What is it to think like a mountain? How is it that many of our decisions go wrong, sometimes producing negative side-effects?

You might remember hearing about a hole in the ozone layer that appeared last century. No one intended to create that hole. But we did it.

We didn’t intend to put mercury in our brains and lead in our bones. A recent study tested 62 samples of human placenta and found microplastics in every single one of them.

How do things go wrong on personal and planetary scales? And how can we do better?

3—Introduction to Ecological Thinking—A Wisdom-Based Approach

Thinking Like a Mountain: How Our Decisions Go Wrong, and How to Get Them Right

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Auspicious interbeing to you and yours, my friends. Koinos Hermes, and a deep bow of gratitude and reverence to Sophia.

What is it to think like a mountain? How is it that many of our decisions go wrong, sometimes producing negative side-effects?

You might remember hearing about a hole in the ozone layer that appeared last century. No one intended to create that hole. But we did it.

We didn’t intend to put mercury in our brains and lead in our bones. A recent study tested 62 samples of human placenta and found microplastics in every single one of them.

And here we can see a more holistic critique of capitalism. I don’t think the petroleum and plastics industry CEOs wake up in the morning and set the intention to put plastic into human placentas and developing embryos. The issue is not about capitalism versus socialism, but the simple fact that capitalism involves a style of thinking and a style of consciousness out of attunement with reality itself. We need a shift in thinking and in consciousness.

Gregory Bateson put it so well when he said, The major problems of the world are a result of the difference between the way human beings think, and the way Nature actually works. The Buddha would agree. Socrates would agree. Jesus and the Peacemaker would agree.

How can we think the way Nature works? That’s our focus. And the basic ideas of ecological thinking can begin to shift our perception and action in the world, helping us live better, love better, and further the conditions of life.

Today, we’ll go a little further into these ideas.

The government tried two things: Restricting the grazing by domesticated animals, and reducing the predators. Humans in conquest cultures have historically done a bad job at understanding the role and importance of predators, and they have also displayed a lack of skill in living together with those predators.

Naturally, when humans killed off lions, wolves, and other predators, the deer population soared—right past the carrying capacity for the ecology. The feedback loops that kept predators, prey, and plants in balance got thrown out of whack, and this led to a collapse of both the plants and the deer.

We find the basic idea of state and flow at work: The state or level of the deer population, and the input flow from humans. The flow here had to do with decisions made by the humans. Put another way, we find interwoven ecological processes of predators-deer-plants-humans.

The deer population depends on a feedback loop between the deer and the plants. From a certain perspective, the input of that loop is deer, and the output is grass, but we can also say the input is grass and the output is deer. Deer and grass make each other, and they collaborate to create an ecology. The processes at work include metabolism, which means transformation: The deer eat the grass and metabolize it into more deer, and the plants absorb sunlight and metabolize it into more plants.

Grazing that exceeds the ability of the plants to properly grow, mature, and propagate will lead to less food. If a positive or reinforcing feedback loop emerges—because we remove the essential balancing presence of natural predators—we will find an exponential shift in the state of the deer population.

The predators provide a negative or self-correcting feedback loop, while the deer provide a positive or reinforcing one (which exists because the ecology can provide food for up to 30,000 deer). We can contrast these loops by saying one loop becomes a runaway feedback, and the other functions as self-correction.

When the balance vanishes, the positive feedback loop takes over, and we find exponential growth in deer coupled with an exponential decline in grass—which starts out slow, and then becomes sudden as the exponential function takes over. We call this a runaway.

The deer population eventually exceeded 60,000, and may have blown past that, though the numbers are not clear. In any case, it led to what was described as a “morally shocking” famine in the deer population, with the deer suffering greatly.

We must recall here the intention of the intervention into this ecology: To help the deer thrive. In a grand stroke of ecological and philosophical irony, the exact opposite result emerged. The point of philosophical and ecological thinking has to do with reducing these sorts of unintended and unwanted outcomes in our lives and in our world.

If the human beings would have lived better with themselves, each other, the predators, and the ecology as a whole, they could have rejuvenated the land and the deer population in a wise and graceful manner. Instead, they collapsed the ecology.

Let’s look at this example in a way that draws from the terminology of ecological science or systems thinking. We’re going to question the value of using this approach, but it still seems important and potentially helpful in some ways to think about these terms. Try to stay with it, and we’ll come back to a different perspective.

And we need to do this, because you and I are the objects of these sorts of interventions—sometimes with the motivation to help us, often with the rationalization that the intervention is good for us.

We need to see that people have started to use systems thinking in ways that affect us every day, and the impacts can spread wide and far, both in space and in time. Systems thinking is hip, and people want to waive their systems thinking flag, so that they look very scientific and cutting edge.

