NOTE:
I mistakenly attributed a quote to Thomas Merton that was actually from Bruno Barnhart! Here’s a reference to the actual quote!
https://www.awakin.org/v2/read/view.php?tid=2416&sso_checked=1
Introduction
Welcome to Negotiating Reality, where we explore how our civic, spiritual, and natural processes tethering us to reality are breaking down, and what we might do about it.
I’m Eric Hekler. Today, I’d like to invite you into a conversation I had with Matt Biggar, author of Connected to Place: Regenerating Nature, Communities, and Local Economies Through Systems Change.
Matt is the founder and principal of Connected to Place, a strategy consulting firm. He has over three decades of experience in facilitating systems change in communities and organizations.
Preview of Key Ideas
I want to give you a sneak preview of some of the key ideas Matt and I explored together.
Early in the conversation, Matt asks a really great question: Can I recognize native plants as easily as logos? Just think about that for a moment. Can you? How well can you? It’s such a simple question, but it really cuts to the heart of our profound disconnection. How well do we really feel connected with the nature, with the communities, with the places that we actually inhabit?
Matt’s key insight is this: we love and connect with what we know. Right now, what we seem to really know are the products and services that are literally designed to capture our attention and pull more dollars. This disconnection is very, very real. Matt offers data showing we spend 87% of our lives in buildings, 5% in cars, and only 8% outdoors. This has been, of course, a very recent development in human history.
At the heart of Matt’s diagnosis of the problem is this disconnection to place—hence the core thesis of his book. He frames this as a central facet that is really at the heart of all of these interconnected issues we’re dealing with: climate change, biodiversity loss, economic inequality, and social division.
But critically, this is not a conversation about despair. It’s grounded in real-world examples and offers a framework to help guide us through this.
In the beginning, he tells us about these amazing changes that are happening in Paris—it’s pretty cool, some pretty amazing stuff, and you’ll hear about it soon enough. He also flags how he’s seeing patterns of system change levers: shifting power, resetting culture, transforming land use, and leveraging interconnected systems as a way to break down silos.
And he doesn’t just give us the Paris example. He talks about some of his own work and the great work that’s happening in Detroit, particularly on advancing food sovereignty. He brings up this idea that there is a goal advanced by Black farmers in the area to really establish Detroit as having food sovereignty over their fruits and vegetables, which I just think is so cool. Or how half of metro cities in the United States could probably produce all of the food that they need within a 155-mile radius, and that could increase if we actually move towards a plant-based diet.
Or even the idea of cultivating true place-based identity, where we really feel part of our culture. He brings up these really interesting examples of oaks—what would it mean to re-engage with oaks? I hope you listen to actually hear the depths of this.
What I really loved about this conversation was Matt’s approach, which was both systemic and compassionate. On a systems level, he’s naming how capitalism might actually just be an addiction problem for all of us. And at the same time, engaging with deep compassion and recognizing that we’re all navigating this, and we’re all trying to work through this. He very much holds this sort of both-and dynamic of personal and systemic change as an infinity loop that we need to be navigating together.
Not only that, I was really grateful Matt played through what I originally called “Island Sculpt” (and now I’m starting to think of as “Island-Shaped” from Episode 3). He played with it and showed how this could actually be a valuable heuristic for thinking about place-based economics, from hyper-local gardening into organizing towards watersheds, food sheds, fiber sheds, and other sheds. He was really flagging that these are not abstract ideas, but they’re actually emerging realities on how to be living in right relationship and towards interdependence.
And then, last but not least, he was really flagging the critical importance of those who take a network mindset.
I don’t want to give too much more away because I want you to jump into this. With that, let’s dive in.
Interview with Matt Biggar
The Paris Transformation: Proof That Change is Possible
Eric: Alright, welcome, Matt! I’m so glad you’re here. Thank you for joining us today.
Matt: It’s great to be here with you, Eric. Thank you.
Eric: Cool. So, let’s start with how you opened your book, because I really loved it. And honestly, as someone that pays attention to climate and sustainability issues, I didn’t know how much changed in ten years in Paris. You were flagging closing 100 streets for motor vehicles, removing 50,000 parking spots, creating 800 miles of bike lanes, and by 2024, almost 3-to-1 more people were biking than driving in the city center. That’s really cool! I’d love to invite you to tell us more about that and why you started your book with that sort of orientation.
