Building a Harmonic Web of Life

 

“‘How can we use our science and our technology to really be for the benefit of all life?’ That’s the question we need to be asking.”

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In this episode, Michael and Sarah welcome writer and integrator, Jeremy Lent to help us rethink our relationship as humans with the rest of the living world. In contemporary life many consider nature to be something that is separate from humanity - a resource to be exploited, tamed, and excluded. If, however, we shift this mindset and see ourselves as part of a web of life on which our future depends, a very different set of behaviours will emerge.

Jeremy Lent is author of The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning, whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. Described by Guardian journalist, George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age,” his latest book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe, offers a worldview based on connectedness that could lead humanity to a sustainable, flourishing destiny.

Show notes

Jeremy Lent’s brilliant book The Patterning Instinct explores how our current crisis of unsustainability is not an inevitable result of human nature, but is culturally driven and a product of particular mental patterns that could conceivably be reshaped. 

The Web of Meaning, Jeremy’s second book is part of a deeply researched and beautifully written trilogy. He deconstructs the current dominant worldview and proposes “the building of a new civilisation that will allow future generations to prosper on a flourishing Earth”.

George Monbiot said “The most profound, brilliant and potentially world-changing book I've read this century is Jeremy Lent's The Patterning Instinct,” and writes about his ‘astonishing’ new field of enquiry that ‘explores the deep changes that could avert a planetary disaster’ here.

George Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher. We recommend his books, Metaphors We Live By, written with Mark Johnson and The All New, Don’t Think of an Elephant - a guidepost for developing compassionate, effective policy that upholds citizens’ well-being and freedom.

The Human Microbiome is the collection of all the microorganisms living in association with the human body. These communities include eukaryotes, archaea, bacteria and viruses. Bacteria in an average human body number ten times more than human cells, for a total of about 1000 more genes than are present in the human genome. 

Liology offers a different way of relating to ourselves and the universe: a way that is integrated, embodied and connected. 

Biomimicry 3.8 (co-founded by Janine Benyus and Dayna Baumeister) is the world’s leading bio-inspired consultancy offering biological intelligence consulting, professional training, and inspirational speaking.

Freya Matthews essay, Towards a Deeper Philosophy of Biomimicry 

In his essay, Designing for Dynamic Equlilibrium Michael Pawlyn describes how “buildings will need to be radically rethought in terms of the materials they use, how they adapt to the weather, and how they are integrated into their ecological context. Buildings could behave like generous neighbours in a like-minded community, cleaning the air, moderating the microclimate, offering food, accommodating wildlife, and much more.” This theme is developed further in our book Flourish: Design Paradigms For Our Planetary Emergency available at Triarchy Press

Eileen Crist, The affliction of human supremacy,  “Human supremacy is not just a worldview, not just a story about how things are: it is a lived worldview. It constitutes an actionable credo that has carved the world we inhabit, both mentally and physically.” 

In Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer uncovers how other living beings ‘asters and goldenrod,  strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass’ - offer gifts and wisdom, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices.

Citizen Potawatomi Nation is a federally recognized tribe of Potawatomi people located in Oklahoma. The Potawatomi are traditionally an Algonquian-speaking Eastern Woodlands tribe. They have 29,155 enrolled tribal members, of whom 10,312 live in the state of Oklahoma.

More lobbyists for big polluters than any national delegation Global Witness, 8th November 2021 Glasgow / London

Transcript

Sarah Ichioka  00:02

Hello and welcome to the Flourish Podcast where we discuss design for systems change. I'm Sarah Ichioka. I'm an urbanist strategist and director of Desire Lines based in Singapore. I'm delighted to co present Flourish with Michael Pawlyn, who is the founder of Exploration Architecture, and a leading architect in regenerative design based in London. 

Michael Pawlyn  00:50

In this episode, we're discussing a massive topic, rethinking our relationship as humans with the rest of the living world.

