The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Ecological Awakening: A Path Toward Holistic Adulthood with Bill Plotkin

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

(Conversation recorded on September 16th, 2024)    Where have all the elders gone? As the world grapples with its unfolding economic and energy crises, it can often feel like we lack capable guides to help our societies navigate these transitions. How can we cultivate ourselves as individuals to become balanced, true adults who are fully equipped to contribute to our communities, the planet, and the massive changes ahead? In this episode, Nate is joined by eco-depth psychologist Bill Plotkin to explore the profound themes of human development, the urgent need for ecological awakening, and the importance of art and nature in navigating the crises of modern society. Plotkin also outlines his eight stages of eco-centric human development to foster a healthier future for humanity and the planet. What circumstances have led to generations of individuals stuck in psychological adolescence? What role does the concept of the soul play in shaping our life purpose? How do we implement a cultural regeneration that aligns with the natural world and the stages of human development, ultimately helping us prioritize the health of the planet, people, and all species? About Bill Plotkin: Bill Plotkin, PhD, is an eco-depth psychologist, wilderness guide, and agent of cultural regeneration. As founder of southwest Colorado's Animas Valley Institute, he has, since 1980, guided thousands of people on the journey of soul initiation and is the training director of the Soulcraft Apprenticeship and Initiation Program. He's also been a research psychologist (studying non-ordinary states of consciousness), rock musician, and white-water river guide.  In 1979, on a solo winter ascent of an Adirondack peak, Bill experienced a "call to spiritual adventure," leading him to abandon academia in search of his true calling. He is the author of Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche (an experiential guidebook), Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World (a nature-based stage model of human development), Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche (a nature-based map of the psyche), and The Journey of Soul Initiation: A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries (a guidebook for the descent to soul). His doctorate in psychology is from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Visit him online at www.animas.org.   Show Notes and More Watch this episode on YouTube   ---    Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

The most important thing for true societal change is that we have educational systems, not only for children and teenagers, but for adults, to help people ecologically awaken. Because once we have a large enough percentage, everything will shift. We'll start embracing the world as all relatives and all intelligent. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Higgins. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human. human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future.

By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. Today I'm joined by Bill Plotkin for introduction to his work in eco-depth psychology, human development, and the soul. Bill holds a PhD in psychology and researched non-ordinary states of consciousness. In 1979, on a solo winter ascent of an Andorandak peak, Bill experienced a call to spiritual adventure, leading him to abandon academia in search of his true calling. He has since founded the Animas Valley Institute and has guided thousands of people on the journey of soul initiation and is the training director of the Soulcraft Apprenticeship and initiation program. This interview is a bit different from other.

others on this channel that cover oil depletion, economic systems, ecological risks. Instead, I interview Bill in an attempt to get at the root of what underlies all of these issues, which is a shift in human development, consciousness, and values from our ancestral past. Bill begins our conversation by reading a poem that he and I believe will be helpful as you listen along. For me, it set the tone for the rest of this unique episode. And before we begin, if you enjoy this podcast, one of the biggest ways you can support us is by subscribing on your favorite platform or sharing this episode with someone who might enjoy it. We believe in making this content free and accessible to as many people as possible and appreciate your support. With that, please welcome Bill Plotkin.

Bill Plotkin, good morning. Welcome to the Great Simplification. Thanks so much, Nate. Great to be here with you. To be honest, well, I'm always honest, to be open and blunt, I hadn't heard your name until a year or two ago, and now I've heard it like a hundred times. We have many mutual colleagues and somehow the winding road has brought me to your work. And I recently read your book, Nature and the Human Soul, which we're going to talk about today. but you emailed me last night and said you would like to start by reciting a poem. So I'm handing the mic to you. I like starting with poems often because the material that is the essence of my work is something that's really totally off the map of the contemporary industrialized world.

And so I'm in my work, I'm evoking possibilities. experiences, certain kinds of dimensions of magic of the world that are difficult for contemporary people to access through their everyday worldview. And one of the amazing and indispensable things about good poetry is that it slips beneath the radar. You might say a good poem. is connecting up some reality about what it is to be human in this world, especially those realities that are somewhat mysterious, and using language and rhythm to evoke our innate human intuitions

about these mysterious aspects of life. And good poetry, of course, shifts consciousness in a way that might be helpful at the start of our conversation, both for you and me and for our listeners. So this poem is one of my favorites from one of my favorite poets. His name is David White. He's an Anglo-American contemporary poet, and this poem is called All the True Vows.

I'll recite it, and I hope you and your listeners will forgive me that I'll have kind of some commentary as I go along with this poem. But it won't be interpretation, because that's one thing we don't do in our work. We don't interpret dreams, or we don't interpret poems, but we do amplify them and try to help their effect be amplified. Let me say as a preface to this poem that the poet is speaking about two kinds of vows that he distinguishes, and he's also speaking of two kinds of truth which are the kinds of truth we don't usually talk about every day in the contemporary world. And he's also talking about two kinds of promises.

And I want to say a bit about those promises. There's one kind of promise that is rarely ever made in the contemporary world. David White calls it a promise it will kill you to break. And it's rarely ever made because my understanding is that very, very, very few contemporary people ever reached the stage of human development where you could make that kind of promise. And you'll get more of a sense from the poem about that promise. The second promise he speaks of at the end of the poem is a promise that unfortunately almost everybody in the contemporary world makes as a child. and too rarely is that promise broken,

because that second promise has to be broken in order to access our deeper life in order to be someone who could ever make that first promise. Okay, I hope that's sufficiently mysterious, but here's the poem, all the true vows. All the true vows are secret vows, The ones we speak out loud are the ones we break. All the true vows are secret vows.

The ones we speak out loud are the ones we break. There's only one life you can call your own, and a thousand others you can call by any name you want. Hold to the truth you make every day with your own body. Don't turn your face away. hold to your own truth at the center of the image you were born with. I'm going to pause here in the poem and say, those are two pretty interesting truths that we don't talk about in the contemporary world every day,

that the idea that we are making a truth every day with our own body, well, that's interesting. And the other one, that each of us is born with an image, and there's a truth at the center of that image. And you and I and our listeners can wonder, maybe those two truths are the same truth. Maybe. The truth, I'll call it the deep soma truth and the deep image truth.