Matt: Yeah, great. There are few examples of such dramatic change within a decade, and that’s definitely why I started it—just how it grabbed you, it grabbed me as I learned more about the story. I had to find out more, and guess what? The story continues beyond the book. In just March of this year, Parisians voted to open about 500 more streets. I noticed I used the word “open,” right? I think that is the thinking around a lot of this: yes, it’s closed to cars, but it’s open to people doing all sorts of other ways to experience streets and get around.
Eric: I love that.
Matt: Yeah, so opening 500 more streets was what they voted to do. That includes removing 10% more of the parking and fewer car lanes. And the vision that they have embedded in this is 5 to 8 streets that are pedestrianized in each neighborhood in Paris. They really got into this transformation, which I would call systems change in a lot of ways.
It teaches us a ton. I mean, the fact that this amount of change is possible—it’s not just about the physical changes that have happened there, and we’ll explore this more, but it’s the impact it’s had on people: the amount of cycling relative to car driving, and how people are experiencing the nature and the communities in Paris are changing. The connections are stronger.
But this doesn’t happen without real intention, right? Without a real sustained use of what I call the systems change levers, which we’ll talk about. Those have been kind of derived from real-world examples like Paris.
Eric: Yeah, that’s great, that’s really helpful. Maybe before we get into the frameworks, I’d love to hear what’s something that, as you studied this Paris example, really surprised you?
Matt: Mayor Hidalgo, Anne Hidalgo, is the one whose administration came in and has really led this change. And one of the surprises is she was re-elected in the middle of this. Like a lot of American cities, when there’s been changes attempted on streets, there’s a lot of political backlash. Even here in San Francisco, there’s a supervisor who recently lost his position, was actually recalled, and it had a lot to do with street transformation that had actually happened.
The fact is—and this is worthy of an entire book to itself, maybe someday I can actually do a case study—there’s definitely a buildup of power to support the mayor. This is a democratic election that put her back into office, put her in office originally. There was a lot of advocates working very strongly on these changes and were able to bring people along and see that this is something that they want to support. Once it was experienced, it’s like, oh, we want more of this. They were able to integrate it into Parisians’ lives enough that this is good, we want it to continue.
Eric: That’s great, and it sort of feels reminiscent of your title for your book, right? Connected to Place. It sounds like there were enough people connected to this place and this sort of vision of what their place could become that they are supporting it. That’s helpful. And I definitely want to get into the, okay, then how the heck do we learn about this in the U.S.? Because it seems like we’re in such a weird, different place. But we’ll get to all that.
The Crisis of Disconnection
Eric: Continuing with this, a key thing that I’ve been exploring in this podcast is the ways in which we’ve been disconnected. I frame it as our civic, spiritual, and natural processes that tether us to reality are breaking down, and we’re trying to figure out how to bring them back together. You flagged, particularly, an alienation from nature. You flag how we spend 87% of our lives in buildings, 5% in cars, and only 8% outdoors. It’s really depressing, honestly, to read it and to hear it. So unpack that a little bit more. How did you come to that recognition? What does that mean for you as you think about taking part in helping us to better connect to these things and grow into the future together?
Matt: Sure. Yeah, and I know you explored in some of your work in other episodes that this is a very small blip of human history. So much has transformed. Those statistics you just threw out—not that long ago, in the arc of human history, were the total reverse. Almost all the time was outdoors. I’m not going to say that some of this change hasn’t been beneficial to humans in terms of our health and stability and so forth, but it’s come at a huge cost. I think that trying to draw lines between this disconnectedness and the bigger crisis we face is a part of this book and a part of the work.
I think there are many links to it. There’s just a ton of parallel developments that have happened here. On one level, we are facing these very serious interrelated crises: climate, of course, biodiversity loss, and then on the social side, economic side, the widening economic inequality, the widening social division that’s been so politically exploited, especially in our country. At the same time, people are not doing well. There’s just study after study of anxiety and stress and depression and this decline of well-being.