Sarah Ichioka  00:57

And one of the common themes in our book Flourish is that the worldviews or stories that we hold, as societies, have a huge influence on the behaviour that emerges. We feel this is particularly true in our relationship with nature.

Michael Pawlyn  01:13

And I think that this is a really important finding that's come out of cognitive neuroscience recently, particularly with the work of George Lakoff. And so essentially, if at a societal level, we see nature as something separate from us, and as something to be plundered for resources, that will produce very different behaviour than if we see humans as part of nature, and as part of a web of life on which our future depends.

Sarah Ichioka  01:37

It's such a dramatic difference from the way so much conversation happens, right? So many people don't even think about humans as animals, you know, let alone as fully integrated in the entire web of life. So it really is a significant mind shift that we all need to work towards.

Michael Pawlyn  01:56

Absolutely. And the thing that really got me alerted to this was learning about the Human Microbiome Project, you know, the idea that our human cells are outnumbered ten to one by microbial cells. So while we might think of ourselves as individuals, actually, we're not you know, we're kind of walking ecosystems, and when you're running for the bus, that's not just you running for the bus, that's you and your, your massive ecosystem of microbial cells and all of that super organism is connected to everything else in the world and dependent on it.

Sarah Ichioka  02:31

So in today's episode, we have one of the most articulate thinkers and writers on this subject. Jeremy Lent wrote The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning, which was recently published. Jeremy is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and he explores pathways towards a life affirming future.

Michael Pawlyn  02:57

Jeremy has been described by Guardian journalist George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age” and his work has been a key inspiration for our book. And it's a real honour for me to be able to interview him today. Hello, Jeremy, and thank you so much for joining us today. Sarah, would love to have met you but the timings with Singapore, London and California are really quite difficult to coordinate. But she told me that she actually grew up pretty close to your Liology Institute.

Jeremy Lent  03:29

How interesting. Wow.

Michael Pawlyn  03:31

Yeah, I was just trying to remember how I first heard about your work. And I'm pretty sure it was through a George Monbiot article. Then I read The Patterning Instinct, I came to your workshop in London, and then bizarrely, about a year later, we bumped into each other at the Extinction Rebellion protests in Trafalgar Square, which was, which was a really nice surprise.

Jeremy Lent  03:51

Yes, that was great. I only wish it was having a little bit more impact.

Michael Pawlyn  03:55

I know. Absolutely. So where I would love to start is to discuss our human separation from nature, how dualism arose, and why it's problematic. And I'm conscious that it's such a massive subject. So I've been wondering how we kind of work away into it. And I'm actually tempted to ask something that sounds a bit like a joke, which is, did it all start to go wrong when we invented the fence?

Jeremy Lent  04:22

Yeah, that's, I like that. It's a great question to ask, did it all start when we discovered the fence or when we invented the fence because that goes even way back 10,000 years or more? And I do think yeah, what we need to recognise is that this kind of separate way in which we see ourselves in today's society, is an accumulation of a few different steps. But I think there's a few particular discrete steps that are really important. One is actually really the rise of what is known as sedentism. Generally, that relates to agriculture. So we tend to talk about the rise of agriculture. But it's really sedentism, which is really when nomadic hunter gatherers kind of started to settle in one place, which could have been for different reasons. But then all of a sudden possessions become important. You put up fences, and separations.

Michael Pawlyn  05:14

And nature becomes a backdrop.