As people continue to uncover its cogency, it will get colonized and co-opted by all manner of spiritual materialism. And that’s dangerous. People using systems thinking can have planetary impacts that reverberate for decades or even longer, so we need to inquire and think critically.

Corporations in particular engage in a kind of mechanistic systems thinking to more effectively manipulate us and their own internal processes, and they rationalize all their interventions, doing their best to see them as good. They fancy their products as somehow beneficial to us, but they almost never look at the larger ecological impact, and we can safely bet that they don’t engage in ecological thinking as we have tried to consider it here together. The same holds for governmental agencies.

So, we want to think about what systems thinking is as we may commonly see it, and also consider the limitations of those common approaches, and how we can arrive at a more holistic ecological thinking, which means practices rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty.

Let’s begin by reviewing a few things, which we tried to relate to a sense of wisdom, love, and beauty.

We have defined an ecology as a relative wholeness constituted by an interwovenness of relative parts or elements, each of which can affect the behavior or activity of the wholeness as well as the behavior or activity of the other relative elements. While each relative element of an ecology manifests a certain degree of relative autonomy, each relative element can only affect other elements or affect the whole in dependence upon other elements, and typically in recursive loops. Ecologies think, learn, and communicate, which depends on a flow of meaning, and not just a flow of physical forces.

We noted how radical all of that is. Among other things, the fact that ecologies operate on the basis of a flow of meaning gives us the opportunity to heal human culture—and thus heal Nature too—from the misguided metaphor of power—and all its negative consequences.

Power doesn’t matter to ecologies the way meaning does, and so if we think we see power dynamics at work in our culture, the way to heal them is to dispel the enchantment cast by the very notion of power itself—to see it not as something solid, but as a metaphor we can abandon.

How do we do that? By inquiring into how we can open up the flow of meaning again. Meaning offers us a peaceful path out of our insanity.

We reflected on this as part of our consideration of Gregory Bateson’s 6 criteria—for mind, ecologies, learning, thinking, evolution, and life in general. We have the same 6 criteria for all of these, which reveals something quite wonderful.

Let’s keep in mind that holistic ecological thinking invites us out of the delusions of force, power, physical energy, physical impacts, and linear cause and effect, and it invites us into the more vitalizing notions of patterning, context, recursiveness, and meaning. Ecological thinking invites us out of a mechanical universe made of matter that doesn’t matter, and into a living, loving, relational Cosmos, in which everything we do matters, and we exist in a vibrant web of meaningfulness.

We could rejuvenate ourselves, our cultures, and our world on the basis of this shift—if we accomplish that shift as part of better ways of knowing, being, living, and loving in a Cosmos that arises as total interwovenness.

Please keep these things in mind: patterning, context, meaning, interwovenness, dynamism, wholeness.

The wholeness and interwovenness that characterize the basic nature of an ecology is alive and alove, which means it has a dynamism. That dynamism means ecologies exhibit impermanence, a constant flow and flux.

These core aspects of reality—the wholeness, interwovenness, and dynamism—give rise to four major characteristics of ecologies that we can find rather difficult at times to fully accept and work with: precariousness, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. These characteristics arise directly as aspects of the nature of reality.

Okay. Ecologies flow and change. We saw that in the example of the Kaibab plateau. How do the changes happen?

Studying an ecology in part means studying the ways feedback-loop relationships constitute changes in, or the evolution of, that ecology, which we usually experience through time.

[Studying ecologies in part means studying the being-time and the time-beings of those ecologies (e.g., we may say, “for the time being, this ecology seems stable” and we may look toward the beingness of that time).]

We introduced this idea when we looked at Bateson’s 6 criteria for mind. We noted that ecologies must have recursive loops and not merely linear chains of causality. These loops operate within the ecologies, but they also transcend the conventional boundaries of the ecologies.

We saw that in our example. Deer eat plants, and that makes more deer. But in a balanced ecology, the deer give back to the plants. Their excretions help to grow more plants. So, each deer as an ecology transcends their own hide. And then we have human inputs that transcend the boundaries of the whole plateau.

Sometimes people speak about ecologies as having two basic functional elements: The state of the ecology and the flow of the ecology.

The state of an ecology functions like a status or indicator or set of indicators, and the decisions affecting it function like flows into and through the ecologies that help constitute their state. No ecology exists without states and flows. In human terms, the flows are effectively decision processes or “policies” that tend to operate in accord with some sort of aim or value.

Keep in mind, our lives get shaped by these aspects of ecologies all the time. Corporations and governments track the state of the culture, and they make policy decisions that function as flows of meaning into our personal, professional, and social lives. We are talking about how our life is. This isn’t abstract. Rather, it is urgently concrete.

Our romantic lives function like this, our families and friendships function like this, and our minds function like this.

