Planetary Regeneration Podcast | Episode 11: David McConville and Dawn Danby
This blog is a transcription of the 11th episode of the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, hosted by Regen Network’s Chief Regeneration Officer, Gregory Landua.
In this episode, Gregory interviews David McConville and Dawn Danby from Spherical Studios. Listen on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher; or read the transcription below.
Gregory: Hello and welcome to the Planetary Regeneration Podcast. I’m your host Gregory Landua.
Hello and welcome to the Planetary Regeneration Podcast. In today’s episode, we have David McConville and Dawn Danby, joining me from Spherical Studios and their home out in Oakland, California. Episode was pretty amazing. They have a really deep understanding of regenerative design from a holistic perspective, deeply imbued by the work of Buckminster Fuller. The conversation today really runs the gamut and I hope you enjoy it. I’m looking forward to having David and Dawn back on the podcast in the future. Enjoy.
Gregory: Boom. Welcome to the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, David and Dawn. I’m so excited to have you all — two of my favorite “regenerati” or “regenerates.” I’m excited to dig in, and I’d love it if you wanted just each do a quick introduction to the audience about what you’re passionate about, and if you were to name an imperative for our age, what feels true to you.
David: I’m nominated. Thanks for having us, of course. It’s always a pleasure and it’s a good excuse to hang out with you for a little bit. Let’s see, what passions. The first thing, when you just said that, since we had no run-up to this and you very explicitly didn’t want to give us any kind of heads up on conversational topics, the first thing that came to mind was context. I had a flash in my own work of the past 20 years or so. I’ve been attempting various techniques, particularly experiential techniques for understanding that nested scales of our existence of the context within which we find ourselves. That’s not just spatial context but a temporal context, and even spectral and relational context. I think that plays into the second part of your question in that I feel that de-contextualization is such a significant aspect of why so many things are going haywire at the moment, because there’s not a deeper sense of particularly the relational context, in many ways, intentionally broken by our system that depends on us actually not being attuned to the rationality of our existence. So much of what we’re experiencing now is the reconnection to that context.
Dawn: Small being. Small beings of all kinds are a part of our context. I think we’ve cross paths and I’ve cross paths with this community in the last three years, after having spent many years, couple decades, working in — what was it originally called? — ecological design and then became sustainable design, and then increasingly over that time got further and further away from looking at life systems. What I was doing around what was called sustainability in design worlds, looking at buildings and infrastructure and all the huge amounts of material flows going around the world, which I got really deep into for many years was that we got further and further away from looking at anything besides just materials and energy that could lead to power for human systems — energy in the form of really electricity and materials in the form of what could be manufactured or built — all of which is important work and interesting work, and fundamentally, when done well, is all about looking at systems in relationality and context. But after 20 years of that, I’ve found myself completely disconnected from life systems, to the point that, when introduced to the ideas around regeneration, I couldn’t see them — literally couldn’t even conceive that given how hard it was to do sustainable design or greener products or whatever it was. My original work was in industrial design and manufacturing. It was so hard working up against so many systems that I couldn’t imagine a context in which we could heal systems, that we could heal life, and couldn’t imagine either how we could use all the tools that I’ve been involved in for 20 years to do that. It led to a strange pause in nihilism. Now, I’ve been in this really, almost like healing myself by healing my thinking, in the last two years or three years, to realize what is possible, where the potentials really are, and therefore, what’s the science, what are the narratives, who are the practitioners, what’s the world that’s already here that needs to be given so much more attention and love. In a lot of ways, we’re working at Spherical to be a system to those transitions.
Gregory: Let’s dive straight into… Thank you both for that. That’s a fantastic introduction. Where I’m inclined to go is maybe pulling two threads and trying to weave them together. One is this really great provocation that David made during his introductory monologue. I don’t know what to call it. Not that it was a monologue but introductory [crosstalk] around context and the imperative of reclaiming and regenerating context. Then, the other one, which feels like it’s imperative, Dawn, that you’re inviting us to, that felt a little more embedded but I’ll take a crack at pulling it out, which is potential and actually embracing the potential of living systems and of life and of humanity, and starting there and honoring it and seeing it and being able to see it, being courageous enough to see it and to pull it out. I want to hold those two threads and I want to start by asking Dawn — what is the potential that you’re reconnecting with? Can you give us an image? Can you invite us into an image of what you were unable or unwilling to see as possible, but now you’re holding even if [inaudible 00:07:52]?
Dawn: Yes. I’m recognizing that for 10 of the last 20 years that I’ve worked in technology industry and leading sustainable design [inaudible 00:08:07]. In this moment above our heads…
David: A squirrel and a dog.