Jeremy Lent  05:16

Yeah, not just separating humans from nature, but also humans from each other. So if you're successful in your agriculture, then all of a sudden wealth hierarchies become part of the human experience. But that was true of agricultural agrarian civilizations around the world. But then to your point, and really where I begin my book, The Patterning Instinct, there was a very big distinction between the Western way of thinking about things and other traditional agrarian civilizations. So the story of Admiral Zheng is a great way to look at that distinction. In the 15th century, he was this Chinese admiral who had this massive armada of ships like 20,000 boats, that basically dominated the Indian Ocean for decades. And then in that same century, of course, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean, and he had three little boats, you could fit 10 of his boats, in just one of Admiral Zheng's boats. But we all know about Columbus, because basically his voyage to the Americas changed the world. And no one's even heard of Admiral Zheng, unless you're, you know, a classical historian. Why is that? And it's because of this difference in worldviews, ultimately, that in the East Asian worldview, domination and conquest was not even thinkable. You know, when Zheng went to these places, he brought back ambassadors to China, he didn't think, oh, let's take over them, conquer them, and just turn their populations into slaves. Which is exactly what Columbus thought when he went to the Americas. So we need to recognise that there's a fundamental difference between our western way of thinking and other ways, other ways of making sense of the universe. And that actually went all the way back to the ancient Greeks. And it was this form of dualism, this form of seeing humans as being split between a soul and a body. And even the universe itself, being split, with some sort of transcendent God and the world became desacralized, it had no, no actual value, intrinsic value in itself. So it led to this notion of seeing nature more like it's a resource and or a machine, which led to some of the incredible benefits and things like the scientific revolution, sort of trying to figure out how this machine works, but also led to the dominant view today of nature, basically, as a resource to exploit. And that, I think, is one of the fundamental ways in which we need to change our way of relating to the rest of life around us, if we're going to move our civilization into a better path.

Michael Pawlyn  07:54

And you argue so persuasively in The Patterning Instinct that a worldview is not something of no consequence - it’s actually hugely important in terms of the kind of behaviour that results at a societal level,

Jeremy Lent  08:05

The thing is a worldview is so powerful, because people don't even realise they have a worldview. It's a little bit like looking at the world through a lens, and you don't realise that lens actually distorts things, a little bit like if a fish is swimming in water, but that fish never knows it's in water, because that's all it knows. So similarly, when we grow up in a particular cultural society, it's not like somebody sort of puts us down, when we were a little kid and says, “Now here, I'm going to tell you about our world view, this is what we believe is and what we don't believe” - nothing like that happens. It's just imparted through an innumerable number of little momentary interactions. And we sort of make sense of the world in that way. And that's why it's so powerful, because we think that is reality. 

Michael Pawlyn  08:55

So Now I’d just like to explore that a bit further, let's say, an architect or an urban planner says to you, “Okay, I understand the dangers of dualism and the dangers of having a world view based on the conquest of nature. And I'm convinced by the benefits of seeing ourselves as part of what you call a harmonic web of life. How should I now embody that in the work that I do? What's that next step?”

Jeremy Lent  09:20

One of the most important things to do is to look at the deeper underlying assumptions, whatever they might be, that are so implicit in your planning, that you may not even realise you're making them, like asking what are the sort of fundamental views like why are we sort of setting up a certain construction? And what are we keeping out? Are we keeping nature out? Are we keeping people out? How are we bringing people in and what is our relationship? What's the implicit relationship between and who we're building this for and who is outside of that particular view both other human beings beings who are outside of it, or non human life? What's our relationship with these things? And if we're trying to move away from that dualistic split and more towards a world view of deep inter-relationships, then obviously one of the questions that needs to be asked is, why are we making those separations in the first place? Who is invited in? And what does it even mean? And, you know, are there ways to bring other aspects of life within the construction rather than keep it out? Those, I think, are some of the sort of fundamental building blocks that need to be started with, right?

Michael Pawlyn  10:38

So I've got a question from Sarah here. And she said, getting specific, can you share with us what your favourite building or public space is, that you feel embodies harmonic coexistence with nature?