I hope part of this is just a change in consciousness. Like, what are we doing here? How have we constructed society in such a way that it’s doing this? I think when it just comes down to it, our bodies and minds ultimately can tell us a lot about how to get out of this. It is something I think we all experience to one extent or another, this disconnectedness to nature in daily life. There was just so much documentation about how that’s changed. There was a recent big study that tried to document that human connection to nature is down 60% over the course of the last 200 years.
Disconnection from community—Bowling Alone was a real seminal work by Robert Putnam 25 years ago, and it talked about the decline of civic life. Bowling leagues, church and community centers, just activities—this has been a real retreat from in-person community.
I’d also add a couple other layers of it that I think then start to speak more directly to the crises: separation from people of different lived experience, how much residential segregation has taken place, communities with very different resources, and this lack of understanding. When communities are exclusive and people aren’t intersecting in daily life—if you’re not riding the bus or you’re not getting out in public space, even if your community is not super diverse, there’s still a lot of diversity there.
And then the final piece is all the things that we bring into our lives—some of them are very much needs, some of them are more wants, but it’s certainly food, energy, and consumer goods. The fact that we have this global economy and it’s really hard to know the nature, the people, the communities that made it possible for you to have these things. All these things come at a big cost to the environment in terms of emissions and resource use.
The disconnectedness is very much related to these crises in the ways I’ve talked about, but even at a deeper level: I like to think of, we love and protect what we know. We love and protect our family and our friends because we’re with them, we know them. That’s not the case as much anymore with nature, with in-person community, with our food. So this connection that we need to bring back into our lives is our way out of these crises, in my view.
Eric: Yeah, I love that phrase: we love and protect what we know. So it sounds like a key thing you’re inviting us is how do we start to rekindle and connect with all those relationships that matter?
Matt: Yeah, absolutely. What’s happened is there’s either all these other pulling forces that have pulled us away from those connections in our daily life that we can talk about. But there’s also the exclusion of things from our places that has happened. If you have... we’re no longer producing much food close by, so we’re excluded from that. But it’s also on the social front, where the whole nature of all the history of redlining and zoning says this community’s only... we’re excluding human diversity from this community to our detriment. So there’s less in our places that is diverse and sustaining and what we need.
Diversity, Relationality, and Capitalism
Eric: Maybe linking this a little bit—I know a key area that you particularly put your finger on is the influence of corporate capitalism. I want to come back to that, but I want to also just play with this a little bit. The more we’re talking, the more I’m hearing other conversations I’ve had in this space, and I want to bring some of that wisdom into here.
I can hear how important diversity is to you, and also to place. I’m thinking about Rob Dunn, and when I was interviewing him and building on his books as an ecologist. In one of his key books, he talks about the critical importance of diversity to create a stable ecosystem and ecology. Healthy evolution requires a certain degree of diversity and resonance and all these different beings living together in a healthy, mutualistic relationship, which was a key part of his second book, Never Home Alone.
I’m hearing a lot of that articulated here. And in contrast, something that’s coming to my mind as I’m hearing us talk out loud—let me know if this resonates or not, I’m just trying to play connection, but it doesn’t mean it is connected, it’s more playful space. I’m also now thinking about what I was hearing from Marsha Bjornerud as a geoscientist. One of the key things she brought up is Newtonian thinking versus Darwinian thinking. What she was saying was not really Newton or Darwin, but more exemplars of people showing up with a different style of how you know things—coming back to you love what you know, right?
She was very much framing a Newtonian form of science, which tends to be reductivism. You’re looking for those Platonic ideals, these idealized and perfect forms—ultimately, everything is to try to cut out all the variants until you find that ideal form. Versus Darwinian thinking, which is all about honoring people, place, time, and in particular, having that long time trajectory. Her book was called Timefulness, all about how do you actually connect deeply with people, place, and time and actually be guided by that? It draws you into this relationality.