Dawn: Between squirrels and the dogs, it’s taking place such a battle right over our heads, quite literally and [unintelligible 00:08:20]. We’re going to manage that in the real time. In that context, I’ve encountered a lot of different visions of the future. Those were paid for by people who had an interest in particular futures coming about. I’ve been in a lot of these foresight projects and different kinds of initiatives where we are trying to imagine where we might go. Anybody who’s paying for that always rights themselves into the starring role. What I would have served is just that, in watching that and having that experience over and over, it felt to me that I was encountering, and in fact, being overwhelmed by lots of really biased futures that were techno-centric that were blind to life systems. Therefore, the potential that was being offered up, that was being always pointed to as inevitable, always had as a focus an intensification of the technical systems, a simplification of systems. The longer that I’ve spent unwinding from those narratives, those futures, and seeing what humans are capable of — even in a very small place within a community or within their own land — there’s the realization that life systems have is extraordinary power to do what we hoped we would see in the green building sector, which is that like…
[00:10:00]
Dawn: If you’re designing a building to accept sunlight and you’re looking at where the air flows and you’re thinking about the thickness of the walls and you’re looking at all of those interrelated contexts, all of sudden you get something that works so much better, many, many times better because you’re stacking all the functions in a building in a way that you would stack functions in a landscape. Being able to finally see that, even at a microcosm level, makes it easier to imagine into what it would look like for us to be healing lands, healing ourselves, at much larger scales — even collectively at planetary scales. That feels like the most audacious thought to hold.
Gregory: Let’s go to that audacious thought. What do you think is possible that your impression is that other people are unwilling to think it’s possible?
David: I have lots of thoughts about that.
Dawn: What do I think is possible? I think, in some ways, the practice of looking into the future sometimes always defaults back to what’s probably, given what trajectory we’re already on. If we look around and we think, “Okay, all the systems are in fast and slow and uneven forms of collapse so that’s likely that that will just play out.” That’s a really easy thing to hold. It’s probably the easiest thing to hold. In fact, I often say that I’m more well-armed for nihilism than the vast majority of people because I’ve spent more time, as many of us in our community, looking into the darkness. It takes, I think, a lot to be able to hold all that darkness and yet find cracks of light and imagine into how a narrative can change very quickly.
Gregory: Let’s just set some framing. Let’s just say, probabilistically, the most likely scenario is multi-system planetary collapse, at least from the human perspective. Let’s just put a number out there. Let’s say, we have a 3% chance or something, for that to not be true, for there to be some sort of smooth path transition in which our economy evolves and transforms to be deeply embedded in the living systems, and increasing complexity and increasing resilience and increasing health of the biosphere and humans and the other greater than human living wholes that we’re a part of. Let’s say there’s a 3% chance. If you were to just choose one or two nodes to engage with, how do we double that to 6%?
Dawn: I think there’s a thousand, thousand different nodes and we never know which one is going to work so we’ve got to try a bunch of them. I think I can argue that we need to change the finance system and we need to change the worldviews and we need to change the policy. There’s a lot of different…
Gregory: Is there something though, that’s deeper than that, that if you hit it, it changes many of those things, maybe, in a nonlinear way?
Dawn: I don’t know if I can answer this but I’ll tell you what I think today, because I’ve been obsessing over the particular types of futures that we’ve been fed. I actually think that it’s hard to live into a future that involves healing, that involves inclusion, that involves planetary regeneration, unless we tell ourselves that story. Regardless of whether the instrument ends up being something like incredible transformations of how capital gets moved or what policy things happen or what inventions are devised to allow us to, in real time, assess the health of our ecosystems on land and in water, all those things will be assistive but none of them will really necessarily add up to the narrative view. I do think that there’s a challenge that we have which is being able to even imagine into a particular future. That is the story that the finance people will need. That’s the story that the policy people will need. That’s the story that the technology people will need.
Gregory: Yes, so storytelling. The node is, in fact, having a coherent story of healing, regeneration, connection — to use the [crosstalk] term from Charles Eisenstein — the Interbeing story.
Dawn: Yes, that is self-inclusive of a thousand, thousand other stories, that are all happening in multiple places and in multiple contexts.
Gregory: The paradigmatic theory of change here that we have to invite people into a coherent paradigm. I’m just searching around. Is it that there needs to be the generation of the paradigm that people can magnetize to embrace and that imbues their meaning making or is it that we need to break the existing paradigm and let people come to whatever comes next or some combination of the two? What does it look like and feel like to be engaging at a paradigmatic level successfully?
Dawn: That’s a good question. I will leave this to David in a second, but I do think that people come to different perspectives in lots of different ways, is my belief. I don’t think there is an answer to this. I think that people have snap revelations. Some people evolve their perspectives over decades. I don’t think there is a single answer. I’m just recognizing that, as I personally go out and talk to people, that there’s an essential role [inaudible 00:16:58] that I’m [inaudible 00:17:01]. A lot of people are trying to point to what potentials might look like, and then it changes the nature of how people see the world that they’re in, and it changes the nature of what they think as thinkable and, therefore, investible. It’s one piece of what is needed.