Jeremy Lent  10:51

Hmm, that's a great question. There's a small airport close to where I live, it's in Oakland. And when you walk into it, they have a living wall. And it's kind of interesting, you know, it's this huge wall, you know, it’s a big airport, and it's actually filled with grass. And then plants coming out of soil that they've built into the wall, you know, and they're very proud of it. And they talk about it as bringing not just sort of a pretty little picture of nature, but sort of bringing nature into this built environment. And I find that so fascinating because on the one hand, it seems like, you know, here’s obviously people trying to break out of these constructions that we have. And yet here I am in an airport of all things, where it's basically, this kind of system that is doing one of the most destructive acts in terms of our human balance with emissions and the living Earth. And here I am, on one hand, it brings my attention to this possibility of bringing life into the airport. And on the other hand, it sort of almost highlights how it's done in such a constrained manner, you know, all we got to bring a little bit of nature into our lives. And I think that's kind of almost like a fractal microcosm of so much of the fundamental issue here. People could expand that even just looking at things like national parks, in the United States, you know, there's huge, wonderful national parks, but even they're like, our parks, just a way in which we pay sort of lip service to the human needs to have some sort of connection with nature, even while we constrain it and make it fit into our criteria. Is there a way to really fundamentally revamp our way of thinking about nature, so that it's truly symbiotic rather than sort of almost like turning nature into little pets that we bring inside our architecture to make us feel a bit better?

Michael Pawlyn  12:53

Yeah, yeah. One of the most comprehensive visions I've heard for this comes from Janine Benyus and Dayna Baumeister of Biomimicry 3.8. And what they say is that, if you were to be designing a new building or a new piece of city, the way you should start is by identifying how a mature healthy ecosystem in that part of the world would function. How much oxygen would it produce? How much water would it filter? How much wildlife would it accommodate? How much carbon would it sequester? How much food would it produce? And those should become the metrics to aim for with your new building or new piece of city. And I do find that a wonderfully inspiring vision - it’s way beyond where architects and planners are at the moment. But there are enough examples of small bits of that, like the living wall that you were just talking about. Enough small examples of it to be convinced that it is possible.

Jeremy Lent  13:46

Yes, you know, I love that. And I think that that gets to the underlying true shift that is needed, which actually, I think was expressed so well in an essay by Freya Matthews, and I think it may have been you who shared some of her writing with me. 

Michael Pawlyn  14:03

That’s right 

Jeremy Lent  14:04

And thank you for that, because I've been in touch with her a few times since then. And I think she's a true pioneering thinker.

Michael Pawlyn  14:12

Well, sure. I mean, I was delighted that you enjoyed them because I'd love to see her ideas spread as far as possible.

Jeremy Lent  14:18

Right. She takes a lot of the notion of biomimicry, and really expands it to the deeper questions of what does it mean to live in true symbiosis with nature? And one of the things I love is the way she reframes a question when we're creating any kind of construction, rather than sort of trying to think about things “Oh, how do we limit the damage that we caused the pollution or whatever?”, but actually asking the question, “What does this living ecosystem want from me?” So really, true symbiosis is this way of being with another entity in such a way that is truly mutually beneficial? Where you know, I can gain from that other entity something that I need that they have, but I'm giving something to them. How can I make a construction so that the net result is actually better for this ecosystem than if I hadn't been there in the first place, not even limiting the damage, but actually regenerating through that symbiosis.

Michael Pawlyn  15:18

And just for the benefit of our listeners, Freya Matthews is an Australian philosopher. And she wrote two wonderful essays exploring the sort of deeper philosophy of biomimicry. One of the concepts that she outlines, which I love, is what she calls conativity, which is one of the aspects of any organism in a complex system. And what she describes there is the fact that biological organisms have evolved, not just to survive, but to survive in a way that actually enhances the health and vitality of the overall system. And I think you're absolutely right, Jeremy, if we could get to achieving the same thing in the way we design our buildings and cities, that would represent a massive leap forward.