As I’m hearing you talk, what I’m wondering is, is there something here where it’s almost like we have these wonderful ideals that we’ve set up, but we’ve almost idealized them so much that we’ve turned them into weird, transactional things that tear us apart? Because it doesn’t allow us to actually have that—well, we’re living beings, we’re in relationship, we need to be constantly negotiating with each other, flowing, all that complexity, but we don’t know how to do that. We have everything now functionally outsourced to some other place, some other corporation, some other group. Most of the things that we’re reliant upon have been kind of idealized into these corporate structures. Do you feel like some of that wisdom from geoscience and ecology is valuable to bring into this conversation as we think about connecting to place?
Matt: It’s interesting to hear all that, and if I understood it correctly, definitely the Darwinian side is this connection to place, people, and our interconnectedness that, to me, that’s my orientation. And I don’t think you can possibly be place-based without an orientation of relationality.
I would say that capitalism—I will speak out loud, and people have different reactions to the word capitalism—but capitalism, in my view, is driven by a profit motive. It’s going to disregard the planet, disregard humans, because it’s all about making money for the people at the top of these organizations and the shareholders.
The whole corporate structure that we live within is designed to concentrate wealth. It’s designed to not care about the places where that wealth is extracted from. Most of the American public does not see it that way. There’s not widespread consciousness about the extent to which we’re all kind of pawns in this game.
I think we need more of a consciousness shift, not necessarily to think of ourselves as pawns, but to recognize we’re participants in an addictive system. I mean, that’s what I think capitalism is. It’s an addiction system, and we’ve all got to overcome that a little bit. I struggle with it greatly. I make plenty of consumer purchases I don’t need to make.
It’s very difficult because so much of it is like drinking salt water. You drink more, you get thirstier. It’s not satisfying us. If you think about, just in our lifetimes—and I’m older than you—but just the extent to which our material abundance has grown. Has our happiness grown?
Eric: No.
Matt: We’re more depressed, we’re more anxious.
Eric: Totally.
Matt: So I would say a lot of this is we’re not getting that loving connection that we need. I hold strong compassion for us, how hard this can be. A lot of it is just to raise the level of awareness. This is why these discussions like this are so important. I will also say, on a practical level, I will not tell anybody that the way to live connected to place is to go off the grid and, you know, completely get out of capitalism. That’s not practical for folks. But I do think we can all take steps to live more connected to place, and that’s personally meaningful.
There’s lots of data on how connecting to nature, connecting to community is really healthy for us. I mean, just time in nature in particular is really healthy. Knowing people who don’t look like you, think like you, that’s healthy. Encouragement and support to move in that direction is so much needed.
It does require personal change. We’re part of systems, so I do want to explain how simple living connected to place can be, and then we’ll get into deeper layers of its complexity.
Practical Steps to Connect to Place
Matt: It’s sitting on your front porch, just making time to do that. If you have something like that, or just going out in the front of your house. Maybe you have—even if you’re in an apartment—you can grow some vegetables, or if you have a backyard or a front yard, these are ways to just start connecting to what’s out with you and reducing the use of that time, increasing that 8% outdoor time a little bit. But then, how our time gets sucked into other things so much with the constraints we talked about.
A lot of folks are going to be in car-dependent communities. It’s not going to be easy to get around without a car at all. But that just goes to simple things like trip chaining, where you’re a little more thoughtful about your car trips. As opposed to running out for this one time or that time, let me combine my trips into one trip as much as I can. I know it’s a bigger challenge with families. I’ve raised kids, it’s not all easy, but there’s something that we can all do there.
And social media—I picked this up from other podcast hosts recently—he basically said, I love this phrase: get in and get out. Just go in with, like, alright, I know I want to see a couple things, and then I’m going to get out. Easier said than done. But these are kind of just the ways to start to think about what is my relationship to place and how am I being pulled away from it? How can I grow it?
One of the challenges—I think it does relate to some of the other speakers too—is there’s a knowledge piece to this. We can challenge ourselves to learn something more about our place that we don’t already know. For me, a lot of times it comes down to what are native plants? What’s the native vegetation? What was grown here for millennia before we’ve changed a lot of it? How can I recognize native plants as much as I recognize corporate logos? That would be a huge change for a lot of us. I’m still working on that. I’m not there, but I try to get there.
