Introduction
Welcome back to Negotiating Reality, where we explore how we understand our world and reckon with the possibility that many of our deeply held truths just might be delusions. I'm your host, Eric Hekler.
Throughout Season 1, we've been building a framework for understanding the fundamental nature of reality—what philosophers call metaphysics. We've discovered that "Life Breathes" together across vast scales of space and time, that "Islands Sculpt" each other in endless webs of relationship, and that "Beings Adapt" by consciously constructing reality through cultural concepts and social agreements.
Today, I'm thrilled to explore these ideas with Dr. Rob Dunn, a scientist whose work beautifully illustrates why this framework matters for humanity's future.
Rob is a professor of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University, where he also serves as Senior Vice Provost. He's the author of eight books that span from the hidden biodiversity in our homes to the evolution of human taste to the future of life on Earth. His research has taken him from studying ants in Bolivian rainforests to investigating the microbes living in our belly buttons—and everywhere in between.
What makes Rob's work so compelling for our conversation is how it reveals the profound disconnect between how we think the world works and how it actually works. His research consistently shows that we're not separate from nature—we ARE nature, embedded in relationships with countless other species whether we realize it or not.
In his book "A Natural History of the Future," Rob argues that biological laws will shape our destiny regardless of human intentions. Through fascinating examples—from bacteria evolving antibiotic resistance in days to cities becoming evolutionary laboratories—he shows how our attempts to control nature often backfire spectacularly, creating the very problems we're trying to solve. It was the key book that grounded Episode 3.
And Rob's more recent work takes us into some of the shared territory I explored in episode 4 and, in particular, questions about what humanity is striving for. In "The Call of the Honeyguide," he explores how Western science has systematically overlooked mutualistic relationships—partnerships where different species help each other flourish. From the bacteria in our guts that keep us healthy to the intricate relationships between trees and fungi, to the extinct partnership between honeyguide birds and humans, Rob reveals a hidden world of cooperation that challenges our culture's obsession with competition and control.
What I find most exciting about Rob's trajectory is how it mirrors the journey of Season 1 itself. He's moved from documenting biological laws that constrain us to revealing mutualistic possibilities we could consciously cultivate. It's a shift from "here's what we must accept" to "here's how we could participate more wisely."
Today, Rob will walk us through some of ecology's foundational principles—like how the size of any "island" determines what species can thrive there, whether we're talking about actual islands, crop fields, or the cities we've built. We'll discover why our urban corridors are accidentally creating superhighways for exactly the species we don't want—pathogens and other species that, as Rob said “chew on us”- as they exploit human environments.
Rob will explain what he calls the "law of escape"—how species can temporarily outrun their natural enemies by moving to new places, and why this matters for everything from global rubber production to human civilization itself. We'll explore why most people can't identify the plants outside their own windows, and what this disconnection means for our capacity to make wise choices about our shared future.
We'll dive deep into the fascinating world of mutualisms—cooperative relationships between species that challenge our assumptions about nature being "red in tooth and claw." Rob will reveal why even cooperative relationships involve constant attempts at cheating, why trees are essentially "ecological Ferraris" competing to smother their neighbors, and what our relationships with cats and dogs might teach us about partnership and attention.
Perhaps most intriguingly, we'll explore Rob's call for a "smell revolution"—his argument that our neglect of olfactory experience represents a massive blind spot that, if addressed, could fundamentally rewire how we understand ourselves and our world. And we'll discover his hypothesis about why walking dogs might literally be extending human lifespans in ways that have nothing to do with exercise.
This isn't just academic. Rob's work suggests we're at a critical juncture where humanity must learn to work with biological laws rather than against them, while simultaneously discovering entirely new forms of partnership with the rest of life. Throughout this episode, Rob also repeatedly called out the importance of artists and others who can take these ideas, dream about them, and, from that, create new art to help humanity grow into these new possibilities. It's exactly the kind of thinking we need as we face unprecedented challenges that require unprecedented forms of cooperation—not just among humans, but with the entire community of life we depend on.
Let's begin.
Recap
Thank you, Rob, for this fascinating conversation. We covered a lot so let’s do a quick recap.
Ecological Laws That Shape Our World
Rob explained how his books evolved from recognizing that "ecologists know a lot of things about the living world that are not in our daily conversations" while "our technology gets louder" and "the observations of ecologists become quieter."
He started this discussion by grounding us in the species-area law: larger islands support more species. And, in A Natural History of the Future, Rob describes how this applies everywhere—crop fields, cities, even our bodies. As he put it, "The species that we're favoring are the ones that can chew on us." Our urban corridors and agricultural systems inadvertently create ideal conditions for pests, pathogens, and invasive species.
Rob also explained the law of escape—how species moving to new areas temporarily escape their natural enemies. This benefited human migration and crops for millennia, but "we're out of places to escape to." His rubber tree example illustrates our vulnerability: most rubber comes from Asian plantations that escaped South American pathogens. If those pathogens catch up, global tire production faces disruption.