David: To the [inaudible 00:17:23] your next question regarding paradigms. I spent many years exploring the foundations of western cosmology and trying to pinpoint the narrative that has catalyzed particularly the patriarchal dominant quest for transcendence, looking for how we leave this world to some other place that is still on an endless loop it seems, within this particular hyper-capitalist version of reality that some of the people that have been the greatest beneficiaries is the mass consolidation of wealth of the planet are caught within. Paradigmatically, after quite a bit of work to try to understand it myself [inaudible 00:18:21] whether that was heaven or whether that was outer space, what I came to appreciate was how blind that paradigm is to the nature of life itself, that because life is in many ways the substrate [inaudible 00:18:52] of all experience that it’s taken for granted to a such an extreme degree that we’ve built an entire — not we but particular social-economic structures have built an entire system based on the extraction of living systems reducing them to resources and then perpetuating a particular story around the possibility of a very, very narrow version of growth. From a paradigmatic level, I think that, as so many cultures have demonstrated throughout time and memorial, it’s absolutely critical to understand our places in our world as being alive. To understand that is the greatest context and the greatest gift that we can possibly imagine because what’s happened in the last 50 years — this has a lot to do with the contemporary work that we’re engaged around revisiting a lot of history of Gaia theory
[00:20:00]
David: — is the discovery, largely because of the space age, because of the quest for life elsewhere, we’ve found out how extraordinary the conditions here are. That has not yet made it into the dominant story. That is not actually part of the narrative that you get when you are subscribing to the heroic journey of science and technology and the scientific revolution and the story of modern progress, that all of that is extraordinarily anthropocentric, Eurocentric valorization of particular ways of knowing that are including and excluding so many other ways of knowing and the practices that are about integrating with the living systems of the planet. They are about recognizing the aliveness of the world. They are about catalyzing abilities for the enlivenment of our own communities by connecting with all of these relations upon which we are dependent and to which we can contribute. But the foundational aspects of the paradigm that’s the water that so much of that “capital w” Western world is swimming in, has a lot to do with disenchantment where we are no longer called upon to sing the world into existence. I think that, in a broad sense, that’s what so many people that are tapping into the notion of regeneration are experiencing, that we have an active role to play in bringing the world to life. It actually never went away. This has been sustained by cultures all over the world. There are plenty of examples. One of the reasons that we’ve been mapping these documentaries of regenerative projects all over the world is just to see the degree to which there are these patterns all over the place, of people either continuing with very long-standing traditions of celebrating and participating within the aliveness of their places or rediscovering what the possibilities are through all kinds of new terms that actually harkens back to old practices oftentimes — whether these are agroecology and water retention landscapes — all of the different modalities that are for engaging the biophysical living systems. I think, paradigmatically, at the root of it, is the recognition that this planet is actually alive and that itself is so difficult to absorb because in many ways, a lot of people are imagining killing it now. We went from a planet of resources and extractible things to turn into capital to — we’re killing the planet.
Gregory: Like create a giant Dyson Sphere computer brain or something.
David: It’s just like the sci-fi imaginary is so transcendent. This is what I was talking about. I wanted to understand what was it within the western cosmology, what were the [seeding?] conditions that would catalyze particular views of, “Okay, we either got to go to Mars. We’ve got to go [O’Neill?] colonies. We’ve got to download our consciousness” or whatever it is — we’ve got to get out of this corrupt place. It’s deeply embedded in Greek philosophy. It’s deeply embedded in the history of Christianity. Ironically, this is now being… to mythology and cosmology that’s being perpetuated under the guides of science and technology.
Dawn: Yes, it’s a re-warmed or warmed-over version of the same kinds of ideas.
Gregory: Yes, the [Manichaen?], Gnostic dichotomy transcendence that shows up in the Abrahamic religions. What I’m hearing is if we’re conscious of the larger, historical arch, we are still very firmly… Even the techno-utopianism is another version of a long history of re-warmed, basic philosophical precepts in which we as humanity need to escape the dirty, corrupt Earth to go somewhere else.
David: This was the hierarchy of the heavens. This was a great chain of being. What I discovered was that a lot of the characters that are taking the mantle of science and technology, and declaring themselves as the high priests of rationalism, are in fact acting a lot like the medieval catholic priests. In many ways, they are less comfortable with the paradox.
Gregory: Do you care to name names?
David: Not really. Let listeners discern for themselves. I’m not really interested in picking specific fights. I’m way more interested in how we’re elucidating the terms of paradigmatic structures that enable us to see ourselves as part of the living whole.
Gregory: Okay. I’d really be curious to hear your perspective about this. I would say I’m in a heated agreement with both the historical paradigmatic analysis of where we’ve been and where we currently are and how that looks a lot like the past. I think I awoke to that reality sometime in reading Robert Anton Wilson back in the day. I was like, “Oh.”
David: [crosstalk] at age like 13.
