Nature
What changes when we understand humans not as separate from or above nature, but as one species within an extraordinarily complex and interconnected web of life.
Part of Love & Work's continuing inquiry into what human beings are capable of becoming.
NATURE
The world is made of relationships
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” - John Muir
Poet strolling by a marshy bank, Liang Ka*
In the 1970s, I helped start an organization that wrote and published a magazine called New Roots: Notes on Appropriate Technology for the Northeast. Inspired by thinkers like E.F. Schumacher, we were interested in what he called intermediate technology, or what we affectionately nicknamed “A.T.”
A.T. wasn’t one fixed set of devices or techniques. It was a way of asking: Appropriate to whom, for what purpose, at what scale, and with what consequences?
One of our cover stories was about the New Alchemy Institute, a group of scientists and designers on Cape Cod. They were experimenting with ways to grow food, raise fish, design buildings, and produce energy by working with natural systems rather than overpowering them.
John Todd, one of New Alchemy’s founders, called this “biological design.” Sunlight fed plants. Plants supported fish. Waste became nutrients. One organism’s output became another’s input. The intelligence was in the relationships.
This way of seeing the world made perfect sense to me then, and it has informed my pursuit of connections ever since. Fifty years later, I keep finding the same ideas wherever I look—in ecology, systems thinking, and Indigenous traditions that understand humans not as observers or managers of the natural world, but as members of it.
There is a powerful concept that holds much of this understanding together: kinship. Kinship begins with belonging. We aren’t separate from the living world; we are part of it. And from that simple understanding springs a whole family of ideas that have shaped my thinking ever since: reciprocity, interdependence, relationship, attention, adaptation, regeneration.
I’ve spent much of my life following this same thread, trying to understand what the living world can teach us about the human systems we create together. That connection becomes clearer to me all the time. We flourish through relationship because that is how life flourishes.
And the cool news is that this way of seeing the world is no longer confined to what we once called the alternative media. It’s finding its way into the mainstream.
NATURE, ECOLOGICAL DESIGN
Nature already knows how to heal itself
For more than fifty years, biologist John Todd has explored how human design can work with nature rather than against it. In Healing Earth, he describes projects restoring polluted ponds, treating wastewater, and repairing damaged landscapes. His approach is deceptively simple: understand how healthy ecosystems work, design with their relationships, and trust life’s remarkable capacity to repair itself.
BOOK: Healing Earth
NATURE, KINSHIP
We don’t simply depend on the living world. We belong to it.
In Flourishing Kin, Indigenous scholar Yuria Celidwen offers kinship as a different way of understanding our place in the living world. We do not simply depend upon other people, species, and places; we exist through our relationships with them. Kinship turns interdependence into relationship, making reciprocity, attention, and care essential conditions for our shared flourishing.
BOOK: Flourishing Kin. Indigenous Wisdom for Collective Well-Being
NATURE, SYMBIOSIS
It takes a community to make an individual.
In Entangled Life, biologist Merlin Sheldrake uses fungi to challenge our ideas about individuality. Fungi form vast networks, exchange nutrients with plants, and create partnerships with other organisms. Even lichens are not single organisms but living relationships. The deeper Sheldrake looks, the harder it becomes to say where one life ends and another begins.
BOOK: Entangled Life
NATURE, ATTENTION
Your backyard is wilder than you are.
In The Comfort of Crows, Margaret Renkl spends fifty-two weeks paying close attention to the plants, animals, and changing seasons in her own backyard. She travels nowhere exotic and discovers nothing rare. Instead, by returning to the same familiar place day after day, she shows how much there is to see when we learn to pay attention.
BOOK: The Comfort of Crows
One liners
ARTICLE: Braiding knowledge: how Indigenous expertise and western science are converging.
ARTICLE: On New Year’s Day 2000, Scottish volunteers planted 100 trees in an almost treeless valley; today, more than 750,000 native trees and shrubs cover its slopes.
ARTICLE: In Brazil’s Cerrado region, Indigenous fire practices reshape wildfire strategy.
ARTICLE: Within a year of their reintroduction to an English woodland, beavers transformed the landscape into thriving wetlands, bringing back wildlife and helping reduce flooding.
ARTICLE: One year after 1,170 acres of Louisiana wetlands were rebuilt, shrimp, blue crabs and fish are already returning to the new habitat.