Jeremy Lent  16:04

I think that's right. And, and that does take this real shift. It's like a lot of the time, even people who are relatively, you know, more enlightened than our dominant world view and talk about how we need to move towards sustainability, we'll often talk about it in terms of the frame of, we can't just keep exploiting this resource in such a way that's not sustainable, because in the end, there won't be enough left of nature, and we're just going to hit collapse. And that's completely true. And because we are doing this, and totally unsustainable exploitation, this is a phrase used by another really pioneering writer whose name is Eileen Crist. And she talks about this concept of human supremacy. And the concept of human supremacy is just so implicit in our world view, that we look at nature and we say, you know, we need to be enlightened, we need to make sure we can exploit these resources for sustainably, you know, for seven generations out, rather than thinking, this nature around us, is filled with sentient beings. And they have an intrinsic value, an intrinsic right to flourishing just as much as I do. And so that is a big shift. And that can be disturbing, because for many of us, it can raise questions that we'd rather not even think about, like, if we're meat eaters, or fish eaters, what does that mean, for the ways in which we literally, our civilization raises animals, it's like 75 billion animals a year, are raised, basically tortured, enslaved in horrendous circumstances, undergoing sort of short lives of pain and misery, just to be killed, so that we can eat food at a good price. So these are questions that need to be asked, even though they're very disturbing and difficult sometimes in terms of the implications they have for many of us.

Michael Pawlyn  18:03

Absolutely. We include quite a long quote from Eileen Crist in our book, and she talks about how once you've discerned the idea of human supremacy, you just see it everywhere, I realised just how pervasive it is this assumption that humans are kind of, at least the way we behave a lot of the time, it's as if the world exists for our benefit.

Jeremy Lent  18:25

And she points out how that concept is instilled in our very language. So you know, when we look at fish in the ocean, and we talk about fisheries, or fish stocks, you know, or when we talk about animals online, we talk about them as livestock. So our very language gives a sense of like, these are not living sentient beings with feelings, they're just resources, just like mineral stocks. What biologists have now understood is that it's not just other mammals with feelings like us that they're essentially like that. But plants have sentience. This is recognition that basically indigenous people around the world or it always had, which was that all living beings, including plants, are basically our relatives, and they do have a sacredness to them. And so that leads to this concept of how can we harvest what we need from the earth around us, but in a way that honours them. There's a beautiful concept that the indigenous biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, writes about, in her great book Braiding Sweetgrass, this concept of the honourable harvest, where you harvest what you need, but you do it in an honourable way. You take only what you need to make sure to leave enough that whatever it is, can continue to flourish and look after itself. Basically the gifts that nature has to offer us how we can relate to that in a way that recognises it as a gift and honours it. And it doesn't lead to a zero sum game where I have to cut down my own flourishing in order to let other things flourish. But how can I actually flourish in a way that instils that sense of a true regenerative living for all things around me?

Michael Pawlyn  20:26

And Robin Wall Kimmerer also talks about the importance of language and how in the Potawatomi Nation language, I think she said, 70% of the words are verbs. And she explains how important that is and how to them, a mountain is a verb, and a bay is a verb. And initially, when she was learning the language, she was thinking, well, this is ridiculous, but it actually conveys something that is in process. And if a bay or a mountain can actually be in a state of health or exploitation, then in a way, you're much less likely to exploit that and treat it as a resource. If it is expressed as a verb as part of the overall web of life.

Jeremy Lent  21:09

I think that's completely true. And we also see, similarly in East Asian languages, there's many of the things that we look at as noun - verb -object - in sort of proto Indo-European based languages are actually much more like that sort of ongoing verb. So there's one person says that if you look, for example, at the sort of foundational philosophical statement of our so dominant worldview, from Descartes, you know, ‘I think therefore I am’, well, that would be translated in Chinese or Japanese as more like ‘thinking, therefore being’, which leads to a completely different way of relating. In our language, it's always like, there's “the subject does something to the object”. And then we sort of structure our ways of thinking around that. 

Michael Pawlyn  22:02

I've got another question from Sarah here, in The Patterning Instinct, it can sometimes appear that you idealise Asian cultures. How would you characterise the relationship between historic cognitive frames? And the contemporary realities that we see in places like China and India today?