Maybe they are the same truth. Okay, back to the poem. Hold to the truth you make every day with your own body. Don't turn your face away. hold to your own truth at the center of the image you were born with. Those who do not understand their destiny will never understand the friends they have made, nor the work they have chosen, nor the one life that waits beyond all the rest. By the lake, in the wood, in the shadows, you can whisper that truth

to the quiet reflection you see in the water. Remember, whatever you hear from the water, it wants you to carry the sound of its truth on your lips. I'm going to pause here again and say that the poet is sort of inviting us to remember or actually to go to a solitary place in the wild world by the lake in the wood, in the shadows. And if we have some sense of that truth,

the somer truth, deep somer truth, and the deep image truth, we can whisper that to our own reflection that we see in the water. And then he says, whatever we hear from the water, remember, it wants you to carry the sound of its truth on your lips. Remember, in this place, by the lake, in the wood, in the shadows, you can, no one can hear you. And out of the silence, you can make a promise it will kill you to break. Quick commentary here. The promise that will kill you to break, the poet is implying, is that you will carry the sound of the truth of what you hear from the water on your lip.

for the rest of your life. Out of the silence, you can make a promise it will kill you to break. That way, you will find what is real and what is not. I know what I'm saying. This is the poet speaking in the poem. I know what I'm saying.

Time almost forsook me, and I looked again. Seeing my reflection, I broke a promise and spoke for the first time after all these years in my own voice before it was too late to turn my face again. That's the end of the poem. And I'll just add here that that second promise that we have to break at some point is the

one we make in childhood too often in the contemporary world. We make that promise that we won't speak in our own voice or we won't sing in our own voice, that we betrayed our own authenticity for a certain kind of social safety. And so the poet says, seeing my reflection, I broke a promise and spoke for the first time after all these years in my own voice before it was too late to turn my face again. It's beautiful.

As you know, I have a lot of questions I want to ask you, but I could probably ask you just enough questions, just about this poem. But let me start with this. Last night, a friend of mine who went to one of your seminars and I talked and she said she went to like a three session thing. And the first session, she was like, it was so slow and there was poetry. And I was kind of bored. I was wondering if I was in the wrong, had chosen the wrong session. But by the third session, she realized that the poetry and the slowness and the discourse at the beginning was purposefully to tone down the nervous system of the loud Western civilization industrialized mindset and that you had to quiet the mind in order to get to the deeper part of the feeling and the conversation. I don't know if you've experienced that in your seminars, but that was her feedback.

And I'm just wondering starting off a podcast conversation if it's the same sort of thing where the medium is the message in a certain sort of way that a poem, one that is deep and profound like that one, allows us to quiet the reptilian fighter flight information processing system and allow us to get more into a paris sympathetic state. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I think something like that is very true. Good poetry like this evokes, it comes from, it emerges from, and it evokes a certain kind of worldview. A view of the world being a much more mysterious place than we usually think of it as, and having opportunities to enter a... ever more deeply into the world and discover our unique place in it. This is something we don't talk about in the everyday, I call, some people call the Industrial Growth Society or the Consumer Conformist Society.

But all humans know this because we have evolved for hundreds of thousands of years to be creatures like other creatures that can find. our way deeply into the world and find our way of our own unique way of serving life. So yeah, we often start our five-day and longer programs with poetry and stories, but mostly inviting people onto the land in a certain kind of way that evokes are more but ancient human intuition of what it is to be a human alive on this planet. So some of my viewers might wonder why I'm highlighting Bill Plotkin and Samantha Sweetwater and people of Joanna Macy's lineage, etc.

when things like climate change and oil depletion and geopolitics and polarization from AI and all that are happening. And I think the answer is that this is at the root and that we actually need poetry and nature to resuscitate and regenerate who we are capable of being to confront these crises. And without that art, without the fusing of the leasing of the leasing of the limbic and cognitive systems, we can't respond to today's challenges in a way that is commensurate with the stakes of our time. So I do think art and poetry and obviously nature are pretty important. I assume you agree. I do agree. Let me give you some background. I was originally trained as a psychologist many years ago. Sometimes I think of myself as recovering psychologist or a psychologist gone wild. And I became a developmental psychologist. I became a psychologist

really interested in how is it, what are the processes or the stages that we go through as we develop as we mature? And what I've been noticing over the last 40 years or so is that that the stages we go through in the contemporary world are not the ones that nature, you might say, has designed us to go through. That there's a very widespread form of a rested human development that we find, I find, my colleagues and I and others, find throughout the world and all to call developed or industrialized cultures, which are most of them now.

And one thing that just becomes increasingly clear to me all the more so every day is that the root problem behind beneath all of our crises, the metacrisis or the poly crisis, so on, of our time, which I know all your

listeners are familiar with, the root cause is arrested human development. I also refer to as systemic human development oppression. It's the kind of oppression we don't talk about in our contemporary world, but all the other oppressions, racial, sexual, class-based, and so forth, are rooted in the systemic and systematic oppression of human development in contemporary life, that our,

our societies or our cultures will not regenerate in healthy ways until we do something about that very fundamental problem. And that's what at Anims Valley Institute, my colleagues and I, now we've been at it for about 44 years. That's our primary work. We actually say our mission is cultural regeneration. And our dimension of cultural regeneration that we work with is stages of cultural regeneration that we work with is stages of, human development. And so what we've done is we've mapped out, we've mapped human development onto nature's own templates of wholeness.

And we ended up with eight stages of human development that we call the ecocentric or soul-centric stages. And here's some of the kind of bottom lines, Nate, that will kind of drive home the main point is that it's become quite clear to me that more than 95% of contemporary people never make it to what true adulthood is. That's a big statement to make. It's kind of radical. And it might make things sound even more hopeless than our listeners always already thought it was. But here's the positive angle on this. And that is that we are each, human beings evolved to grow through these more wholesome or optimal or soul-centric stages.

And it doesn't take that much support to help someone who never had that kind of support catch up in a matter of a few years, depending on the person, the kind of support they get. For me and my colleagues and many other thinkers of a similar event in the world, one of the most important things to change is education systems and the way we parent each other and our relationship to the more than human world and yes to art and poetry and so on. Again, my colleagues and I for over 40 years have been developing ways to do that. But the practices and the programs, the experiential immersions that we've developed, that what we do in them, the actual practices,

are not that unusual. It's our maps and our models, nature-based models, that change our entire understanding of what we're doing and why. And so I'll mention just real briefly, and maybe you'll want to go into some detail with some of these three major models that we've developed.