One other thing I want to add to it as a way to enter into place-based thinking is our identities. Really think about what’s going on in our country right now. Certainly in the headlines, in the news, it’s so much political identity. Clearly, it’s Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals, far-right, far-left, all these things that people’s identity is becoming based on. Let’s work towards a place-based identity, because that goes back to reality, what we’re talking about. Who we are—we are people of place. We are people of a place.
You can look at your neighborhood, your city, your region. There’s so many ways to start to identify yourself in those ways. If you decide, I’m really just a resident of this neighborhood, that is the center of what I am, well then, if you can free up some time—less tech time, less car time—maybe you can spend a little bit of time doing something in your neighborhood that would be very rewarding and would really nourish you, as well as nourish your community.
Living connected to place is not about sacrifice. In behavioral science, I recognize fully from my dissertation I did years ago that it’s self-interest. If we’re asking people to change how they live, which is what this is, it has to align with self-interest. I feel connected to place does, because it’s where we’re living in line with nature more.
Personal Stories of Connection
Eric: I appreciate that. I appreciate you also bringing up that invitation to know. It’s always bothered me—so I have a house, and I have my backyard, and going up, I have a hill behind my house. I’m literally looking at it right now. I know enough to know that almost everything on that hill is an invasive species. It kind of pains me. I actually went to someone who does indigenous gardening to replant the whole thing. When we brought him out, he said, “I’d have to tear out this entire thing and start fresh to get the mycelial network growing properly and stuff, because otherwise all these invasive species will just kill the native plants.” But he’s like, it’s possible, but it’ll cost you $75,000.
Matt: Wow.
Eric: That’s a big one. But honestly, it’s something that’s in my heart. If I had that amount of money, it’s one of the things I would spend my money on more so than a lot of other things. I want to feel a connection. Honestly, I look at this hill and I dream weird thoughts. One is redesigning it to be a bit like Torrey Pines, because that’s our native plants and flora and fauna of where I live.
But then I started thinking, well, we actually always have all this mist, so I started looking into mist collectors so I could actually get water, because that would be a critical part. Torrey Pines is on the ocean, we’re sort of a little bit off the ocean. Then I started thinking, well, actually, it’s a hill. I could actually start thinking about water collections and then actually using this functionally as a battery source to start to get energy. When I have solar on my house, I can pump the water up to the top, and then at night, I can let it run down and have a turbine function with it.
I’m kind of bringing this up as a bit of a playful example, but I’m curious, like, is this kind of in the spirit of what you’re getting at, connecting to place?
Matt: Absolutely. Oh, it’s a wonderful example, I love it, and I love how you thought about it. I feel like you’re going to make progress on that over time. It could just be starting with a small plot and then going from there. It sounds like there’s a passion there, and it is the nourishment that you get from it.
It doesn’t have to be there, maybe it’s some other place. For example, I happen to live really blessed to be here in San Francisco, and I have a very large hill behind us. It’s like 900 feet high, we’re close to sea level. It’s called Twin Peaks. It’s a popular tourist destination in San Francisco. What I love about it is they have been doing tons of native plant restoration. This is public land, so the government has found resources to do it. There’s an effort to really bring in Indigenous voices into it and to start to rediscover some of the history of Twin Peaks. It’s speculated that it was kind of like a hunting lookout space for the Ohlone, but there’s not a lot known. There’s a road that was built across it, and now half of that road is open to people and closed to cars. There’s this revitalization happening there that’s really beautiful.
Having to do it as an individual is kind of overwhelming. But the bottom line is it’s almost like a spiritual connection to the place there. That’s what I feel like on Twin Peaks, so I get to bike up there. I call it my spiritual center. Something that just pulls me there. It’s an amazing—I mean, I’m blessed, again, to have it, but I think that exists everywhere we are, there’s that connection that can pull us in.
Eric: Yeah, maybe just to come back to that. You’re exactly right, there actually is an association that I’m a member of called Friends of Rose Canyon. Every year, my son and my wife and I, we go and we rip out all of the mustard seeds and all these other weird—honestly, they look kind of beautiful, they’re like these interesting radish flowers. They honestly look nice, but they’re totally invasive, and they kill everything, so we’re ripping all these things out and planting all things appropriate, particularly starting with live oaks as sort of an anchor species.
