Notes on Ecological Cybernetics

Better late than never (is that one of the most frequently used subtitles on Substack?)

Jun 07, 2025

I want to start with an apology for the length of this journal entry, and a promise that subsequent posts—which will focus on the research interviews—will be much shorter.

“Most of us walk unseeing through the world, unaware alike its beauties, its wonders and the strange and sometimes terrible intensity of the lives that are being lived about us.”
— Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)

Carson wrote this passage in reference to the ecologies that we humans were unknowingly damaging with pesticides back in the ’50s and ’60s, and I often think of it as I walk through unfamiliar neighbourhoods.

Like many others, I adore authors like Rachel Carson and Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose writing instils me with deep enchantment—a sense of being in awe of something unknowable, something bigger than oneself. I drink in the unbelievable titbits they compile in beautiful prose about the magic of the more-than-human world around me: salamanders use the earth’s geomagnetic waves to find the waters in which they were born to bear their own offspring… Activity in our oceans essentially dictates what happens in the air and atmosphere of the earth… A seemingly dried-out piece of moss can live through several human generations in suspended animation and revive itself following a good dunk in some fresh water. What a trip.

I think that the way in which these two women inspire wonder is even more notable because they’re both professional scientists. For the last several hundred years, the scientific method has been more of an instrument for understanding, measuring, and utilising. Forget about awe and reverence and other such spiritual malarkey. I should note, right off the bat here, that I am very pro-science; I guess I’m trying to highlight that there is a certain degree of hubris that has typically gone hand-in-hand with such disciplines in recent centuries.

We found this beautiful edition of Carson’s “The Sea Around Us” whilst visiting a friend in the US and they gifted it to me, what a treasure!

That being said, it seems to me that we’re in an exciting era, where the leaps in knowledge made due to Cartesian dualism—and the mental frameworks that such progress reinforces—are about to become happily married with alternative models of knowledge. Enter cybernetics. Or should I say re-enter cybernetics? Whilst the term has been used to refer to an ontology since the second world war, it’s gone through many iterations since then and hasn’t quite stuck in the mainstream discourse. I want to focus in this research on the ecological cybernetics (EC) lens of the 60s and 70s. To my mind, its relevance continues to grow as the need to reflect on humans’ relationship with our environment and natural resources does.

Let’s cast our minds back to the heady pre-Covid days of 2019. Through my work in the hospitality and lifestyle sector, I was involved in a lot of interesting projects and initiatives which were, shall we say, “socially conscious” to varying degrees. However, I soon realised that I was increasingly often inadvertently participating in greenwashing. I decided to pack my pencil case and go back to school to research how we communicate about sustainability, nature, and impact. I shall leave you, dear reader, to guess how shitty I initially felt about the loan I’d taken out for the university fees when I was left unemployed for over six months as a consequence of the pandemic. And yet, looking back now, I don’t regret a single penny. I pursued this MSc degree to untangle some of the sustainability gimmicks that were becoming such common practice in business at that time, but the truly valuable outcomes of my MSc were more unexpected:

I realised how much I love learning (dweeb!), and
I discovered EC, which has had an almost spiritual influence on my worldview.

I soaked up its key tenets of dynamism, homeostasis, and interconnectedness (you can read a bit more on the basics of EC in my first post). My research culminated in a thesis about how models of knowledge from non-“western”1 cultures might ultimately build societies which are better guardians of the environment around them. Many scholars theorise that this could be a result of the way such groups perceive the relationships within a given environment, including their own very integrated place within it. Much of the well-intentioned conservationist discourse (“save the animals!”) conjures images of a future earth where we’re living in a planet of cities, there’s no wildlife and we’re kept alive by a giant air-conditioning system. Unpleasant, but liveable. Most people are now familiar with the more realistic forecasts detailing that if we fail to course correct, “nature” does not die out. Plants and oceans and other, hardier organisms have the capacity to continue, in one form or another, for a lot longer than humans.

Our fragile dependence on our environment is a reality which many non-“western” cultures weave into the fabric of daily life and organised society. Gregory Bateson observed that many such peoples, whom he had interacted with as an anthropologist and psychologist, held a worldview deeply underpinned by cybernetics. This allowed them to readily accept the idea that there are complex and unknowable forces at work around us in the natural world—enchantment— and they often followed animist belief systems. These might seem a tad loopy if assessed through Descartes’ dualist understanding of the world. How can a river, which the Cartesian framework regards simply as unthinking, corporeal matter—water—be given the same categorisation as a human? We have been blessed with a soul—a divine, immaterial thing. Whilst it might well be seated within our body, Cartesians would argue it is ontologically very distinct from our brain, our various organs and limbs.