One is, what do the eight stages of human development, two of childhood, two of adolescence, two of adulthood, two of adulthood, to a adulthood, to a adulthood, look like if we look through the lens of the natural worlds at what a human being is. The second map is what are the parts or the dimensions or the facets of a human psyche? What are the, especially what are the resources of wholeness that each human is born with and what are the kinds of practices and guidance that humans can be offered in order to cultivate

their natural human wholeness and resources. And also, what are the kinds of inner protectors we have? Sometimes we call them sub-personalities, like our inner critic, but there's lots of different kinds of inner protectors whose job starting in our childhood is to keep us safe enough so that we actually survive until we're 15 or 20 or older. So that's the second map, which has to do with structural map of the aspects or the parts of the human psyches, both the facets of wholeness and the varieties

of inner protectors. And the third map, which is guiding what we call the journey of soul initiation, which takes place during the fourth of the eight stages, I call it the cocoon stage, and that corresponds to late adolescence, not the second half of our teen years, but a psychological stage that most contemporary people never reach no matter how long they live. And the journey of soul initiation is the journey in which we start by relinquishing our adolescent identity and story, you know, the really healthy, successful adolescent way of belonging in the world and wander deeper into what in the contemporary world, because of the natural world. and deeper into the depths of our own psyche in search of what you might call like the poem that we were born to be or the dance we were meant to do in this life.

Or as the poet says, the truth at the center of the image we were born with to find that image and not just find it as information that we can, then uses an answer, but it's when we encounter that truth at the center of the image we were born with, or the poem that we were born to be, it starts to do a metamorphic, shape-shifting dance with our psyche, our conscious self, our egos in particular. And over some months or years, we are shaped-shifted into someone who is capable, of living that image is a gift, a life-serving gift to the world. So real briefly, what are, just labeled them, what are the eight stages that you talk about in this book? We have two models of human development.

When we call the ecocentric or soul-centric wheel, which you've just asked about. But the other one is the egocentric wheel, which is an attempt to model. the kind of stages most contemporary people do go through. And I'm mentioning that now to emphasize that the stages that I'm about to tell you about are relatively rare for most contemporary people to go through. Of the eight stages, contemporary people tend to get stuck

in a not particularly healthy version of the third stage. Okay, so the stages are, again, two of childhood, and the first one we call the innocent in the nest. And to understand these stages, there's so many dimensions of them, but maybe the most important one for now is to say there are two developmental tasks for the individual

in each stage. In a way, a person matures or progresses through the healthy stages is by applying themselves to or addressing the developmental task of that stage. And one thing that's unique about the first stage, the innocent in the nest, which is early childhood, is that the individual doesn't have any tasks because they're an infant and a toddler. Who does have the task on behalf of the child are the parents and the family?

And so the first stage of early childhood, the innocent in the nest, goes well only if the parents are in stage five, which is the first stage of adulthood. So that because sometimes we call that an initiated adult, which is someone who knows what they were born to do

in this life. They have accessed that poem that they were born as. as that truth at the center of the image. And they have found ways to deliver that to their people. I'm now understanding why you required me to read your book before you agreed to be on my podcast, because your work is like a horizontal and vertical fractal Russian doll. It connects up and down and all over the place. But sorry to interrupt.

Keep going. Yeah, that's such an important point, Nate, that to have a healthy early childhood, you need to, a fully healthy one, you need to live in a society where there are true elders, which are very rare in contemporary world, true adults, also very rare, and healthy family settings. And the way you get to that kind of culture is that you have people who go through these, stages. So you can see this kind of a catch 22. How can you go through these stages if you don't already and create a culture like that if you don't already have one? And the answer is you can do it, but it's more challenging than if you lived in a healthy culture and family with adults and elders and true elders. So since we're doing the Russian doll approach here, could you just label what the eight categories are briefly and then we'll backfill from there. So give people the

mental map of what the eight categories are. So the first stage early childhood is the innocent in the nest. I've used an earth archetype and a human archetype to evoke the nature of each stage. The innocent being a human archetype, the nest being an earth archetype. Stage two, which is middle childhood, is the explorer in the garden. We're out of the family nest, where we're getting a little bit out into the wild world, but only as far as the garden. And early adolescence, which of course starts at puberty, which is a psychosocial passage, not primarily a hormonal one, but there's that aspect too. Early adolescence I call the Thespian at the Oasis, the Thespian, because we're learning

how to create our own, how to shape our own social. persona that's different in some ways from how we've learned to be as a child in our family. The fourth stage, which is late adolescence, which is the one that most contemporary people never reach, I call the wanderer in the cocoon. That's the stage during which the journey of soul initiation happens and where we go and search in the depths of the world, who we were born to be. The second half of the wheel, which is adulthood and adulthood, begins with stage five, early adulthood. I call it the apprentice at the wellspring.

And what we're apprenticing to is a delivery system and also the wellspring, which is an image for the way the mysteries of life in general in our particular life springs up out of the ground into the world. Late adulthood is the artisan in the wild orchard. Artisan in the wild orchard, because in late adulthood, we are discovering our unique way of delivering our soul work to our people, the Earth community more generally. And so, like, you know, every apple is a unique one, the wild orchard. And then elderhood starts with stage seven and the archetypes there are the master

in the grove of elders. And true elders have a totally different kind of task in the world than true adults do. True elders are letting go of their primary focus in their soul work and become one of the people. whose task in life is to care for the soul of the more than human community, and in particular to make sure that the human village is operating in a way that keeps the rest of the Earth community healthy.

So just saying it that simply, we all can see what happens in the world when we don't have true elders, and the illustration of that is what, in fact, is happening in our world these days. The final stage, stage eight, is late elderhood, and the image there is the sage in the mountain cave. This is a particularly mysterious stage for Western people. The only person who was really able to explain it well to me was the person who was in that stage. At the time I met him, I was Thomas Berry, the great the

the man who wrote The Dream of the Earth. And he gave me some sense of what the sage in the mountain cave does and how that anchors the entire human village in the depths of the world. So there's a ridiculously fast run through these eight stages. Nate, would you like to go? Well, as people have been telling me, I am often saying these days, I have so many questions, Bill. Let me start with a couple of them. First of all, presumably humans go through childhood, adolescent, adulthood, elderhood, but that's in chronological years. And what you're saying is that someone lives to be 85 years old and then they pass on,

that they went through elderhood in the human framing, but in the eco-psychology, eco-depth psychology framing that you just outlined, they may have never made it to adulthood even. So are their cultures historically or today, perhaps some uncontacted Amazon or or Papua New Guinea tribe where you would hypothesize or have evidence that the inhabitants of that tribe actually do naturally go through these eight stages because it's a healthy interconnected vertically and horizontally cultural transmission connected to the earth.