Jeremy Lent  22:19

Yeah, so that's a great question. I'm glad she asked that. Thank you. Basically, I think it's very important to recognise that there's sort of no golden age, and there's no period or place that has all of the answers. I think when I contrast East Asian ways of thinking to Western ways of thinking, it's more to point out that there is a different world view that's possible. And beyond that, this is recognition that the dominant world view, that is that Western mechanistic dualistic world view has become so powerful, that it is now very much it's led to a human relationship with the rest of life being out of balance. So what I'm calling for is not so much any kind of preference of one worldview over another or saying that there's something fundamentally bad about our western viewpoint, but that it needs to be balanced. And that both indigenous and East Asian world views allow us to see a different perspective that we can add to our dominant world view rather than rejecting everything that has arisen from it. And I think it's really important to point out that traditional China - even though I do think that there is so much we can learn from the ways in which they made sense of the world - was also incredibly patriarchal, and was imperialistic. And we see that right now, just in the experience of Tibet, for example, and other places. So we need to recognise that similarly, there's no sort of going back to the nomadic hunter gatherer indigenous way of living, but we can learn from these things. And I think that when especially when we tie this in with modern scientific understanding, from systems sciences and complexity theory, what we have is the crying need - because our world is recklessly so heading towards a really towards the precipice - but we have the need and the ability now to form a synthesis, sort of a synthesised worldview, that takes some of the greatest insights from different elements of human culture and history throughout time and find a way a more integrated way of living on the earth that accommodates scientific understanding that accommodates human and technological innovations, but also actually turns towards life and says, “How can we use our science and our technology to really be for the benefit of all life?” That's the question we need to be asking.

Michael Pawlyn  25:06

That was beautifully put. I was just thinking, then, you know, to many people, the kind of changes that we're talking about, which is effectively a transformation of human consciousness, can seem so large as to be beyond reach. And in The Web of Meaning, you talk about how change happens in nonlinear ways. And I’ve just got this overwhelming feeling that we need to bring about a tipping point, by showing that we've got enough of these solutions clearly articulated, and there's enough support for it, and we can show clearly enough that the current system is thoroughly rotten. What are your thoughts on how we can bring that tipping point about?

Jeremy Lent  25:48

Yeah, so this is one of the sort of great questions of our time, the most essential question of our time, because we do need that tipping point, essentially, we're heading towards a tipping point. The question is, “What is the tipping point?” If our dominant culture maintains its dominance, for a few more decades, the tipping point we are going to hit will be this complete, utter collapse of the Earth's life systems, and most likely the collapse of our civilization along with that, which would be just the worst catastrophe imaginable. So the question is, “Can we achieve a cultural tipping point that actually shifts the direction of our civilization before we hit that ecological tipping point?” That is what I think is the key race, if you will, of this century. And there are a lot of very powerful forces arrayed against that kind of tipping point, the incredible dominance of global capitalism, the way in which it spread. So much so now that the large transnational corporations are more powerful than any country. So yeah, we just finished COP 26, for example, there were like, you know, 500 fossil fuel lobbyists, they're making sure that basically, the whole outcome of COP 26 would be a complete fiasco in relation to the existential emergency we're facing. So it's a crucial question. And I believe that the sense of possibility arises really from nature itself. Like if you walk in the forest, you're sort of walking on the ground, and you see the trees up above you, whatever. What you're not aware of, is the mycorrhizal fungal network in the earth underneath, where the trees themselves are using this network to communicate with other trees in the forest. And there's all this stuff happening, that we're actually unaware of, but it's a powerful force in the actual, whole ecosystem, but it's below the level of our surface awareness. And similarly, the news headlines look like it's just we're heading to catastrophe at a faster and faster rate. What the headlines don't show in these kinds of conversations is millions, hundreds of millions, maybe even billions of human beings, looking at what's going on and feeling in our hearts “This is not right, I want to do something different”. And the way that I see the potential for change that will surprise really, potentially all of us, is to think of our whole global system right now as a tightly woven, weaving, if you will, but this system is unravelling. And imagine, like a weaving beginning to unravel. As it unravels, it's painful, it's scary, but it also loosens the actual relationships between those things that have stopped anything else from changing. So what we have as our opportunity, and our only real chance of turning things around, is to kind of reweave this fabric as it's unravelling. But before it completely unravels. So it reminds me, there's this game that kids play that you might know, called ‘cat's cradle’, right? Where you sort of take the string, and you skillfully put things around your fingers, and you move it in such a way that with one movement of the hand, the whole pattern of the string changes from one to a completely different pattern. And that's essentially what we need to be doing with our society. We need to be instilling these different ways of living and being - different ways of applying economics, architecture, technology, business activity, all these things within our current society. So that at some point, the power of this more connected way of being can just begin to get stronger. Well, the dominant ways of being show that - as they start to fall apart - show that they're no longer valid for the future.