*About the illustration
Liang Kai’s early 13th-century Poet Strolling by a Marshy Bank offers a very different way of seeing landscape. Much Western landscape painting stages an encounter between humanity and Nature. Here, the poet is simply one presence among many—water, grasses, mist, trees, distant mountains. He neither dominates the landscape nor stands apart from it. He belongs within it. The scale is part of the meaning: we aren’t separate from the living world. We are part of it.
"Progress is people flourishing."
-Ted Gioia
Self-Directed Learning
Given curiosity, access, and one another, learners can create knowledge together.
In 1999, Sugata Mitra gave children in a poor New Delhi neighborhood access to an internet-connected computer, with no teacher or instructions. He wasn’t surprised to see that they learned to use it by experimenting and teaching one another. He repeated the experiment and kept seeing the same thing: given powerful tools, children can learn remarkably well together.
TED TALK: Kids Can Teach Themselves
Play
Play is how children practice being human.
Peter Gray began studying how children learn after his own son struggled in school. He and his wife found a school that gave children extraordinary freedom. He noticed how much time they spent playing. Free to Learn explores his discovery: when children invent and direct their own play, they are learning remarkably consequential things.
BOOK: Free To Learn
Learner Agency
Teens: take responsibility for your own education
Grace Llewellyn had taught middle school before deciding that, for some young people, school itself was getting in the way of learning. So she wrote The Teenage Liberation Handbook directly to teenagers, treating them as capable of making consequential choices. Her radical proposition: you can take responsibility for your own education.
BOOK: The Teenage Liberation Handbook – 30th Anniversary Edition!
Learner Agency
Start with questions, not answers.
Karen Brennan and Sarah Blum-Smith studied teachers who gave students meaningful control over their learning. They found that the teachers didn’t step aside. They were intensely involved—asking genuine questions, offering expertise, providing structure, and helping students pursue their ideas. Student agency didn’t diminish the teacher’s role. It transformed it.
BOOK: Start with Questions: The Classroom as Design Studio
Civic Engagement
The deepest purpose of education is to help people become free and responsible human beings.
Danielle Allen describes herself as “a Harvard prof and democracy advocate working on democracy renovation 24-7.” We’ve talked before about her conviction that democracy’s promises of freedom and equality can only be fulfilled if ordinary people show up as engaged citizens willing to participate in public life rather than retreat from it.
ARTICLE: Education and Its Public Purposes
The Arts
Thinking is a practice that can be cultivated, and the arts are one of the most powerful ways we learn how to do it.
Nelson Goodman, an American philosopher, saw the arts as a way of knowing—not decoration, but a fundamental way we understand the world. In the 1960s, he noted that despite their influence, we knew almost nothing—“zero”—about how people learn through the arts. No one had studied artistic learning with the rigor given to other fields. With this in mind, in 1967 he founded Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
WEBSITE: Project Zero
Social Imagination
Books
The purpose of education is not to prepare students for the world as it is, but to awaken in them the capacity to imagine the world as it could be.
Maxine Greene began her career in the forties, when philosophy of education was an all-male domain. Initially barred because of her gender, she entered her field at Teachers College, Columbia University through the English Department. She went on to become a fierce and articulate advocate for the idea that the purpose of education is not to prepare students for the world as it is, but to awaken in them the capacity to imagine the world as it could be.
BOOK: Releasing the Imagination. Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change
Futures Literacy
Building futures literacy in the transition from study to working life.
If we assume the future is something we must consciously design together—not a fate to endure—then we need futures literacy. When students learn how they “use the future” in their thinking, they can surface fears, hopes, and hidden assumptions, reducing paralysis and futures-related anxiety.
PDF BOOK: Futures Lab Playbook
Reinvention
“What happens in classrooms today is what will happen in society tomorrow.”
Aylon Samouha is an education innovator and the cofounder and CEO of Transcend, a school design organization that partners with communities to design and scale new school models focused on “extraordinary learning” for all students. In this TED Talk, he explains why schools must be redesigned—not merely improved—to prepare young people for a rapidly changing world.
VIDEO: Schools Urgently Need a Redesign. Here's How
Schools
Free education classes that equip people with the tools to actively engage in movements for justice and peace
The Sojourner Truth School for Social Change Leadership is named after Sojourner Truth to honor her work as an activist for justice, freedom, and honesty.The school launched in Northampton, Mass. in 2017, sparked by the waves of grassroots activism that followed Donald Trump’s first election
WEBSITE: The Sojourner Truth School For Social Change Leadership