Yeah, such an important question because people might say, hey, great model, Bill, but what's the evidence that it ever happens that way? In some ways that the natural world's own template of wholeness tells us that it happens that way. But in terms of, can I point to cultures in the world where it works this way.

There's so many dimensions to that answer. One is that if I actually knew about contemporary cultures that work that way, I would not name them because if they're still functioning in a healthy, ecocentric way, they won't be once they have too much contact with the contemporary world, what Rianne Isler calls the Dominator societies, which have been destroying the healthier, which she calls the partnership societies for many years,

for millennia, actually. And it's something that was done to our own cultures. for us people who are derived from Western European cultures, we might have to go back a few thousand years to our indigenous ancestors, but all humans have them, indigenous ancestors. So that was the first part of the answer, Nate. Second one is to say that there are a few writers, authors

who have written about their cultures, And if we take a look at what they say, it is consistent with the sole-centric developmental will that we've developed at animus. So one example is Melodoma Somei, who's from the Dagara people. He's passed on, but he was from the Dagara people of West Africa. And he wrote a number of books about his people and about their initiation rights. he wrote about the initiation rights for boys. And it very much corresponds to what we have in our Animus Valley Institute maps all through all of the stages. Another example would be Martin Prechtel, who wrote about the culture he was adopted into,

the Tutu Hill, Mayan people of contemporary Guatemala, whose culture may pretty much have been undermined by now by the contemporary world, the dominator world. Also, there's a Native American educator educator, Greg Cahette from New Mexico, who's written a number of books, including one called Look to the Mountains. And when I look through his books, I see, yeah, He is describing cultural ways, many which have been lost or diminished, but in North America,

that very much correspond to these eight stages. It's both really rewarding and frustrating to interview on a Zoom or Riverside, in this case, someone like you that is so deep and wide in your answers. It feels like a proper podcast with you would be like sitting in a cabin somewhere, you know, in the same space and having multiple hours because these are not sound bite answers. Actually, a podcast in 75 or 90 minutes is itself not an example of adulthood or elderhood in its communication vectors. Would you agree? No, totally agree. My colleagues and I, we have about 20 guides, by the way,

that we are offering experiential immersions all around the world, maybe 15 or 20 different countries. We have two training programs, one with 100 trainees, and the other one with about 25. Joining us for a first five-day immersion is really just an introduction to the kind of work we do. and sometimes we say, you know, the real thing we're doing, the primary central thing we're doing in our immersions

is inviting people into a worldview that they're not familiar with and in some ways is opposed to the contemporary worldview. And it's not something you can just tell people about or talk about. We use ceremonies and practices and poetry and so on to open the gates to what we consider to be the real world. Some people might call it the animate world or the world of depths of the psyche's depth. And it takes a while to get through that door.

But once you do, it's kind of a one-way portal that you would never want to go back and maybe you even can't. increasingly, in conversations like this and in my work, I've come to distinguish a difference between knowing something and knowing about something. And the difference is that when you know about something, you can recite the facts and tell the stories. But when you know it, there's an embodied sense like, yes, that is true. I feel the reality and gravity of that. thing. And I think that's what you're talking about, what you experience in person over five days,

is there's an embodied sense of knowing certain things, which is different than knowing about them. Yes. Yeah. Well said. So true. And here's probably the best example of that. There's a, um, an experience that this one maybe, uh, Jim, I'm just making guesses at numbers or percentages that maybe 20, 25% or so of maternity people have had. That means a lot have not had it. And we call it ecological awakening or eco-awakening. The ecological awakening is the first time in life, at least since early childhood, when we experienced ourselves as a full member of the more-than-human world,

more than human being, meaning not just human, which is to say the Earth community, that the experience of being related on a kinship basis with everything, other animals and habitats, and vegetation, rivers, mountains, everything, that these are our relatives. And it's the experience when, the way some people say it is that before, I had that experience of that kind of eco-awakening, it was as if there had been an invisible wall between me and the rest of the world. And like, I wasn't even aware of the aliveness and the magnificence of all the other others. And I didn't really experience myself at being at home deeply in the world.

And during this experience, it's as if that invisible wall just shatters. And that we feel like we've just been welcomed home by the rest of the world. And there's often a lot of grief that comes up for people that moment because side by side with the joy

of finding oneself at home finally for the first time in your life is also the grief that you've lived your life up to that point without even knowing it or experiencing it and that you realize that so many other your fellow human creatures might never know this the rest of their entire lives

so there's quite a bit of a grief about that but the actual experience of ecological awakening is completely different than taking an a class in ecology and maybe having a college professor explain all these things to you, you might

cognitively intellectually understand it, but you might still never have had the experience. And that experience of ecological awakening is when a human a temporary human shifts from an egocentric version of early adolescence to an ecocentric version of early adolescence.

And then you can complete early adolescence in a healthy way. And then once you address the tasks of early adolescence enough, then the way I like to say is mystery will then toss you into the next stage, the cocoon stage. But here's something I just want to underline, and that is for humans growing up in a healthy ecoquine, centric culture, there's no such thing as ecological awakening because ecological sleep never happens. In other words, every human child is born experiencing the whole world as relatives,

as kin. We're not going to keep this to 75 minutes, Bill, because I do have so many questions. relative just to your last comment, I studied business and Chinese in undergrad, and I got a master's in finance, and I got a PhD in natural resources. But all throughout, my favorite subject was human psychology. But human psychology doesn't have an eco in it. I mean, how can we teach psychology to the 250 million college students around the world without the relationship between humans and nature being a core part of it? Well, you won't be surprised that I totally agree. Like what we call psychology, again, I'm trained as a psychologist,

but what we call psychology in the Western world is really, in my view, and others, just a little fragment of what psychology actually is. And so many of us, eco-psychologists and depth psychologists, are bringing in these other dimensions of the human psyche or the human relationship to the world. One is our embeddedness and entanglement in this much wider,

magical, mysterious world that's multi-specated and multi-habitatted and so on. And also, the depth psychologists are reminding us of this so much to our psyche other than the ego is the ego is one of the things that makes us magnificently human and we wouldn't be human without the kind of consciousness we have,

self-reflexive consciousness. Ego is a great thing in the way I use the word, that's a very small part of our psyche. And so I, at Animas, we call the kind of psychology we do echo depth psychology because it both has the wider foundation of the more than human world is that we emerge from as humans and we are part of and our processes reflect and natural processes.

