpt"

Before we close, let's recap the core insights from Lyla's journey, as inspired by Rob Dunn’s book, through the many scales where islands sculpt and are sculpted:

At the microbial scale: We learned that we're not individuals but walking ecosystems. Our health depends on nurturing beneficial relationships with the trillions of microorganisms we host, rather than trying to sterilize our way to wellness.

At the home scale: Our living spaces are biodiversity hotspots that shape our health. Working with natural processes rather than against them creates healthier environments for us and our microbial partners.

At the neighborhood scale: The tension between efficiency and resilience teaches us that diversity creates stability. "Productive messiness" in communities mirrors the diversity-stability law from ecology.

At the city scale: Climate change reveals how our urban planning has unintentionally created island chains perfect for species that can harm us, while threatening those we need. The solution isn't more control but better partnership with natural processes.

At the institutional scale: Like species, our organizations must adapt to changing conditions or face extinction. The choice is between being like the inflexible dusky seaside sparrow or the adaptable crow.

At the cosmic scale: Perhaps most importantly, recognizing that we're not Earth's protagonists—but we're not meaningless either. Our value comes from our capacity for right relationship with all life, guided by love and mutual flourishing.

The overarching insight: We are all islands, and all islands sculpt and are sculpted. This happens whether we're conscious of it or not. The question is whether we'll participate in creating healthy relationships or destructive patterns.

"Islands Sculpt" offers us a framework for understanding our place in the web of life—not as controllers, nor as meaningless mass or as victims, but, instead, as conscious participants in the endless dance of life sculpting life, who have the capacity to see and understand all of these dynamics and to choose right relation over domination.

[MUSIC INTERLUDE]

Conclusion

In our next episode, "Beings Adapt," we'll delve into neuroscience and psychology to understand how, at our core, we are beings that are constantly adapting to our various islands at various scales, and, critically, how we do that through the capacity to invent social realities.

Together, these three aphorisms—Life Breathes, Islands Sculpt, Beings Adapt—offer a framework for understanding the nature of reality that provides the foundational assumptions that will be built on and leveraged throughout this podcast.

Until then, tend your islands well, and remember: you're not separate from the forces shaping you—you're an active participant in the endless dance of life sculpting life.

PS A shout-out to Donna Spruijt-Metz who offered the word “sculpt” when I shared very early versions of the 6 word metaphysics. She suggested it was more poetic and, the more I engaged, the more I liked it. Thanks, Donna! =)

I'm excited to welcome Reverend Dr. Christopher Carter—someone who's been both teacher and guide for me in learning how to breathe into spiritual formation. 

I met Christopher in late 2019 at a Racial Resilience Workshop he co-led with Seth Schoen. What struck me immediately was how they held something almost impossible in our polarized times: seeing racism's deep complexities and harms while never dehumanizing anyone. They offered a rare path through troubled times rooted in love and grace.

Christopher and Seth became key teachers in navigating not just racial dynamics, but my own struggles with my Lutheran lineage. They provided spiritual guidance when I needed it most (their role in my spiritual development is in a text-only post on the negotiating reality substack page entitled: Music: My Anchor to Sacred Love).

But Christopher isn't just a gifted spiritual guide—he's the perfect guest for today's negotiation because of his scholarly depth. He's Associate Professor of Theology, Ecology, and Race at Methodist Theological School in Ohio, wrestling with pressing questions: How do we understand our relationship with Earth? How do we reckon with ongoing racism? How do we create spaces for genuine healing?

His work weaves contemplation and action, spirituality and justice. His book The Spirit of Soul Food explores connections between what we eat, how we live, and liberation we seek—making a compelling case for Black Veganism with excellent recipes to boot. He also serves as Lead Pastor at The Loft, sits on Farm Forward's board, working to end factory farming AND is co-host of the Progressive Christian Podcast. 

And, as a bit of foreshadowing, Christopher and I went broad and deep. Christopher immediately connects my "Life Breathing Together" story to his son's traumatic birth—that moment when breath meant life itself—and we then go deeper into why we're all literally breathing the same air and dealing with the same consequences. We explore how the ancient Babylonian myth of redemptive violence pops up in "might makes right" thinking, from capitalism to our climate crisis, and why we collectively in the U.S. have been drawn to become super apex predators who hoard rather than balance with life as in healthy ecosystems. But this isn't just diagnosis—we map out practical frameworks for refusing false binaries, practicing hope as an active discipline rather than passive waiting, playing with and fleshing out three ways of knowing, and learning to flow between fusing fully with our experiences and de-fusing from them to be able to observe oneself and the situation. It's a conversation about courage, community healing, and what it actually takes to breathe together shifting towards both/and grace.

Three books Christopher Recommended:

Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward

Arline T Geronimus’s Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society

Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

Part 1 of a 3 Part Series about Metaphysics: Explorations into the fundamental structure and nature of reality

"Life Breathes."

If history has a rhythm, what happens when we zoom way out—past generations, past centuries—into geologic and cosmic time?

What if history isn’t just human memory—but planetary breath? The pulsing, expanding, and contracting of life itself—across billions of years?

Why does that matter?

Well...If you were riding a tidal wave that’s about to crash into shore—wouldn’t you want to know?

Here’s the roadmap for today’s journey:

Part 1: The Planet’s Vital Signs

We’ll start with the current health of our planet, using the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s Planetary Boundaries model. Short version? Earth’s self-regulatory systems—the ones that keep life livable—are breaking down. Returning to the previous analogy, this is the tidal wave we are riding on that’s about to crash into the shore. Or, put more poetically: Our Mother Earth is struggling to breathe the way she once did—the way that made humanity possible.

Part 2: Why Creation Stories Matter

Next, we’ll dive into the importance of creation stories. (Trust me, it’s more than just ancient mythology.)

I’ll paraphrase some of my earlier writings—posts you can find on my Medium page (erichekler.medium.com)—where I wrestled with a big question:

Can we craft a creation story that honors both what science shows us and what spirit calls us toward?

One rooted in cosmology, geology, and physics—yet grounded in reciprocity, ethics, and awe. One that invites us to live in right relationship with the universe, not just study it.

Along the way, you’ll see how Robin Wall Kimmerer’s telling of the Skywoman story lit a path for me—but also why I felt we might need a bridge-story too, one that can speak to those of us steeped in Western science without losing the heartbeat of sacred living.

Part 3: A New Creation Story — "Life Breathes"

Then, I’ll tell a revised creation story—one aligned with what we know from contemporary science, and one that gives us a felt sense of how the universe breathes... and how we belong inside it.

This story—"Life Breathes Together"—will also set up future episodes:

* "Islands Sculpt" — exploring how environments shape us, drawing from the science of ecology

* "Beings Adapt" — exploring how humans adapt to reality bubbles, drawing from the sciences of neuroscience and psychology (finally getting into my home turf!)

These six words: Life breathes. Islands Sculpt. Beings Adapt. are the three part series focused on metaphysics. Explorations into the fundamental structure and nature of reality. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Important caveat: This creation story isn’t meant to be a rigid scientific claim. It’s a living framework—an offering for our moment—meant to be revised as we keep learning.

For those who want the deep dive into the scientific backing (and caveats), I’ve posted a sister essay where I put my scientist hat back on and lay it all out, which you can find on the negotiating reality substack page.

After that we'll wrap up with a few quick reactions, a recap, and then an invitation to try out a breathing and visualization exercise meant to help internalize the story of Life Breathing Together. 

How’s that sound? Good?

Awesome.