Typical analyses of flows will often reduce them to material terms, but we will keep in mind that we want to try and focus on flows of meaning first and foremost.

States and flows dance by means of news of a difference—in other words, by means of meaning. This news of a difference in the states and flows is referred to as “information” but we must remember that information literally means shaping. Flows of meaning shape ecologies, and ecologies shape flows of meaning.

That’s such a beautiful thing to register: Flows of meaning shape ecologies, and ecologies shape flows of meaning. When we look at a forest or a plateau, we don’t first appreciate it as a flow of meaning. We could shift so much by just beginning to honor, appreciate, and deeply perceive this way.

We might then take a more ethical, wise, compassionate, and aesthetic approach to an ecology, because we would realize we don’t understand all the meaning flowing in it. Nor would we think it wise to simply force a human meaning onto a pre-existing flow of meaning which might cause problems for all of us.

Thinking of this dance of meaning as “mediated” by “news” of a difference can give the impression of a separation, but ecologies arise as interwovenness through and through.

Though we can speak in relative terms about “information,” a fundamental holism supersedes all conceptual tendencies toward fragmentation. The holism embraces a nonduality between unity and diversity, and thus, ultimately, holism transcends all relative separation, and an inconceivable intimacy brings things into being and shapes their evolution.

We have to see a dance in all the elements of the system, the way the supposed elements arise totally interwoven. What we think of as an input gets danced into an output. And that output gets danced into news of a difference. And that news of a difference gets danced into a feedback loop that carries what used to be the output back into the input. This reflects the recursiveness of ecologies. Deer become plants, plants become deer.

Everything flows together like this. We tend to think of it as a straight line, and we tend to think of it as pieces. This is the input. This is the process. This is the output. This is the information. This is the feedback loop. But the whole thing is a kind of loop, or a kind of interwovenness.

This interwovenness transforms an apparent cause into an effect, and an apparent effect transforms into a cause. This dance dances itself. And the dance arises out of its own states.

Since all the relative parts dance into one another, they aren’t really parts. They don’t have their own existence independent of the larger ecology or independent of one another.

We need to emphasize that no sentient decisions occur outside of feedback loops, which means no sentient decisions occur outside of relationality. This applies to you in your everyday life: all your decisions arise within various feedback loops, many of which you have no conscious awareness of, even though they impact you. All decisions—human and non-human decisions—arise as aspects of interwovenness.

When it comes to human participation in these dances, the dances evolve according to what human beings attend to, what they can become aware of and how they become aware of it. This is such a deep issue that we will need to inquire into it over the course of many contemplations. Indeed, many of our previous episodes focus on it in one way or another.

We need to continue reflect deeply on the inherently ethical, metaphysical, and aesthetic aspects of the seemingly simple act of attending. How we attend and what we attend to expresses our whole philosophy of life, and attention itself arises as an expression of our relative callousness and ignorance, or our relative care, compassion, wisdom, and sense of sacredness and wonder. Attention arises as thoroughly ethical in its implications.

This is why meditation in the context of a holistic philosophy of life is a most profound ethical and ecological activity. If you care about ecology, even the ecology of your own family or your own mind, but all the more so the ecologies of mountains, rivers, forests, and the great Earth, you will begin to value the arts of awareness and the practices of meditation—again, in the context of a holistic philosophy of life.

Human engagement in, through, and as this interwovenness arises on the basis of what we attend to and how we attend. The arts of awareness, the primal cultivation of awareness and attention, on the basis of our highest values, will decisively affect our participation in the ecologies of the world, and decisively affect those very ecologies we depend on.

We make the world in accord with how we attend to it, how we care for it. We are attendants of the world, attendants of the sacred as it manifests in, through, and as our world. Working with that requires LoveWisdom—it requires philosophy, not science as we commonly think of it.

The technical terms we include in our contemplation here—states, flows, inputs, outputs, information, feedback—we include them because it can help to think in these more technical terms, but only in a relative sense. We mainly need to remember these things if we want to talk to people who are involved in thinking about ecologies in these ways.

From a systems point of view, states are what we look at to make decisions, and flows are the decisions we make. But that’s a narrow way of thinking, and we need a more holistic philosophical view, including mythopoetic expressions.

As for this basic structure of states and flows, we may sometimes see this basic structure of an ecology explained as four parts: The inputs, the processes, the outputs, and the feedback. The inputs are the flows. Something comes into the system, triggering its self-organizing processes. These processes produce a result, which arises as news of a difference, or some kind of feedback that in turn affects or becomes further inputs.

Let’s consider a powerful example of the lessons we aim to learn here, by considering the work of Aldo Leopold. It resonates with the example of the Kaibab plateau, and it goes much deeper. You can find this passage in Leopold’s book, A Sand County Almanac.