Gregory: I was a little older than that. I was maybe 18 or something when I was like, “Holy crap.” His work on the extraterrestrials, angels, the way that these different things expressed and paradigms. Anyway. Just anchoring. A heated agreement, there’s a lot of interesting things that we can geek out on there that would be a lot of fun. I also want to take a step back and share personally, that from my perspective, what I’m trying to do in the world, I think currently the greatest threat — and this is going to be provocative and “I probably shouldn’t say it” sort of thing but fuck it — the greatest threat from my perspective about the theory of change that underpins Regen Network is, essentially, Charles Eisenstein and his community.
I like Charles so I’m not saying that to enemy or other him, but my impression is — and I’m holding a moment David, when you and I were sitting on stage together a couple of Climate Weeks ago a couple of years ago in San Francisco Climate Week — it feels like there is a fervent and active debate about the role of sense-making of epistemology of science and how that fits or does not fit into a new way of engaging with, as an embedded member of a living whole. There’s this narrative that there’s elements that I agree with and there’s elements that I find deeply problematic that I would say Charles Eisenstein is a banner holder — that goes to the thinkers way before him as well — around what is problematic around reductionist and quantitative approaches to knowing. My experience of Charles is that he’s provocatively shaking the assumptions of someone — I’m not quite sure who — that he has in his mind of an archetype of the old paradigm by saying, “Quantifying nature, quantifying anything, is problematic, and reductionist science is bad.” I’ve sort of experienced that as, okay, I don’t disagree but I also think that we can’t throw the baby out of the bathwater. There is a need, a demand, an imperative for good science, for a quantitative approach, for striving to create mathematical and scientific models of reality that are embedded in and striving towards an articulation and honoring a complexity, if that makes sense. I experienced that statement and that stance to be considered threatening
[00:30:00]
Gregory: and downright pushed aside by a growing community of people that previously I considered to be kindred spirits or something. That’s a provocation and an invitation. I’d love to hear how that strikes you, what it brings up, what your thoughts are about that.
David: I think, fortunately, this has been addressed pretty extensively, possibly by people that aren’t included in the particular conversations that you’re talking about, so I’ll step back a second. We were at Climate Week, at Climate Summit, together. Charles had spoken before us. He was on his tour for Climate — a New Story. He was really challenging the quantification mindset, and challenging a lot of the precepts underlying how it is that climate has been addressed from a very quantitative IPCC modeling perspective. In his book, he brings forth a number of the characters and projects that I know we all celebrate and are fond of. I welcomed his challenging and his critique because I’ve spent many years working within the quantitative scientific community actually specifically challenging the foundations of that being the only way of knowing that mattered, because that would fail as a singular modality that in order to understand and interpret complex systems, you had to take much more, for the lack of a better term, transdisciplinary approach.
Gregory: Transrational perhaps.
David: Transrational, I mean, transcultural. It was critical to be able to understand things from multiple perspectives, the multiple ways of knowing. The work that I was engaged in for many years was doing that in the context of western science centers working with local bio-regionalists, working with local tribes and communities, working with different scientists of different trainings. When I hear a critique that’s provoking a questioning of the quantification — to me, that’s nothing new. That’s actually been around for a while. It’s just coming from someone who’s actually widely read and well-respected. If you recall during the Climate Summit, I was showing a bunch of quantitative visualizations of planetary systems from NASA and NOA and elsewhere. Just a few weeks ago, Charles followed up and he was like, “Hey, can I borrow those for my presentation?” Because, I think, ultimately, he’s throwing that as a provocation where it’s extraordinarily important and extraordinarily helpful that he might be…. if you perceive that as he’s trying to get to another level so that we’re not just stuck at that one level. I think the most gracious rendering of this can be found in Edgar Morin’s Paradigm of Complexity. If you look up his book on complexity, he talks about how critical reductionism is and how critical holism is and how critical it is not to be dualistic about separating these elements of complex systems. In my experience, just getting down on reductionism is a good way to isolate yourself from some of the people that we need the most, that are actually quite astute at particular forms of scientific inquiry.
Dawn: If I can build on that, this is also what we see in the world of technology and in the context of the technology that gets developed in Silicon Valley, that in that world, quantification is essential to be able to do work much of the time. One of the things I thought was very significant for me because for many years, my primary constituency were engineers. They were engineers who are dealing with the physical world. They were mechanical, electrical, civil, structural engineers. They were important as a constituency because they were moving such extraordinary amounts of material and burning so much carbon every time they did that. Any decisions they made had significant repercussions on life systems, and what we might call resources. Working within their context of quantification is very important. I think one of the things that was really significant for me was realizing the value of being able to do sophisticated modeling, in the case of looking at building and being able to run calculations that incorporated contextual information. If you’re looking at a building, you’d be able to say, “Okay, this building is in this place with this climate, with these prevailing winds, with this path of the sun.” All of sudden, the nature of what you’re designing would change. That’s a really good use of quantification. That’s a really good use of advanced and sophisticated modeling. It required a particular approach to quantification, but it was also working with the fact that, that is the nature of how many of our fellow humans work and think. We want to be working with them in all the different ways. One of the things that I will say about that, that was always interesting to me, was that what quantification often did for designers or engineers is it gives the impression of specificity and, therefore, of truth. You run an analysis on a computer and it would tell you, “Okay, this is going to be the carbon footprint of the product you’re making” or the energy use of the building or whatever it, which is a very seductive idea. People are very seduced by that. You end up with people working towards whatever it is that that target was supposed to be, what the hottest thing is — energy, intensity, carbon footprint, whatever it has been in the last 15 years — so you end up optimizing for certain things and as [Amory Lovins?] would say, “[passivizing?] for others.” The other thing was that people were attached to those numbers. Actually, the numbers often did something different, which was they gave you a direction. They were better used as heuristics than they were as specifics. That probably was the toughest thing to contend with. It’s sort of a subtle point around how do you use quantification in tools. It’s how do you use feedback from a computer model or something and have that say, “Oh. That tells me that I should adjust the building. That tells me that I should look at the water flow in a different way” as opposed to it telling you the truth about what will actually happen when you build that thing and you throw human [inaudible 00:37:08] complexities into it. But these are really important tools and just as important as looking at scientific visualization. I think, fundamentally, also because people who are trained in quantification are some of the most powerful allies that we have in the challenge that we have, is to help them see what else could be looked at and explored and added to algorithms and having those things change and evolve the more we know.