And it takes in the depth of the human psyche that 95% or more of our human psyche that we're not conscious of. So we use the term echo depth psychology, but I believe in some future generations, what we now call echo depth psychology will just be called psychology. And maybe we'll even understand that psychology is a branch of ecology,

which maybe we'll get to later or maybe you want to go there next, but it has to do with what I understand the word soul means it's not even a psychology concept, it's an ecology concept. Well, why don't we go there? You write about soul-centric and use the word soul a lot in your book, and I know they're like a whole chapter on defining it. How do you define the word soul in this work?

I do define it differently than almost anyone else I've ever read. I did find an almost identical definition finally in the work of Stephen Herod Buehner. For those of your listeners who are familiar with him, he referred. refers to each creature, human and otherwise, as a unique ecological communication. That's really interesting to me, a unique ecological communication. But back to the word soul more generally, some of my colleagues say one of the big mistakes I made in terminology is using the word soul to mean what I'm about to tell you. and other colleagues say it was the greatest move to make because it shifts the conversation about soul because in the contemporary word, the word soul, it has a religious connotation of like, you know, the spark of life,

and it's something that comes into the body maybe at conception or sometime after, and it leaves the body afterwards. It's like a metaphysical thing. That's not at all what I mean. I'm not saying that's an non-valid use of the word soul, just I'm using the word very differently. And other people use the word soul to mean things that have meaning or depth or heart, which is another valid way to use the term, but I'm, again, using it differently. But my definition is founded in the idea that one of the one of the one of the way,

of the ways that people, just in ordinary conversation, use the word soul, is to mean, what I've just alluded to that, it has to do with what's really meaningful in our life and which gives us our deepest purpose. But what occurred to me is that's not something in our psyche. It has to do with who we were born to be. And so for me, very brief, the definition of soul that I use is a creature's unique ecological niche. So when we talk about niches, we usually are talking about species. Like every species has its own niche. And in the contemporary world where it's all about, you know, the usefulness of things.

we talk about ecological services that every species provides. And every species does. Every species has its unique way of enhancing life. That's one of the ecological principles that we work with at Animus, which is that life serves life, that life helps the rest of life be more successful. every kind of life does, and to help further diversify and complexify. So every species has its unique gift to the world.

We humans are not doing a great job over the last few thousand years. As everyone knows, we have been destroying life in the last couple of hundred years. We've gotten really, really good, unfortunately, at destroying life. eliminating species and habitats and so on. But I don't believe we're an exception, that we actually are evolved by Earth to enhance life in the way no other creatures can, but we're going through this major transitional ordeal

of a few thousand years or more. But, okay, that's about species. But now take the next step and say, not only does every species have its unique ecological niche, but every individual of every species does as well. And this is what we hear from the intact indigenous traditions around the world, including some of our own Western-derived ones that we still have access to, that after early adolescence, which is to say,

after we have consciously crafted our own social way of being in the world that works, which is to say we're socially accepted by at least one peer group, and we're being authentic, we're being real. That once we've done that, mystery tosses us into this next stage of the cocoon where the task is to shed that first, self-created identity and to wander into the world as almost like a generic person, but a wanderer, and in search of this deeper understanding of who we are. And some indigenous traditions we use a phrase that's been translated into English

as our original instructions. that each one of us is born with the knowledge to shape shift into a form in which we can provide the greatest gift that we can as an individual to the world. And we do that by inhabiting our unique ecological niche. But here's one of the main points, Nate, is that our unique ecological niche can never be defined in terms of a social role or a job or a career or a creative art project we can only

articulate or point to our soul or our soul work with metaphors like poems. And the phrase we use at Enimus is our mytho-poetic identity. and then we have to learn, you know, what kind of social roles and vocations might be good delivery systems for that. So real briefly, in my case, my first encounter with soul, the poem that I was shown, and was actually from a butterfly after four days of fasting in a wild place,

was the image of the weaving of a cocoon. I actually heard the words cocoon weaver when a butterfly flew by. It points to the poem that I am, that I became clear, and it was a real experientially deep knowing that came with lots of tears to recognize, okay, that is what I am to do in the world, and I have absolutely no idea what it means or how to do it, but I recognized it because that was the truth at the center of the image I was born with. And then it was up to my conscious self, my ego, to, after a while, to begin to learn what delivery systems would be ways for me to weave cocoons for humans who reach the late adolescent stage.

because we need new contemporary ways of doing that. One thing that's absolutely been clear to me from the beginning that the journey of soul initiation is all about authenticity in a very, very deep way. And we can't do that if we copy the ways of other peoples, especially intact indigenous traditions. And so I did my best from the beginning is that we're not going to do it in any other people's way.

we're going to find her own contemporary Western way to do it. And so far, we've been at it for over 40 years and we're still learning how to do that. You're saying that the soul is potentially at the individual level and ecological niche. But for most animals in history, when they were born, the worlds and the biosphere was pretty much stable during their lifetimes. when we're born, you and I in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, I don't know how old you are exactly, but you've got this progression of the two stages of early childhood, the two stages of adolescence, the two stages of adulthood and the two stages of elderhood. But this is all happening during the carbon pulse.

And chronologically, many of us are born in the upslope of the carbon. pulse and now we're at the peak where it's cresting and now there's going to be the downslip of the carbon pulse. So does one's soul or one's calling or whatever change based on economic, cultural, and environmental circumstances, or is it unique to them when they were born on this earth? Yeah, good question. I do believe it's unique to us and it's for our whole lifetime. what changes is how we deliver it. The social role or the career or the creative projects can change during our lifetime to be more effective delivery systems given the changes in culture, environment, climate, and so on. But as William Stafford says, there's a thread that you follow. And the thread is that mythropoetic essence and how you deliver it can change.

So as defined by you, everyone has a soul, which is their unique ecological niche in the community of life. But how many people are tethered to that soul, are aware of it, embrace it, follow it, and how many people are unaware and or completely disconnected from their quote-unquote soul? Yeah, I'd say more than 95% are disconnected consciously from their soul. There's still a connection, obviously, beneath the level of consciousness. But, yeah, more than 95% never make it to adulthood

and not many more make it too late adolescence. But it's there. Here's one way I say it, that in the first half of the wheel, which if you know, if birth is in the east and you go around Sunwise, which is clockwise, in the northern hemisphere, then it's the bottom of the wheel, which is childhood and adolescence,

and the top is adulthood and elderhood, Well, in the bottom half of the wheel, childhood and adolescence, the soul is in service to the ego. And that means the soul, or you might say earth life, more generally mystery, is serving the ego and trying to provide the ego with experiences that enable it to grow. in the contemporary world despite all the cultural systems that make that more difficult but it's in us to develop that way and it doesn't take that much

as I mentioned before, guidance of support to allow the natural process of maturation or individuation to happen. You said, you said you didn't have data for this per se but you expect roughly

20 or 25% of humans have had an awakening in the community of life where they realize that everything is connected. And it was like a shattering of glass when that happened. I don't know when that happened for me, but it's clearly happened because I have that feeling almost every day when I'm out in the woods or with nature. I can access that readily now.

