of foxes and hedgehogs

WORKING TO CREATE THE FOUNDATION FOR A WORLD WHERE WE ALL BELONG

Hosted By: Greg Sherwin, PhD

iRewild Institute Thought Leader

12 minutes

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TRANSCRIPT

Greetings, everyone. I'm Greg Sherwin, a thought leader over with iRewild, and my story is going to be about agency and, ultimately, about control.

Now, we've all kind of experienced COVID recently as a resetting of our expectations of how all our best laid plans can go awry or change. Then something like nature reminds us that things aren't as permanent and controlled as we, in our daily lives, normally expect. In fact, one of the issues that we have to contend with is the fact that while we can optimize, and we can demonstrate our human control over nature, and we've done this to an exceptional degree, certainly with the industrial revolution, where it was man versus nature, we are running into those systemic limits where suddenly the kind of problems that we have to solve aren't about doing more of the linear same. It's not about us being able to demonstrate our conquering of nature and being able to overcome it. Now we're recognizing there's a balance that we're actually missing in the process. 

What Is Agency In Globally Disruptive Times?

Now, agency, our ability to affect change, and to feel like we have some kind of consequential impact, is really core to a lot of Western identity. We love the stories of the lone cowboy who can take on all the bad guys. But the truth is less about your own individual agency, particularly in a complex system, and more about how does that system work when there are things like technological disruption? When there's social media and globalization that are kind of up-turning at scale the things that we normally took for granted? Or certainly things like COVID, where we've seen examples of how a virus can change how we all live? And what does it mean to redefine what it means in terms of our relationship with each other? What we owe each other as people, but what is it about us and, in an even broader sense, about the planet?

“Controlling” Nature

Now our illusion of control also extends to nature. I mean, we all can appreciate, here I'm in Napa, California, you can see these orderly rows of wonderful vineyards. And it leaves you with a sense that, yes, we can control nature to kind of take over yields of crops and optimize for numbers and how much we can kind of work the soil and work nature to actually do our bidding and feel like we are at the center of our narratives and can kind of run the way that nature should work. But usually nature has surprises for us. In fact, a lot of times.

But The World Had Other Plans

Now I’m in Napa’s Trancas Park, and it’s one of the reminders of how our best laid plans can be changed by nature and how nature works in epochs and timescales much greater than what we kind of perceive our own. We have reminders like the sculpture here, which demarcates the heights of the various times the Napa river has overflowed its banks and how high it's gotten, which is certainly much taller than I am. And it gives you that reminder that nature works in its own rhythms, and is more than just sort of the micro-controls that we think that we can kind of bring the world to. 

Of Foxes And Hedgehogs

Speaking of our desire for control, and our ability to affect change, I would like to go back to another story going back to the Greek poet Archilochus. Actually, it's a story of “The Fox and the Hedgehog”, which, probably more famously was made in a more elaborated version by the sort of social philosopher Isaiah Berlin. And the idea is that the hedgehog is particularly excellent at doing one thing exceptionally well, whereas the fox is more about how do I do lots of things. Maybe not the best at them, but to be able to be crafty, to be able to almost kind of have a committee of different multidisciplinary task forces in his brain to be able to solve problems, and to be able to address the challenges that nature challenges it with.

Hedgehogs In A Changing World

Because the story of our dominance over nature is really one of the human hedgehog. It's this idea that we've been able to kind of capitalize on our ability to conquer nature and its predictable ways in a very linear and expected way that we could kind of rely upon. How does it actually make us improve the lives of others, particularly the lives of ourselves? But when we encounter things like mass human migration, job disruption, pandemics, suddenly the hedgehog and its singular focus on how to solve problems goes from being an optimized asset, to becoming a liability. Because once you're out of the operating theater that you're been optimized for, suddenly those very things that made you excellent at what you do, much like the dinosaurs of the Chicxulub crater, that happened in the Yucatan, are all of a sudden working against you.

Being Part of Something vs. Working Against It 

Now, I've already once witnessed on this trail a dog walker basically being pulled by the leash in various directions; the dog had a mind of its own. Well, of course it does. Nature has a mind of its own. And yet, we pretend that we can pull the leash on nature and the world and have it conform to our whims all the time, rather than working with it and finding a way to go together. And the lesson here is that we have an opportunity to rethink how we fit in with the rest of nature, and how it actually makes a more mutual companionship for ourselves, in terms of all the things that are surrounding us.  

How Do We Participate In What Is Out Of Control? 

This orientation shift leaves us on a path to let go of our illusion of control, that all of the universe and life is the narrative of our own personal narrative. Because we're not necessarily in control, we could try compensation techniques, like using cognitive dissonance to deal with a paradox here and feeling like life is all about us, that it's all about our decisions and our whims, and that we can bend its will to us. And then when it doesn't react like that dog that pulled the leash, we either discount it, we discredit it, we find ways of dismissing its reality. And instead, we seek ways of being able to justify and keep the systems that we have in place of our mental models of the world, and how they all can kind of serve us. But that can only work so far until you end up in a situation much like the pathway that led to a landslide into the Napa River. You can only divorce yourself from the truth for so long. So then it forces us with this question. So with the fact that we're not in control, how do we participate in something that maybe seems out of control? For some people that might actually be too much to bear. This is a reason why we have things like conspiracy theories. We want to believe that somebody is in control; it simplifies things. We're uncomfortable with randomness, or that things can happen by chance, or that things can happen by a network of things that we can barely see and detect, that are having an influence all around us. Everything from the root systems all the way to our microbiomes.

A Natural Inspiration For Collective Challenges

As humans are part of the natural world, as much as we try to deny it, the fact is, is that we can get a lot of our inspiration from our origin stories of nature. It actually wrestled with these many challenges at the systemic level long before we even thought of them. And the limits of our very linear mechanistic ways of trying to solve problems ran to the shortcomings we saw at a global scale. Therefore, the idea is that each thing here, whether it's the different trees, or whether it's the grasses, or whether it's the wildlife, these all kind of have stories to tell that often we don't listen to. Not that we necessarily have to become sort of the animals or the trees ourselves, but there's a question that in terms of how the harmony and balance that it's been able to figure out and sustain itself can actually be sources of rather eternal wisdom, in terms of thinking, how we can trust the elements of nature. We spent a lot of our existence as a species trying to fend off nature, trying to keep it out of our houses, and trying to basically treat it as if it were the vicious wolves outside. But the fact is, the wolves, the deer, the plants that the deer eat, all of them are part of a coexisting system that works together. And it really inspires us to think in more holistic ways about how we can actually address some of these greater problems.

Learning Agency From Collective Natural Wisdom

So by indulging me with this nature walk together, I'm hoping that you will be inspired and think of ways that you can let go of some of that desire—that innate desire we have for control. For confusing autonomy with being the king of the kingdom. And being able to look at inspirations, like the broader inspiration that nature provides, in terms of solutions that have figured out some of these very, very complex systemic things that we will not give the intelligence of trees the kind of credit it deserves because we don't think of it and their actions in holistic ways. We often think of them as individuals, and not part of what the connections are between it and everything around it. The more that we can kind of do that, the more that we will be prepared for less stress from all the desire that we have for controlling, and leaning into the trust of nature, leaning into the trust of what wisdom it has to share with us in terms of thinking of how we solve problems, and how it's actually been able to do this for eons before we even existed on this earth. Thank you.