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
Art
Many Gen Z students are thinking that since no career is guaranteed, they should pursue what matters most to them.
Economic uncertainty usually pushes students toward “safer” pre-professional tracks. But in these strange times, more Gen Z students are heading to art school.Applications at New York City art schools are hitting record highs, despite steep tuition and the common belief that creative careers are risky. The surge spans both public and private institutions.
ARTICLE: NYC Art Schools See Record-High Application Numbers As Gen Zers Clamber To Enroll
Complexity
Education as a force for societal and ecological transformation
Ida Rose Florez has a longing: she wants everyone to have access to community-connected, ecologically aware, and joy-filled learning. And she is critical of what most people experience instead—educational systems rooted in complicated, reductionist, machine-based thinking.
BOOK: The End of Education as We Know It: Regenerative Learning for Complex Times
Building
How a transformative learning approach helped the Nordic countries find peace and prosperity
Research shows that Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland consistently rank among the top countries in terms of happiness, democratic strength, economic performance, business climate, trust in institutions, and contributions to global well-being.
WEBSITE: The Nordic Secret
Human Ecology
Human Ecology
Teaching the science and responsibilities of caring for life
Skills like cooking, growing food, repairing things, caring for others, managing money, resolving conflict, and understanding one’s place in the natural world were once woven into daily life and passed down by example.
ARTICLE: Why Every Student Needs Human Ecology Education Now
Literature
allen-ginsberg
“Celestial Homework” that opens "gates to magnificence"
In 1974, Allen Ginsberg and poet Anne Waldman launched the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder, Colorado.
ARTICLE: Allen Ginsberg’s “Celestial Homework”: A Reading List for His Class “Literary History of the Beats”
SEL
What if educational social-emotional learning programs were ultimately about making the world a better place?
This article explores how societal polarization affects youth—and makes the case for social and emotional learning (SEL) programs that foster empathy, compassion, and prosocial behavior aimed at collective well-being.
ARTICLE: What If SEL Were About Making the World a Better Place?
Inspiration
Prominent civil rights figure Ruby Bridges has published a new children’s book about being the first Black child to integrate at William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans.
In November 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges became the first Black student to integrate William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, escorted by U.S.
ARTICLE: Prominent Civil Rights Figure Ruby Bridges Publishes Love Letter to Her First-Grade Teacher