And it comes with both a feeling of overwhelming, beauty and awe and also an overwhelming sadness because I anticipate the the backside cost of capitalism and and the superorganism on what they're going to do to nature and coming decades but I can I can get to that point but it's unlike when you do mushrooms or some peak experience where you can only do that when you're under the influence of some external stimuli. In this case, it seems to me that when you, when you have that breakthrough or you experience it once or twice or three times, you can't go back to the way it was before. Is that your experience that once people go through this, that it's there and available to

them? And then I have a follow-up question. Yes, that is my experience. Once we go through ecological awakening. We don't go back to sleep. I mean, we can slide off that understanding after a while if we get no support from it in our contemporary world, but it's much more easily accessed again. And then our life changes because we, because again, the ecological awakening is moving from an egocentric worldview to an ecocentric worldview. And the ego-centric, it's all about the ego.

It's all about me and what can I do and what can I accomplish. And what kind of, like, even the contemporary world understanding of the hero's journey, which Joseph Campbell wrote about brilliantly, but still his understanding of the hero is an early adolescent one. And it's very different from the mature hero journey. Well, I have two follow-ups now. My next follow-up is, given what we face, potentially 3 degrees Celsius, hopefully less,

biodiversity loss, geopolitical conflict, energy depletion, financial overshoot, all the nodes of the meta-crisis, don't you think that a large, much larger than currently, percentage of humanity, would have to go through this awakening, this shattering of glass

and recognition of an earth-centered rather than a human-centered worldview and that those people then engaging with the work of the bend-not-break metacrisis framing, that that is a necessity, that if we just have people working on the metacrisis that don't have this broader ecological wide boundary worldview,

we're just going to knock our heads against different walls that rhyme with how we got here. Yeah, okay, there's a couple things here. One is the deep time view. It's part of the echo-centric perspective that

you know anything worth doing has to be done in my lifetime, you know, in any given individual's lifetime. And ideally in no more than a year or two, and even better in 15 minutes. And so we often are looking for solutions that can be really quick.

But in a deep time view, it's taken a few thousand years at least to get to this crisis point. It started a long, long time ago. And I could point the listeners to some books about people who have written about how this has started a long time ago. And it's not going to... Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. That would be a good one, yes. Another one is the Parable of the Tribes by Andrew Schmuckler. And another one would be any of the books by Paul Shepard.

And of course, there are others. So it's going to take a while. And to me, getting from where we are now, which I call it. pathological adolescent societies or patho-adolescent egocentric societies to a life-sustaining society or societies, diverse societies, that's going to take a while. But to get from there to life-sustaining societies, truly healthy, mature societies, which are not merely life-sustaining, but life-enhancing, that's going to take quite a number of generations to get there. But I want to look at these two steps and a little bit more detail.

The first one, a life-sustaining society would require a large percentage. I don't even know if it would be 50%, because of tipping points, positive tipping points, but a large percentage of humans in any given contemporary society would have to be ecologically awakened. That's relatively easy compared to becoming a true adult, which is a whole lot more. And so we have a movement happening now, some call it nature connection movement,

and it's changing more and more the way we do education now in the contemporary world. And so we have generations being raised now who might not have gone to sleep ecologically, or at least are being ecologically awakened, and are learning about life in an ecological context. This is something that, to me, is so urgent, and this might be the most important thing for true societal change,

this first half of it to a life-sustaining society, is that we have educational systems, not only for children and teenagers, but for adults, I mean, people in adult bodies, to help people ecologically awaken. Because once we have a large enough percentage, everything will shift. We'll stop treating the world like a landfill

or just a set of resources for us. Well, if we will start embracing the world as all relatives and all intelligent. So that's the first step. And that could be done maybe in a generation or two. Because there's a lot of really creative visionary people who are leaning in that direction and seeing how fundamental it is. But the second half of it, which is getting to a truly mature life-enhancing society, that's going to require societies where, you know, 20% or so of people are true elders,

and 20, 25% of humans are actually true initiated adults. That's going to take a while. And so we have to have this deep time perspective of seven generations. or so, what foundations can we put in place now to increase the chance that human societies that survive this century, we don't know how many will, we can't even guarantee any will, but those who do survive, how can they begin growing a true elder which starts at birth? and that's one of the things we think about all the time at animus is what are the foundations we want to put in place and we're doing our version with coming up with new formats for guiding the journey of soul initiation

and we have colleagues in education and in the world of parenting that are developing formats, structures, to support parents and their children to have a greater chance of reaching that cocoon stage and the initiatory journey. So what does it mean to truly be an adult in this culture? based on your framing. You said that ecological awareness or the awakening is necessary, but

only a first step on the way to truly being adult. You're like the fourth or fifth intellectual that I've come across in the last few weeks that has pointed out that we basically need to grow up and be adults. And once we do that, there are implications and things to do, but most of us aren't. So from your framing, what does that mean to be an adult? in our culture or as a human generally? First, I don't mean what we mean in the contemporary world. Like, if we look at the concept of maturity, we have generally agreed upon intuition

of what it is to be a mature human. And it's a very, very different continuum than what we find in the social center development a whale, but the other day I wrote down some words that seem to correspond to what we mean as as to maturity, what we mean by that word in the contemporary world. And it's things like being responsible, dependable, kind, compassionate, able to think for yourself, able to contribute to family and community, able to both lead and follow, to be generous, good sense of humor, able to hold down a job, be self-sufficient if sufficiently able-bodied

and so on. But in terms of the soul-centric wheel of development, we'd say any 15-year-old would be capable with flying colors of all those things. It doesn't, we don't have to, it's not what a definition of an adult. Okay, but, so, but to answer your question directly, Nate, I actually have a few definitions of an adult. Here's one of them. It has three parts to it.