David: If I can flip that on its head now, that I think the part of the challenge of being within paradigms of quantification, is a failure to recognize paradox. The language of paradox, in many ways, is poetry. The ways in which we integrate quantitative reality and understanding with our own capacity for poetic imagining, anesthetic imagining, has everything to do with the way we build our worlds. Oftentimes, the quantitative worldview sort of sees beauty and desire and aesthetics and poetics as a nice-to-have thing — you beautify something — this is a trope. This is a total trope within scientific visualization to the degree that it was absolutely not trusted for many, many years on the part of real scientists, until you realize that it isn’t just a matter of lying when you try to make something beautiful or it is beautiful. You’re not trying to just put a marketing spin on it because it’s not about the market; that to pull out the beauty that’s inherent within the flaws and the metabolisms and the relationships within these living systems is absolutely essential to get to a deeper truth than what the quantified numbers are revealing. This is a very difficult thing to understand when you’re told that all of reality can be reduced to numbers.
Gregory: That Douglas Adams line, “What’s the answer to life, the universe, and everything?” and it’s a number.
Dawn: Yes, he was my Robert Anton Wilson.
Gregory: Yes. What does that mean? There’s a sense I have from my perspective and the work that we do
[00:40:00]
Gregory: at Regen Network around the appropriate role of quantification as a heuristic tool to visualize change and create consensus around the aspirational state that a group of people in a place would like to commit to together. That is not an exercise in getting the right answer. It’s an exercise in everyone being able to see models and representations, and use the innate power of human pattern recognition to allow that to calibrate a collective sense-making process essentially. There we are. It’s maybe like a bid or a candidate. With that said, I want to push on something you were saying, David, which was that there is a quantitative worldview. I’m not sure that that’s true. I don’t know that there’s a quantitative paradigm. I’m curious, but when you said it, I was like, “Is that true?” Or does the quantitative show up differently at different worldviews and the particular expression of a quantitative approach that, for instance, Charles is pushing against? I think he’s identifying it. He’s saying, “That’s the paradigm.” I guess what I’m saying is: is that the paradigm or is that just how this innate process shows up at a paradigm that we can name something else, and the same process will look very different at a living systems paradigm level?
David: Regarding the question about the worldview. If I said quantitative worldview, I would have been referring to the myth that all of reality can be quantified, that that’s the particular story that is the perpetual quest that all the world is number, and that we are living — and this is essentially the platonic story — that we’re just seeing the shadows of an ideal realm. That is very specifically laid out within beginning with Plato’s Timaeus and he’s describing this architect, this Demiurge, as this creator on the outside of the world constructing the world. This tacit assumption that there is a foundational reality made of numbers, beyond this imperfect manifestation in which we’re inhabiting, is foundational to much of the belief that emerged out of the seeds that Plato planted. It took on many different forms but I think the way it manifests now is that emphasis on science and technology and quantification as the way to achieve a synoptic god-like view on the world that is somehow ultimately objective and outside of the world, and can give us the god-like view. I think it’s precisely that assumption that that’s possible, the irony is that every time we get close to trying to achieve that, we find out the paradox that we cannot un-situate ourselves, that we cannot take ourselves out of context. There is no ultimately objective view, that the complex systems work in such a way that they’re trying to achieve that is one thing. Insisting that it can be achieved is what keeps getting turned over and challenged again, and again, and again. It’s not that attempting to achieve some type of, for a lack of a better term, intersubjective, empirical validation of material truth, which is essentially what science is doing. That type of radical pragmatisms to validate that something is occurring through multiple different measurements. That’s great, but to confuse that with the totality of the reality, and to say that we don’t have an active role in shaping that reality and/or perceiving that reality, is the fallacy of that particular worldview that from the quantum revolution to all of the weirdness in cosmology, to all of the situated knowledge, to all of the science and technology studies critique in their realms of study that have deconstructed that particular assumption [crosstalk]…
Gregory: Do you think that anybody still believes that?