Rob identified how human psychology limits ecological awareness. We "preferentially notice and conserve things that look like us"—a "cave painting" approach focusing on charismatic megafauna rather than insects and microbes that run ecosystems. He noted our techno-utopian blind spots: space stations where "fungi grew over the windows" and "feces is packed down to Earth." We have "the aura of grandeur and omnipotence" but "the reality of a nearly chimp brain."
Mutualisms: Nature's Complex Partnerships
Rob's work on mutualisms—cooperative relationships between species—highlights both an opportunity for healthy cultural evolution and growth as well as inviting us to not fall into any idealized or romantic notions of harmony. In brief, nature is messy.
Dunn offered some key tendencies of mutualisms including that mutualistic relationships between species tend to be local, that species can monitor if their partners are fulfilling their part of the arrangement, that they can sanction and break relationships when they detect cheating, and, that it is critical to recognize that mutualisms can easily shift into parasitism, if the species are not diligent.
With this, while mutualisms are very likely the key driver of evolution, as described at length in The Call of the Honeyguide, and they do in deed focus on mutually beneficial relationships between species, they also, at the same time, involve recognition that "each partner is trying to cheat the other."
His playful cat example illustrates this complexity. While dogs show measurable health benefits for humans, cats' benefits remain unmeasurable. Rob speculates cats might fulfill our "morbid curiosity"—they're "like a dangerous animal, but then not."
Rob emphasized that "the actual world is messy." Even trees, which seem majestic, are out-competing grasses: "trees are jerks" because they "compete with each other to get to the sun." A tree trunk is "the gas tank and tires of a Ferrari"—designed to "smother other plants." With that though, these trees do create the conditions for a range of other niches to emerge, hence the messiness of it all. This seems to be another both-and example of the need for a healthy balance between cooperation and, within contexts of mutualism, competition.
The Cultural Knowledge Crisis
A key point Rob kept hitting on was our disconnection from the living world. Working with administrators, he found "none of them know any of the plants outside our building." We've "outsourced" biological knowledge to museum curators—"monks making sense of the world" who are "trained to be monastic."
This creates a fundamental problem: "How are we going to make choices about which species, which relationships" when we no longer have "that layer of social, cultural, learned knowledge about goods and bads"?
The all caps recommendation he landed on for psychologists and philosophers?
Pay attention to smell! He made a compelling case for paying attention to smell, noting it "would rewire our understanding of the world." Our brains have inherited a variety of smell categories, like the smell of bread, and linked that with good or bad, but this is all just our cultural inheritance. Given what we are learning from neuroscience, there is a real opportunity for us to cultivate the “culturally embedded knowledge that we are not fully aware of" but could be with new concepts.
Dogs as Guides to Better Attention
Rob ended with a hopeful hypothesis: beyond cardiovascular benefits, dogs "force humans to pay attention" when they "pause to smell stinks." In our world where "we are so distant from a world in which we pay attention," these moments provide "that little hint" where "you might look around"—and "that is enough to make your life better and longer."
Connecting the Dots
Returning again to the Life Breathes episode, Rob expressed interest and support in playing with the boundaries on what life is and is not and seemed to really appreciate the life breathes aphorism, while also connecting with the wisdom offered by Marcia and geology more generally. As he shared his work and describing insights from a Natural History of the Future,, my sense is that the Islands Sculpt summary of Rob’s work did hold up. And, Rob reinforced how the foci on Beings Adapt, particularly when supported by insights from Lisa Feldman Barrett and neuroscience more broadly, are pointing us both towards the need for and the possibility of healthy cultural evolution. On that front, Rob offered us a series of explorations and questions he explored about mutualisms, getting deep into the true reality of it all, not just the abstracted and idealized notions of mutualisms, such as the current fad of focusing on rhizomal networks, which are cool, but, critically, not the whole story. He tagged the importance of really having the time to build meaningful, real-world relationships with other living beings as a key part of this and, going back to the intro, the challenges of doing this in a culture that keeps drawing us to towards technological pace. Rob offered a range of explorations and meditations that can be used as possible starting points for healthy cultural evolution towards mutualisms.
A Call to Artists, Designers, and others
And, throughout all of this, Rob kept calling for artists, designers, and others who can help us all dream together to listen, understand, and then build out and play. His humility and clear modeling of both showing up to do is part AND recognizing that we need to figure out how to do this together was such a breath of fresh air for me. I also just want to tag that Rob and I barely scratched the surface of his book, the Call of the Honeyguide. There was so much more in there that I wanted to explore, such as his explorations into thinking about the Industrial Revolution and its impact on agriculture, his mapping out of a range of different mutualisms in different areas, and otherwise. I want to reinforce this because, coming to this call for artists, if you are looking for inspiration on new ways to think and engage and help humanity navigate this moment, The Call of the Honeyguide is a great start!
Thank you, Rob, for this conversation and your books "A Natural History of the Future" and "The Call of the Honey Guide."
The next time your dog pauses to smell something, consider it an invitation to pay attention to the larger world we're embedded in.
Book Recommendations
* Alexis Rockman's "A Fable for Tomorrow" (paintings with commentary)
* Paul Theroux travel writing essays
* Bruce Chatwin's "Songlines" and Patagonia work