Michael Pawlyn  29:57

And that comes across so well in your second book, The Web of Meaning because often the transition that we need to go through is portrayed as one of great sacrifice. But you describe how in many ways, it could create a much more meaningful existence by stepping off what people call the hedonic treadmill. 

Jeremy Lent  30:15

That is completely true. And I agree with you that that's another shift that needs to be done. You know, so much of the time, somebody looks at all these environmentalists, they're all kind of moralists telling me, I got to do less and basically be miserable. And, and so it's very much viewed in that way, like a zero sum game. But there's a very different way of looking at things which I call ii the book ‘fractal flourishing’, which comes from this recognition that actually all of us are embedded in the greatest systems all around us, just within our own bodies, every cell is part of an organ, which is part of our bodies. And for each of us, we're part of a community - like family, and then community, and then society, and all of humanity and all of humanity as part of the living Earth. And once we recognise this embedded way in which everything, each entity, is part of a bigger entity, one of the key principles we discover is that the health of any one is dependent on the health of the other entities within it, and that it's part of our true flourishing for each of us as individuals, and can only really occur when we live in societies that are themselves flourishing. To get back to that initial question we were looking at, when we look at this notion of mutually beneficial symbiosis. When we ask not, how can I cause less harm in the environment? But rather, what is this larger context of life around asking from me? We're actually not doing that at our own expense, where we're doing that for the benefit of our own fractal long term flourishing.

Michael Pawlyn  31:54

Hmm. And I understand you have a third book underway. And so this is going to be a trilogy? Are you able to tell us a bit more?

Jeremy Lent  32:03

Yes, I'd be happy to and what the book The Web of Meaning is about really is looking at how our dominant world view is not just destructive, but plain wrong. And actually, what modern systems science points us to is the same underlying insights that indigenous traditions and other non-Western traditions had about deep interconnectedness. And when we look at the implications of that deep interconnectedness, it leads us ultimately to ask us how our dominant modern culture is based on the exact opposite on a sense of separateness, then we need to ask what would our world look like if we actually built it from the foundation up, not on values of things like wealth accumulation, extraction and exploitation, but on our interconnectedness? What would a society look like if it was built on the basis of setting the conditions for actual for long term flourishing on a regenerated Earth, and in The Web of Meaning, I end with his vision of what's called an ecological civilization, a civilization that actually is based on life affirming principles, and looking at what that might actually mean for our cities, for our economy, for our education, for application of technology for governance. So this next book is actually going to take that to a whole different level, actually going to be looking at the pathways toward an ecological civilization, because oftentimes, it's easier for most people to envision the end of civilization than the end of capitalism. And what I really want to do in this next book is show what that actually would look like, that it's not some far off vision, but it's actually being lived in, it's being actually acted on and structured in lots of smaller, ongoing communities and businesses and places and interactions around us right now. And once we can get a sense of what's actually possible, I believe that offers a pathway for millions of us around the world to start moving towards that possibility.

Michael Pawlyn  34:08

Well, I can't wait to read it. Is there anything else that you'd particularly like to add?