David: Yes, I do because I think that everything [crosstalk]
Gregory: Who believes that?
David: As I was mentioning some of those people that are the high priests of science and [inaudible 00:45:21] right now to be the spokespeople for climate change. They have the solutions and they have the answers. You’ve experienced this directly man. Okay, so the answer is reduction of CO2. We’ve got to stop carbon emissions. Okay. Well, it turns out, we completely ignored land use. We completely ignored all the relationality that comes with the capacity to work with and relate to places. That quest for quantification actually leads down to very dangerous reductionists rabbit holes where, by now, you’ve got people that are now strong advocates for climate change and its higher realms of existence that are off of their radar because they tried to reduce such a complex system to something extraordinarily simple so that they can go out and just have the answer. It’s the danger of all [crosstalk]
Gregory: Yes, I’ve got it. It’s like the PPM fixation — parts per million.
David: Yes, [crosstalk] reductionist. Absolutely.
Dawn: Yes, and also in ordering. There is the tendency to put things in order of priorities, and therefore, taking those in order of priorities and putting them across a linear timeline. We’re going to solve first, solve first for the climate emissions problem. Once we’ve done that, that will be good. Then, 10 years hence, we’re going to start working on the land thing and the ag thing because that’s going to be a problem too, but we’ve got to wait on that because this other thing is so important. I’ve encountered that kind of stack ranking of prioritization all the time. There’s a part of that that’s been kind of fed by the need to look at climate systems and some people see the importance of those things, and I understand it. I had a conversation three days ago with a guy who’s a biogeochemist who spent many years working in the Amazon who, because of the nature of his work now — which involved managing an organization or sustainability of an organization; looking at its buildings; looking at its energy use — he had gotten to the point where he was like, “Well, we need to address first the climate thing and then later we’ll deal with the land thing.” You’re a biogeochemist who worked in the Amazon and you’re telling me that, because he was working within the constraints of what he saw every day. It’s not to say that what he wanted to work on first was problematic. I think it made lots of sense. Great, you have fossil fuels and lots and lots of buildings, and that ‘s the thing you need to deal with because you’re not in charge of that rural land or large scale agriculture or anything like that. It’s interesting how people will take… I think this is the thing I find myself most frustrated by, is that all of this is important work. We need to deal with the energy use in the buildings and the fossil fuels sector and everything. All of that needs to be addressed, but it’s the tendency to see those prioritizations that are then underpinned by a certain form of carbon reductionism, that then leads to seeing everything as zero-sum. We need to do this first and let’s divest from looking at land. Let’s divest from it financially and divest from it as a narrative, divest from it as a story that we’re telling because it needs to come later after we’ve solved the thing that’s most important to [inaudible 00:49:01] based on [inaudible 00:49:03]
David: To bring this back to the beginning of the conversation. If you recall, Robert Anton Wilson was a big fan of Korzybski and non-Aristotelian logic. That, in everything we’re discussing, at the root of it, is the challenge that emerges from dualistic logic. The idea of non zero-sum, the idea of disciplines, the idea of carbon versus land, it’s an either-or logic that is so deeply embedded that came out of the same tradition with Plato and with Aristotle, and then it just got overly simplified to where now we’re operating at a particular paradigm — not we — but the dominant logic of the zero-sum types of approaches and understandings have to do with an embedded logic of dualism.
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David: The most important thing that I think we can be doing is to be cultivating the capacity to work within the context of complex logics so that we can see the world from multiple perspectives. This is what Edgar Morin writes about in The Paradigm of Complexity so that we’re not having these debates that are sucking all the air out of the room about who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s also not just the matter of being relativistic and not having a perspective. It’s actually recognizing the complexity of these systems as you can look at things from different [opt-ins 00:50:27]. You can look at things from different views and there are different types of truths. That’s just the way that living systems operate. If this was the waves of controversy that Lynn Margulis created by suggesting that the origin of species was actually this weird combination of competition and collaboration, this endosymbiotic coming together that it’s even an anthropocentric overlay to talk about competition and cooperation. The world is far more subtle and complex in terms of how the dynamics of our relationships unfold, so the idea that we have to fight to be right or wrong about how it is we’re dealing in living systems can actually… they are practical implications because people argue so that they can get their funding, so that they can get attention. I think that we cannot forget that that tendency towards dualism is precisely why we’re in so many difficult conversations that can’t seem to be resolved.
Gregory: Yes, that feels like a good summary, essentially. I think that what I’ve been reacting to, in how I perceive — which could be myself falling into the trap of having the wrong colored lenses in my glasses — what I perceive in Charles’ provocation is exactly that expressing the currently unpopular side of a dualist trap, instead of demanding the next level of interpretation of a non-dual, multi-term, maybe three instead of two, term system that just allows us to be, “Oh, okay.” What is it that brings together the qualitative with the quantitative in a present moment of experience that reconnects us instead of separating us from the context?