It’s really been great to see over the years we’ve lived here, because it was originally just all mustard, these big yellow flowers. And now you can start to see the original, the native and indigenous landscape starting to come back, but it’s been taking years upon years. Every year, we just go out, we rip out a certain section, we plant something else. And I love that you named that as a spiritual praxis, because that is very much my experience.
I’m lucky enough to have Rose Canyon and then San Clemente Canyon, and I basically go on a run a few times a week in these canyons. One of my favorite places to go is very much a spiritual spot. It’s this beautiful old oak. I honestly have no idea how old this tree is—at least 100, 200 years old. It is just an amazingly huge tree. Every time I run by it, I stop and I pause and I give a prayer. My son and I affectionately call it Fangorn, from Lord of the Rings.
The Story of Oaks: Culture and Connection
Eric: Obviously I’m feeling you on the place space thing, but I just wanted to play and bring it to life a bit. It sounds like a key part of that is not just that practicality of place, but really that spiritual connection to space—seeing the life around us as sacred and therefore treating it as such. Am I overgeneralizing or overextending that?
Matt: Oh, no, no, I think it gets into this change of consciousness that is, again, society’s pulling us so much in a different direction right now. You are doing it in so many ways. I like to tell folks, living connected to the place is something a lot of us practice in some ways. It’s just not possible to do it as much as maybe we need to. The participation with that canyon restoration sounds awesome, and this connection to what’s there. It’s a constant journey for myself. I don’t pretend to be doing it all the time, but definitely gravitating in those directions is wonderful.
You brought up the oak trees, which I think does get back to larger society things because it connected me to a story I read and I referenced in my book around restoration of oaks in Silicon Valley. We’re in different parts of California, but not so much in San Francisco, but down on the peninsula, there’s a lot of native oaks everywhere. There’s a lot of invasive eucalyptus trees that have been planted in the peninsula, and they’re starting to die, probably in San Diego, too.
Eric: That’s what’s on my hill! The eucalyptus—I see them dying off.
Matt: So, interestingly, this woman I profiled in the book, her name is Cindy Roessler, and she worked for Acterra, which is a conservation organization. She was starting to have this conversation with more folks about oak restoration because you have this great opportunity: eucalyptus are dying, we have a chance to replace it with oaks. But on one level, it’s technical, which is restoration. But she was very clear, like, we need to invite a lot more people into understanding and appreciating oaks.
So she did this whole campaign called Know Your Oaks. It started with all these different factoids and stories about oaks. It was just talking about the history and sharing information about them. So just increasing that awareness. But it took it to another level. She introduced an idea of a County Oak Ambassador program and started getting volunteers. She ultimately had several thousand volunteers, I believe. Maybe thousands is an exaggeration, but hundreds at the very least. These are folks that she could then call on and say, “Hey, can you help with an event? Can you help spread the word?”
She went about this in this integrated way, and it’s very much about place-based identity and changing culture. But she didn’t stop at that level. She then went out and was talking to city councils around the Bay Area, ultimately getting engaged with counties, and working with them. We need to think about oaks as we’re thinking about land use change and how we’re developing and planning for the future. This is a regional asset that needs to be preserved and expanded.
It was a systems-level approach that was personal, social, and political. To me, it’s a beautiful, beautiful example. It just came to mind with Twin Peaks and Rose Canyon.
Eric: That’s great. I love that story because it really does flesh it out. I want to come back to some of the systemic stuff in just a moment. I’d love to maybe pull in two more examples that I know you brought up. You brought up the Detroit work, and you’ve brought up this idea of creating networks.
Detroit: Food Sovereignty as Systems Change
Eric: Maybe start with Detroit. I’d love you to tell us more about what you were playing with. What were they doing and what’s working and how are they changing systems?
Matt: Yes, definitely. There’s two nonprofits. One is called the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. The other is called Keep Growing Detroit, and they’ve been around for about 20 years. They have overlapping missions, but in different ways. They’ve got different structures and they’re both doing amazing work. They’ve really collaborated very powerfully for 20 years, which is pretty rare. Usually, collaborations kind of fall apart.