An adult human is someone who experiences their membership in the larger Earth community as their primary membership. That primary, it's like, that's where they're most deeply rooted, not in nation or ethnicity or religion or even family, that those things like family and culture, religion, spirituality, and so on, adds immeasurably

to the color and flavor and style of our lives. It's some of the most beautiful parts of who we are. But for a true adult, their first and foremost membership is in the larger Earth community. That's how they primarily identify. That's part one. Part two is that they, a true adult,

has had one and more that in the Western world we'd consider a mystical experience of their place in that larger Earth community. And that there I'm again alluding to unique ecological niche. And that mystical experience is what at animus we call an encounter with soul. And part three is that a true adult has cultivated one or more delivery systems for offering or embodying their unique ecological niche as a gift to others. So interestingly, to me, after I came up with that definition, I realized that the first part of the definition is key to what it is to be a healthy early adolescent, namely someone who

experiences their membership in the larger Earth community as their primary way of belonging. that's early adolescence in a healthy society. And the second part has had one or more soul encounters of their, which reveals their unique place in that earth community. That's what happens in late adolescence. And what happens in early adulthood is we cultivate delivery systems, often through apprenticing to either an artisan who's a late adult or a master who is in early adulthood to learn a delivery system to bring that gift into the world.

So in your opinion, what is the future hold if our society never grows up and has some meaningful percentage of its members as adults, as you say? And just more generally, how do you stay positive when you look around and see so many of our societies around the world that are so, underdeveloped in your framework, because what you're saying makes sense to me. So what is your prediction and thoughts on that? I think it's important and useful to say this as bluntly and directly as possible. At least my opinion.

Others have the same opinion. And that is our society is never going to grow up. it's really a terminal situation. It is so decayed psychospircially, no matter how advanced technologically it is, or how beautiful the arts and how well-developed the sciences are, psychospercially, the structures are so inadequate that we can't grow up our society.

And so I'm thinking of people like one of your guests earlier this year, Vanessa Andriotti, who wrote that incredible book called Hospicing Modernity. And right there, the title suggests that with modern societies, that we have an opportunity to help them die because there's no way to salvage them, there's no way to fix them. So what does that leave us? That leaves us the task of creating small communities. Now this is happening in places around the world.

Small communities that are beginning to, that even have been raising children and educating young people in a way to enhance the chance that they would get to true adults. And so that, I think, is our future, small communities, our future that has the potential to be to grow or to be seeds for future healthy societies because it takes many generations to get from where we are to a healthy society. But meanwhile, there's something we can do with our contemporary societies and have to do. do, and I've spoken about it earlier, but let me just connect the dots. And that is support ecological awakening, and so that we can have the chance of growing, our contemporary society is growing to be more ecoliterate and more capable of actually sustaining life. That's urgent.

That's the most urgent thing. It won't create a mature society by itself, but it might support us to to contribute to what Joanna Macy calls the first dimension of the Great Turning, which is to save as much life as possible now. While modernity is collapsing, we have the opportunity, the blessing we might say, to do everything we can to save as many species and habitats as we can.

Before I heard of you or Joanna Macy or this work, I wrote a book with the co-founder of Greenpeace and we called it bottlenecks of the 21st century, which the main goal was to propel as many things of value through the end of modernity and focus on ecosystems and species. So I came at that from an intellectual vantage and now I'm feeling it from an eco-depth psychology. And now my dad is going to be watching this, and he's going to definitely call me an environmental wacko. But that's okay. He says it with love. So here's what we're going to do, because we're running out of time. We didn't even get to your eight stages, let alone the first four. I'm going to treat this as an introduction to your work.

And I'm going to have you back to unpack. There's just no way that we can do just. to this topic in a short form conversation. So you can't and your team can't personally guide everyone in the world, all our listeners through this process, though certainly you can with some. So what would be your advice to people wanting to have, for instance, either that first ecological awareness, glass-shattering experience where they feel connected, to everything in the community of life

and or to undergo some soul-centric development either as an initiation or a soul quest, how can they find support or a qualified guide? How can they do it on their own? Do you have any suggestions to the viewers? When it comes to ecological awakening, nature-based full-spectrum human development as I sometimes call it,

you can for sure get an introduction to that through my books. So my book, Wild Mind, which is the book I wrote after Soulcraft, Wild Mind outlines the structural view or model of the human psyche with the facets of wholeness and the inner protectors. And there's a lot of experiential exercises in that. in that book. We also have been training guides to do that kind of work, and you can find some of those guides on our website,

which is animus.org. That's A-N-I-M-A-S dot org. That's animus is the Spanish word for souls. And the soul-centric developmental wheel, you'll find it in my third book, which is Nature and the Human Soul, and that goes into the eight stages and details, lots of stories from individuals. It also includes the egocentric wheel, so you can see what a contrast, healthy human development is

with what we actually have in the contemporary world for the most part. And my fourth book is The Journey of Soul Initiation, which goes into great detail about what happens in the cocoon. But back to Ecological Awakening, there's lots of guides in the world now who do some form of what is generally called nature connection work, and that is of great support. But that said, time outside of the four walls of our villages and in wild or semi-wild places, often I would recommend that people go alone without their... or at least turn their phones off and open up to these animate others who are there. You see, it's easier said than done. It's most helpful if you have a guide to help you through some of the initial barriers that we have.

So you also are, in addition to the work at Animus, and your books and doing guiding on this experience. You also understand the metacrisis and all that it entails. Do you have any personal advice at this time of global ecological, economic upheaval and anxiety for our viewers, for what we might call the polycrisis, meta crisis, et cetera? Yeah. I borrow this advice from my friend and teacher, Joanna Macy, one of our great earth elders, who's in her mid-90s now.

And she talks about the great turning and that the great unraveling, which the collapse that we're witnessing in all our systems is part of the story of the great turning, that the collapse and the disrupting, the disrupting, is a necessary part of the story. And she reminds us that business as usual is what drives the great unraveling. So business as usual is also part of the Great Turning story. But she says there's three dimensions of the Great Turning. And so my advice to people is do something that supports the Great Turning.

Don't just, I mean, in addition to feeling all your emotions about it, and that the three dimensions of the Great Turning give us something to do. The first dimension is to save as much life as possible. And we all know there's all kinds of organizations out there, environmentally oriented organizations, political groups and so forth, who are doing what they can to save as much life as possible. Get involved. with that. It's even better than therapy. I mean, that's one of the things James Hillman,

a depth psychologist told us that in title of one of his books, we've had 100 years of psychotherapy in the world's getting worse. That doesn't mean psychotherapy is not of value. But one of the things he said was get involved in helping the world be a better place that's even better than therapy. but doesn't fully substitute for it. Okay, so that's the first dimension. The second is, dimension of the Great Turning,

is creating the foundations and the systems for healthier societies. And there's all kinds of individuals and organizations doing that, who are devoutes, developing new ways to approach growing food, energy, governance, and on and on. And so even while modernity is collapsing around us, there's all these very creative visionaries and groups around the world who are developing the foundations for something

healthier. And the third dimension has to do with a change in values and consciousness. And for me, the way I relate to that is things like ecological awakening and the soul-centric development of wheel, and recognizing that we each, that we humans are part of a much larger multi-species, animate world, and supporting organizations that are changing, the story. They're telling a new story, a Earth community story of not separation, but entanglement.