David: This is reflected pretty deeply in the field of environmental ethics actually. The ways in which people are focused on oftentimes anthropocentric perspectives where everything’s being concerning itself largely with the [unintelligible 00:52:58] and a lot of the ecosystem services stuff. The world is reduced to a bunch of resources that we’re going to quantify so that we can understand what all the services are doing. On the other side, you’ve got deep ecology ecocentrism. There’s intrinsic value in life itself and damn your quantification because you’re actually reducing this to… You’ve got these two perspectives that, I think, both have extremely valuable things to contribute. I find myself not subscribing to either one of them, but also subscribing to both of them. To your point, at least for me, the reconciliation has come from the perspective or relationality, that there’s been some wonderful work done on what’s called “kincentric ecology” within particularly many indigenous traditions like specific traditions in Mexico and Turtle Island tribes. But it’s looking at: how do you put kinship at the center? Within environmental ethics it’s often called relational values. When you look at relationality, you can see the roles that both quantification and qualification — that both extrinsic and intrinsic values — play to see the whole system. I think that that’s extremely important in terms of the types of work that you’re doing, to be able to address how critical the relations are. Because I know you’ve personally spent a lot of time understanding how to look at wholes and you can’t just quantify. If you look at your children, no matter of quantification is going to tell you about the essence of your kids.
Gregory: Yes, but on the other hand, having a thermometer when you have a fever.
David: Exactly, it’s helpful to know what the temperature is.
Gregory: Really helpful.
David: Totally. I think that it’s very important to hold that space so that we’re not falling into those arguments in any prolonged way, because they actually get in the way of seeing the whole.
Gregory: Yes, a heated agreement. I think that’s well framed. Harkening back, I studied environmental ethics in college.
David: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Gregory: That argument between the anthropocentric utilitarian perspective that’s trying to meet the market where it’s at, and then provide an onramp, and the deep ecology, deep green resistance, doesn’t want to hear any of that. What I was pointing out is that falling into that battle is the greatest risk. That’s the biggest risk. At least, from my perspective, there is such deep complementarity. It’s like you can’t operate with just a left or a right brain. You need both.
Dawn: I think it’s also important to recognize the role that fear plays in this as well, that there is a tendency for people to work with the system they know. Also, I think, as more and more people become more sophisticated and more aware of the dynamics of what’s happening at a planetary scale, at a local scale, what’s just happening in terms of climate, ecosystem collapses, that it creates a lot of fear. That fear means that people are grasping for answers that they can be familiar with and the simpler the better. There’s an agility that we all need to cultivate to be able to engage in those conversations, to be able to then help people see that they’re holding a silver bullet — that they’re holding a duality, that they are holding quality over quantity and vice versa — is actually not an effective way forward. I think that that’s like a daily practice, figuring out how to have conversations with people who have, because of their fear, especially if they only come into awareness of a lot of these issues really recently so they are completely freaking out. They are still on that total intense zone of freaking out that many of us are so familiar with, that we have to remain agile and able to talk with them through it. It’s somehow related to how people are grasping particular types of solutions or particular types of ideas.
Gregory: Yes, beautiful. Now I want to sag away a little bit in our conversation and ask: who or what is inspiring you right now? What are you reading? What are you coming across? What movements or projects are feeling particularly enlivening that are like breadcrumbs leading towards reconciliation that we started to get a glimpse of understanding what it might feel like?
Dawn: Love this question. We’ll give you a reading list [crosstalk]
David: Just this morning I was listening to a podcast with Lyla June on For the Wild which was pretty remarkable. A lot of the work that we’re doing right now is research with different characters whose parents were from very different cultures or they grew up in very different places over the course of their childhood. In a lot of ways, this is post-dual. I don’t even think of it as non-dual, but this post-dual sensibility is embodied in [inaudible 00:59:03] one of these characters. He has a European father and a [unintelligible 00:59:06] mother. I’m really intrigued by folks that are embodying these many worlds because in my case I had to achieve an escape velocity to get out of my upbringing as southern Baptists and discover all these other things. The more that I’m able to work with people that have been inhabiting many worlds, the easier it is I find actually to work with a lot of the complexity of these systems. Along those lines, I’ve really been appreciating a lot of the writing around commoning lately that not just the commons as the idea of a resource, as a common-pool resource.
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David: but the practices of commoning because they really integrate this complex embodied relational understanding of how it is that we form bonds and trust and relationships that are absolutely essential to be able to do work that needs to be done right now. I don’t know if you saw, but the DisCO Manifesto is a truly distributed, cooperative organization as a response to the decentralized autonomous organizations to really bring back in this notion that we cannot offload our trust. We cannot offload the dynamics of relationality to just the technical infrastructure. The book Free, Fair, and Alive was published last month and looking at what they call “the triad of communing,” which are all of these principles around how building on Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize Winning work, but looking at what are all the different ways and patterns of communing across the world.