And so, many learned people in so-called post-industrialist societies then assume that animists believe there to be an equivalent anthropomorphic soul living within the waterways of said river. There are certainly some indigenous belief systems which more closely align to this, however, as Bateson observes, there are many animist societies who simply reject the presumption of a dualist “mind vs matter” understanding of being. The spirit—the seat from which behaviour and intention and character spring forward—is not an ethereal “mind” which is distinct from the physical form. The complex, dynamic, and self-regulating river; its relationship with the soil around it, the organisms within it, the temperature, the flow… These very characteristics combine to become, in essence, what defines the river as a being with an awareness.

In the more-than-human world, such beings are often functioning across a much vaster scale of time and space than the human mind, which could be one of the reasons it feels so bizarre to many of us to make the comparison. It’s clear to see how these two approaches can create very different outcomes in the way we regard that river. If we consider the water to be simply a physical material, the river is just a resource. However, if we consider the river to be an actor and community member of its environment much in the same way that the humans who rely on it are, the moral dynamics shift drastically.

Let’s expand our perspective a bit further and consider that the humans relying on the river, the river itself, the mountain glaciers and the forest nearby also combine to become yet another seat of awareness. We might begin to have an overwhelming sense that there are forces which are impossible for us to fully observe, understand and master, despite the fact that we humans are currently a very powerful actor within this network. Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of the Mind (1972) and Anderson’s Ecologies of the Heart (1996) give some excellent insights and examples of this intersection of ontology, ecology, and indigenous models of knowledge; how some of the beliefs that animist societies, which might at first seem to us as superstition, when perceived through non-Cartesian ontologies, are clearly empirically correct.

I think one of the reasons we struggle to accept this way of thinking is because it can feel like a reduction of the wonder of human consciousness. It feels almost blasphemous to say that our minds are akin to the cycles of a river. In a way, that’s sort of the point—however, I prefer to think of it more as elevating the regard we give for the more-than-human world, rather than demoting the regard we give to humanity.

Let’s circle back to the exciting era that I mentioned at the beginning of this post—the marriage of scientism and other ways of seeing the world, such as animism. I’m a little bit late writing this Substack entry—as it turns out, starting a research project shortly after having a baby and moving house is somewhat ambitious. However, I have been served a stroke of good luck due to my poor timekeeping, because it means that I can cite this recent study demonstrating how the two schools of thought are becoming deeply interwoven in modern fields of research. It turns out that trees in a forest collectively anticipate eclipses, as observed through the bioelectrical signals which synchronise between them. The researchers used quantum field theory to model the synchronised signals, blending physics and biology, supporting the idea that forests exhibit macro-scale coherence. Such discoveries within the most cutting-edge arenas of science, such as quantum physics, are making a marked step towards ideas which might have felt, for want of a better description, quite “woo woo” to the mainstream 20th-century scientist. If we think about it, even the most commodified representations of indigenous knowledge already accept forests’ agency as a given.

I’m getting a sense that a move towards networked ways of thinking is cropping up more and more often in other areas of life too. Only recently, Hamish McKenzie, the co-founder of Substack, wrote about how the media landscape was transforming from a “temple” to a “garden”, in a post that was ripe with EC vibes. Networked ways of working and organising data, as outlined in this article, seem to be becoming more commonplace as technology cycles around once again away from hierarchical modelling. I’ll take this opportunity to recommend Capacities, which I have been using and LOVING for some months now. I suppose we can reframe the shade about scientism from the early paragraphs of this post—it’s not the science or technology of recent centuries that is incompatible with EC or alternative models of knowledge. Perhaps we can reframe it simply as hubris being so.

I close with one last thought on the effects of this hubris and our myopia in observing and respecting the complex, interconnected relationships that form our reality: to what extent does, for example, the loneliness epidemic interact with this phenomenon? How could it be compounded by it; how does it magnify it in turn? Sure, we can make some obvious reflections about what cognitive processes humans might be habituating when they privilege an individualist, siloed way of considering their existence. But how about the more indirect ways in which the slow decline of pre-industrial community activities, such as worship or caretaking of the commons, impact people? Could this be a factor in declining mental health for young people, the apparent demise of pluralism and the unhealthy aspects of urban development that many neighbourhoods fall victim to? I intend with this research to reflect about how we might mitigate these effects, whilst still respecting people’s right to self-determination and economic growth.

I hope these notes provide a bit more insight into the ideas underpinning The Echo Project. Next up: the first interview.

The Echo Project

Notes on Ecological Cybernetics

Better late than never (is that one of the most frequently used subtitles on Substack?)

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