That we're all in this, entangled with the other species. And they're all as intelligent as we are just different intelligences. So, there's some ideas. Thank you. Those make sense

intuitively and in an embodied way. I feel that those are directionally correct. How would you change that advice to someone who is chronologically in late childhood, early adolescence or young adulthood, someone in their late teens or early 20s listening to this show that isn't far from when they were a young child having wallpaper on their room that was not Walmart, Microsoft's Intel, but was giraffes and orangutans. and fish, what recommendations do you have for young people that kind of feel the truth of what you're saying today?

I mean, this is for people in any stage, is to address the task, the developmental task of your stage. And the only way to get to a next stage, which, by the way, the later stages are not in any way better than earlier stages. A healthy culture has people in every stage, and every stage has a unique gift for the human community and the more than human community. The way to inhabit whatever stage of life we're in is to address the tasks of that stage.

So people in their teens, the task there is to develop a social version of yourself that is both real. It's authentic. It's true to your actual styles and interest and emotions and needs. and so on. And it's also socially acceptable, developing versions of yourself that allow you to feel like you belong

in your social group. But there's the ecological side too of spending time or maybe getting guidance to be in the natural world in a way that you begin to get a sense of the magnificent of this multi-species more than human world.

And so that's the first part is to address the task of your stage and also lend yourself to the great turning if you're able to in any of those three dimensions I mentioned earlier. But the next thing is to say you're likely to have unfinished business from the two earlier stages, which are the two stages of childhood. because everybody does. And Nature and the Human Soul, my book of that title, will help you understand what the stages,

sorry, the tasks of those first two stages are. And one of them, just to give one example, there's two tasks of each stage, so there's four tasks of childhood. And what I call the nature task of middle childhood is learning the enchantment of the more than human world. And that also relates to ecological awakening. But there's also the cultural task that includes things like

learning how to make things with your hands, learning what the herbs are that support our human health and learning how to find them and identify them and prepare them. That's just an example, but the kinds of things that humans have always done to be part of their world. And almost no contemporary humans do that anymore. And that's one of the reasons we get stuck in early adolescence because what's left over or unfinished from the first two stages is, I'll give an example from the first stage. Again, little humans in early childhood don't have their own tasks, their family has tasks on their behalf.

And one is to mirror them, is to show them who they are and what they're feeling when they're feeling. And to say, help them help a small child feel totally welcomed in this world because and by the fact that they are seen and accepted for who they are. That's a real gift capacity of parenting and of being a family member more generally with little kids in it. And very few contemporary people have been mirrored deeply and beautifully when they were in early childhood. And that just starts things off in the wrong foot. But once we're in our teen years, there's two kinds of things we can do to support to address that task that comes from early childhood. of mirroring. And one is to find mentors who can really see us

and to hang out with them. But the second thing is to learn how to mirror yourself. That's something we can do in early adolescence that we couldn't have done in early childhood. And it's not that hard to learn how to do that, to be able to see yourself. and including the parts of you that are still emotionally very young and fragile and to be able to hold and love these, we just call them our wounded parts, wounded children or outcasts.

That's a form of mirroring and to be able to embrace them. That's something we can learn to do. It's not that hard. And it addresses that first task of a task. of early childhood. Do you know Dick Schwartz and internal family systems? Because that sounds like a really real big overlap with that philosophy. I do, yeah. I met Dick Schwartz many years ago.

I was offering a workshop at Noropa, and he was one of the participants. And got to know him a little bit after that as well. So I'm familiar with his internal family systems, which very much resonate with the kind of work we do, what we call it the wild mind work. I humbly would say that our map is more complete than his, and it's not because I or my colleagues are more brilliant or anything like that, but that we very consciously used nature's templates to map out the parts of the psyche.

And if you don't have a template of wholeness that is nature's own, then you're likely to miss certain pieces. And I think internal family systems is missing. some pieces and relationships between them. But it's very much in the same spirit of looking at how do we cultivate our wholeness and how do we stay in very loving relationships with our inner protectors who are not enemies and we can't make them go away. We can only learn how to thank them and love them better.

And that changes everything for us. Again, this is what we call the wild mind work. but yes, thank you for bringing up Dick Schwartz very much a companion in a similar trajectory. If you could wave a magic wand bill and there was no recourse to your decisions

to your reputation or safety or anything, what is one thing that you would do to improve human and planetary futures for the Earth community? Wow. you're limiting me to one. There's so many things I do.

I guess I would do what I would do given the urgency of widespread ecological awakening, so I would wave my magic wand and have every primary educational system be nature-based. And many of them would be like forest, what we're calling forest schools. that everything that's worth learning in childhood is somehow connected to the natural world in its processes and systems. So that's what I would do with the magic wand.

There's a large number, but still a small percentage of educational systems that are very much nature-based, ecologically minded these days. But I would have all of them be that way. and even just 20 or 30 years from now, everything would be different because of that. That I believe. This has been great. I think you feel as well as I do that we just scratched the surface of this topic and your work. Do you have any closing thoughts on this round one of our conversation to share with viewers

and or would you like to outline where you'd next like to go on a deep dive if we have another conversation? Well, I would just say that there's two halves of my message. I'm aware of that. One is it's even more bleak than you thought, folks, because if the core of our problem is widespread arrested human development or systemic human development oppression, that's a really big problem. But the other message is that we all are the humans that we have evolved to be. And we all have indigenous ancestry if we go far back far enough. And it's in not only our DNA, but our psyches to grow the way nature enables us to grow. And with a little bit of support, it doesn't really take that much and a little bit of focus and decision, okay, I'm really going to do this. We can grow and blossom pretty quickly. It's not that hard, really. So, yeah, I'd just like to leave our listeners with, it's worse than you think, and the solution is closer at hand and easier than you might have feared.

Thank you so much, Bill Plotkin, for your time today and for all your work over the decades to be continued. My pleasure. Thank you, Nate. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast. platform. You can also visit the great simplification.com for references and show notes from today's conversation. And to connect with fellow listeners of this podcast, check out our Discord channel. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagan's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett, Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyan, and Lizzie Siriani.