For me, a lot of this understanding of the various cultural practices and the patterns within those practices are really starting to help me to see how this notion of commoning can be seen with all of these traditional, indigenous communities as well as within ecosystems. Andreas Weber writes about this, that the reality is commoning, the biosphere evolved through commoning. For me, that’s extremely enlightening from a perspective of being able to point to what it is that we can be doing beyond the market and the state to recognize what is required for care. How do we create a cultural care? How do we really take into account the household work that’s being done? How it is that we feedback into and support and cultivate the commons that all of the regeneration work is, I think, absolutely contingent on our ability to understand and exercise those practices.
Dawn: There is always infinity of amazing analyses and non-fiction things to read. I think that balancing those with a lyrical of a poetic feel is really important right now. I’ve been really appreciating the work that the Emergence podcast has been doing in terms of just creating these very beautiful — some of the most beautiful — read essays that I’ve heard that just can drop the listener into a universe and into a deeper understanding of landscapes and land and places in a deeply poetic way. That’s been really awesome. We listen to a lot of it while driving with our six-year-old through Vancouver Island, moving between beautiful ancient old growth and freshly destroyed clear cut landscapes back and forth. It was beautiful and horrifying as a soundtrack to that experience and to that trip. Also, just in this last week, I was revisiting Priya Parker’s work on The Art of Gathering, how to have effective conversations, how to talk with each other. That’s also come up as really essential to a lot of this work. As I alluded to in the beginning, I can spend so much time in the technical world of green building and this and that, and now I’m feeling like I’m backfilling my knowledge around ecological design with many years behind you. We started training and doing a year-round permaculture design course up at the Commonweal Garden here, so we’re diving into a lot of the basics. There’s some things that know deeply that are incredibly familiar that has been our work for many, many years. Then, when it comes down to the soil science and many other things…
Gregory: Managing that [hew?] manure pile.
Dawn: Yes, realizing the universe of things that we don’t yet know. I wouldn’t even begin to know where to direct people but I’m appreciative of opening up that inquiry and having a deeper understanding of really what’s happening under our feet.
Gregory: Yes, I definitely echo the… everyone should take a permaculture design course. There’s such a great connection with just a practical vision of what it is to the day-to-day, day-in-day-out, live in a way that is designed in such a way to create an ergonomic fit between human health and ecological health. I would love to, maybe this is a bookmark, but it would be super fun to, at some point, I want to re-engage with education of that sort, and be doing that by and for people. If there’s one theme that I’m taking from this podcast is around just how much we need people who are deeply intelligent and talented at the quantitative sciences to be committed to a post-dual complex dynamic poetic love affair with the Earth, and how creating invitations as many as we can for that community of highly intelligent, highly skilled people to be bringing the tools that they’ve spent years cultivating to bear with the imperatives of our day, which are I think, taking that 3% chance that we have to avoid systemic collapse and increase it exponentially over the next generation, from 3 to 6, to 12 and just keep going up. I think we probably can get up there. If you’re going to toss a coin, we’re just a little bit over half that it’s going to come up. Beauty. Those are great invitations. I’ll do my best to make a little bit of a list for folks who are listening. I’ll have to admit that’s not one of my strong suits. If you two want to [crosstalk] a shortlist, I’ll try to include that in the show notes.
David: Gladly. Another aspect that we’ve been exploring pretty deeply is a lot of the work around the Rights of Nature and the strange paradoxical realm of how to embed structurally a recognition of other entities, of non-human entities. What it boils down to is the same thing it boils down to with a lot of the commons, which is anthological shift and understanding of ourselves as part of a greater whole. What’s really fascinating about the Rights of Nature work is that so many indigenous communities are actively involved in that because they see it as a way to structurally engage in that recognition, but at the same time it’s also very conservative communities like one in Pennsylvania. It was the first to pass anything in the US. There’s a postural meeting ground around how it is that we start to recognize the absolute, critical importance of the forests and of the various things that we call species, but ultimately it’s back to the relationships that we have or relationships that we value. How are we valuing those and both the quantitative and the qualitative sense? I think that that fundamental need to shift from the dualistic subject-object, individual-collective, into a much deeper understanding of all of ourselves as part of the greater context, as part of the greater nested whole, is at the heart of the paradigm that we openly discussing. By seeing the world as a living nested system, we get to experience ourselves and all of the other entities, whatever scales, as being absolutely essential within these living systems.
Gregory: Yes, I love it. We’re getting up here in terms of the top of the hour. I’m going to have to a hot-swap into just another phase of me wrapping up my Friday. I’m enormously grateful for both the work that you two do as individuals and as a couple, as a collaborative, and the work that Spherical is leading. We’re in the realm of the Gaian Systems dynamics and design, but we didn’t get to explicitly break surface so much, so perhaps that’s an invitation to do that again soon.
David: We’d love to.
Dawn: We would love it.
Gregory: Thank you so much.
David: Any excuse to hang out. Hope to see you soon.
Gregory: Likewise.