Jeremy Lent  34:13

Well, basically, just to highlight for anybody who is listening to this conversation, and is intrigued by it, to recognise that connectedness that I'm talking about actually relates to each of us being connected with the future that's unfolding, that so when we look at what's actually happening in the world, I'm just as much as anybody, I look at what's going on, and I feel a sense of doom, but for us all to recognise that actually, it's the actions each of us take each day that are actually generating the future. The future is another of those nouns, right, this thing that is separate from us, but really to maybe shift towards that and think of the word itself the future as being a verb, being something that each of us is co-creating right now, in our choices and our thoughts in our interactions. And realising that that is our possibility. So sort of really join into that part of that sort of mycorrhizal network, if you will, of change that is taking place, and to just be part of what's possible.

Michael Pawlyn  35:21

Fantastic. And where can our listeners find out more about your work?

Jeremy Lent  35:25

Oh, simplest way is just to go to my author website, which is simply JeremyLent.com And then explore it from there really?

Michael Pawlyn  35:35

Well, thank you, Jeremy, such a pleasure. It's really important stuff you're doing.

Jeremy Lent  35:40

Well, thank you so, so much, Michael. And I look forward to reading your book, Flourish. And I really have a sense that the ideas you put in this book may be part of what I can sort of bring into, as part of this kind of coherent sense of what an ecological civilization might look like in the future. So I'll be very excited to delve into it in more detail.

Michael Pawlyn  36:02

Well, thank you. That's very good of you Jeremy. 

Michael Pawlyn  36:11

Jeremy's book The Patterning Instinct, perhaps more than any other book made me realise the significance of world views in shaping our behaviour. So he definitely played a pivotal role in shaping the ideas in Flourish, in which we look at a whole series of existing frames or world views that are holding us back from transformation.

Sarah Ichioka  36:30

Absolutely, Michael. Jeremy's work on looking at how world views shape, our actions, our societies was absolutely seminal. As you know, I'm really interested in how we know what new worldviews look like when we're living them on the ground. And as such, I was really tantalised by his mention that he's working on a third book in his trilogy, which will be specifically about how to shape an ecological civilization. When he was sharing the example of the Oakland airport, I thought that it offered a great illustration of a sustainable approach to architecture, right, you invite in some nature, you have some biophilic elements of it, but in the end, you'd have the entire premise of an airport is degenerative. And I think that there will hopefully be wonderful new examples that he'll be able to share in this third book about truly regenerative forms of architecture and urbanism, which I know Michael, you and I have been really interested in keeping an eye out for as well to add to that positive story of living the new paradigm.

Michael Pawlyn  37:41

Yeah, and I'm sure we're going to see more and more examples. So at the moment, there are lots of examples of schemes that do elements of regenerative design really convincingly. And so I'm looking forward to more and more examples that demonstrate a really comprehensive application of the principles. Picking up on what Jeremy was saying about the importance of biomimicry in shaping an ecological civilization, our sponsor Interface has done some excellent work with Janine Benyus on how nature would design a carpet? So this project led to an idea which virtually eliminated installation waste and quality control rejects while also making it much easier to carry out repairs, and Interface often talk about how nature doesn't waste anything, the waste from one kingdom is utilised by another. And that principle is something that has really driven their inventiveness when they've been rethinking their products.

Sarah Ichioka  38:43

If you're interested to learn more about principles of regenerative design, or any of the many fascinating topics that we've been discussing together today, you're warmly invited to visit our website, which is simply Flourish-book.com and will also have a link to subscribe to our website there as well. That website will also include links to all of our socials. The podcast is sponsored by Interface and based on the book Flourish: Design Paradigms for Planetary Emergency by Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlyn. The Flourish podcast is recorded at Cast Iron Studios in London and the Hive Lavender studios in Singapore. Our co producers are Kelly Hill in London and Shireen Marican in Singapore. Our research and production assistant is Yi Shien Sim. The podcast is edited and features brilliant original music by Tobias Withers.

Presenters Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlyn
Audio producer and composer Tobias Withers
Producers Kelly Hill (London) and Shireen Marican (Singapore)
Researcher and production assistant Yi Shien Sim
Podcast cover art by Studio Folder