Thinking Like a Mountain

A deep chesty bawl echoes from rimrock to rimrock, rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far blackness of the night. It is an outburst of wild defiant sorrow, and of contempt for all the adversities of the world.

Every living thing (and perhaps many a dead one as well) pays heed to that call. To the deer it is a reminder of the way of all flesh, to the pine a forecast of midnight scuffles and of blood upon the snow, to the coyote a promise of gleanings to come, to the cowman a threat of red ink at the bank, to the hunter a challenge of fang against bullet. Yet behind these obvious and immediate hopes and fears there lies a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.

Those unable to decipher the hidden meaning know nevertheless that it is there, for it is felt in all wolf country, and distinguishes that country from all other land. It tingles in the spine of all who hear wolves by night, or who scan their tracks by day. Even without sight or sound of wolf, it is implicit in a hundred small events: the midnight whinny of a pack horse, the rattle of rolling rocks, the bound of a fleeing deer, the way shadows lie under the spruces. Only the ineducable tyro can fail to sense the presence or absence of wolves, or the fact that mountains have a secret opinion about them.

My own conviction on this score dates from the day I saw a wolf die. We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock.

In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks.

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all Other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers.

I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.

So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.

We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.

That’s the passage. It contains so much wisdom that we could spend a long time contemplating it. But we will take the risk of selecting two lines: “Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf,” and, “Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.”

What is the hidden meaning of the mountain and the wolf? What is the hidden meaning of our own life? And how can we approach that hidden meaning by listening to the howl of a wolf, and learning to think like a mountain?

These are questions of ecological and spiritual thinking. That thinking arises as the ecologies we depend on, and we do not have the perspective of a mountain when it comes to these ecologies.

Where is ecological thinking? It is the ecologies we depend on. It is mountain thinking.

We’ll go a little further into the vision of the thinking of mountains in our next episode. But right now, let’s try to get clear about something essential: An entire ecology doesn’t fit in our mind—doesn’t fit in what we identify as our mind. It can never be an object of knowledge, but only an invitation to wisdom, love, and beauty.

If instead of trying to hold an entire ecology in mind we enter into that ecology, with care, with refined attention—trained attention—with humility, with sincerity, if we begin to relax and release ourselves into that ecology of mind, we could arrive at life-affirming insights into how dynamic constellations of interwovenness generate the activities or behaviors of that ecology. We could begin to learn how dynamism produces dynamism, how life produces life. The process is called wildness.

People often use the word “structure” to refer to the relationship of relative parts or elements. Thus, we could say that ecologies arise on the basis of the relationship between their structural dynamics and the flows into and through those ecologies.

The study of ecological dynamics deals with how the structure of an ecology and its “information” flows, or meaning flows, determine the behavior of the ecology. That means things like growth, stability, death, rejuvenation, and—in human terms—success and failure. Leopold spoke of the failure of an entire range—because we killed the wolves.

Since we cannot hold entire ecologies in mind, we don’t really see ecologies, and we in fact find this error of thinking we do see them emerging in some discussions about ecology and systems thinking. People want to delude themselves that they see systems at work, or that we can do something called systems thinking in a way that treats systems as objects of study. But we cannot hold a system in mind except as an abstraction.

We can’t see an ecology, because it’s ultimately not an object. We treat ecologies and systems as objects of study, objects we can manipulate and control. But they are invitations to participation.

So we must find ways of working with them, participating in them, because we do not see systems as objects but live as those systems, as participants—either participants of skill and poise, wisdom and compassion, insight and intention, or participants of ruinous clumsiness and ignorance, trapped in our own karmic conditioning.

We did a series on magic. Magic means accepting this invitation to participate in life, to participate in the ecologies we depend on. Magic is skillful participation in, through, and as the ecologies we depend on.

The inspiration to participate more skillfully drives some people to use ideas like inputs, outputs, processes, and feedback loops—as abstractions to help us understand systems. But we can use other kinds of practices to work skillfully with systems.

How can we most skillfully participate? Do systems models do everything we need them to?

At the highest level, we would refer to the most excellent version of skillfully working with systems as mystical participation, which includes a rational sense of magic. That kind of participation demands a holistic philosophical education.

Wisdom means skillful interwovenness, and a philosophical education teaches us this skillful interwovenness, which means skillful attunement with and participation in larger ecologies of mind. In other words, thinking like a mountain, responding properly to the mysterious call of the wolf, the call of the wild.

I would love to go a little further, but it seems best to pause. We will pick up on several of the threads of this contemplation in future episodes. Stay tuned especially for a little more reflection on thinking like a mountain. I look forward to sharing that with you, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

If you have any questions, comments, or reflections to share, send them in through dangerouswisdom.org. We might be able to bring some of them into a future contemplation.

Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world—your thinking and the thinking of mountains, forests, and the great Earth—those are not two things . . . take good care of them.