In the past year or so I have been undergoing a transition in my thinking and practice away from conservation ecology into a more socio-ecological position. there are no wildlife problems after all,only human ones right? Ive always been interested in systems thinking and complexity ever since reading Fritjof Kapra’s Web of Life, but I’m beginning to explore how these relate to my practice and have inevitably begun a deep-dive with the help of Complexity Explorer and more recently the Human Current.
Thanks to these great podcasts- I’m currently working through them from Episode 1 and have therefore just discovered the work of Diego Espinosa. I listened to the podcast on his book The Certainty Merchants this morning while driving my border collie Magpie to the vets to get his bandage changed. His foot was squished by a slow moving car, but the wound is recovering really well. He loves a bit of complexity science in the car to calm his nerves!
I made some notes on the podcast but i recommend you listen to it, and the one before (Episode 6) which is really a scene setter for the question of interest to me:
How do we build more natural relationships with uncertainty?
Post WW2 society became obsessed with certainty and there rose a tribe- The Certainty Merchants- who you could pay to shore up your live against certainty. Using money we buy the things we need to make us feel safe. We have also undermined the basic organic protection mechanisms- 100,000 years of human behavioural heuristics such as strong social networks and generational economic pacts (inherited wealth). The ego-driven drive towards independence has actually increased vulnerability and reduced resilience and led to pathological systemic impacts such as stress-inflammation-diabetes epidemic.
We need to re-engage with uncertainty and accept it as part of our human condition. We can learn so much for the natural world, remembering we are part of it. Self is just a construct. Our conscious minds tend towards using statistics and probability in problem solving which remains reductionist and risk averse.
A must-listen, and undoubtedly a must-read.
If you like this then you’ll also like this read on Medium Time To Design Our Networks
James T Jones 