Eric: That’s really cool.
Matt: But they’ve got, again, a common vision, which is to create—I’m probably going to state this incorrectly, but I want to say it from memory—a food sovereign Black Detroit that has total control over their fruits and vegetable needs. Just imagine Detroit as a city producing all its own fruits and vegetables. That is the long-term vision, and having it be very much Black-owned and operated, given Detroit’s history and population. So just that mission, that vision is very clear, very powerful, and very unifying.
Then they work—Keep Growing Detroit has supported 1,700 gardens over the years. They give out seeds and plants and support. The other organization, the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, has created a seven-acre urban farm that has been incredibly productive. I mean, you think, wow, you can do a lot on seven acres. I was amazed. They have hoop houses, which are basically greenhouses but not quite as expensive, so they get more use out of them.
But then they also got political around issues. There were property taxes levied on gardens, and they organized and got those removed. So they’ve been pulling at political levers as well. It’s not just the personal work of people growing food in their backyards or in a community garden. It’s political, policy advocacy. Then you get into the cultural piece. These are creating pride in African Americans in Detroit to sort of reclaim their heritage, their connection to land. They bring in African American history around land, and how that was taken away from them and needs to be reclaimed.
Cultural, social, political, personal—you got all these dimensions that are working, and that’s systems change.
The Power of Networks and Collaboration
Eric: That’s really helpful. Maybe I play in just a slightly different framework, and I’m curious if this resonates at all. I’ve been playing in sort of this civic, spiritual, and natural patterns. I can hear the civic in there a lot, for sure. I can hear the natural—that’s pretty obvious. Then I can hear the spiritual in terms of that identity-rooted reclaiming of heritage.
It’s this recognition of the ways in which the Africans, prior to going into slavery, were connected to land, and then that was ripped from them, and they were literally made to function as part of machines rather than as human beings. All of that erasure has happened, and now you’re seeing the re-emerging, the reclaiming of that by leaning into, okay, let’s connect back to the land. Is that part of what’s happening?
Matt: Oh, yeah. What you just articulated was really great. I think when the civic, spiritual, and natural overlap—and I would say a fourth layer is just you personally in it, how it makes you personally feel—when those things are all aligned, that’s the power. I think that’s what’s happening in Detroit. That’s what’s happening in Paris. It’s civic, spiritual, natural, and personal.
Eric: That’s beautiful.
Matt: I want to be clear, I didn’t do the Detroit work. I’m reporting it. I know the folks who are, and I’ve talked to them. They don’t actually get into spiritual. I’m sort of inferring that that’s part of this.
Eric: That makes sense. Maybe part of the reason why I brought that up is because I’m trying to flag, okay, there’s probably a very different way, right? You’re orienting with your systems change levers—shifting power, resetting culture, transforming land use, and leveraging interconnected systems. There’s a very different way that I’ve been trying to talk through civic, spiritual, and natural, orienting to that frame. But I do think there’s a potential high degree of overlap. Does that seem to resonate here in your work? If this is the how, well, how do we actually do that in real-world context?
Matt: Yes. We really do need a lot of people with what we call a network mindset. These might be the most important people as we talk about this work—those who can start to see the different things that are taking place, the different organizations, the different initiatives, and bring them together.
The Four Systems Change Levers
Eric: Let’s lean into the four system change levers you brought up: shifting power, transforming land use, resetting culture, leveraging systems together. This is the “what,” so to speak. And then the “how” that I was hearing you pick up were what you called catalysts: collaboration, systems-oriented governance or government model, place-based education, and then personal change. Let’s start right where you just brought up with a very concrete example in San Francisco.
There’s a lot of folks who are showing up in good faith, goodwill, good intention, and want to collaborate, and yet we don’t. Help us understand how these catalysts work in real-world context.
Matt: Yeah, for sure. I do want to talk about the systems change catalysts because it’s tricky. We talked about the vision, which is really important—what are we trying to do? The vision of increasing the quality and quantity of connection in people’s lives to me is a very unifying vision. It’s not climate action, it’s not social justice. Those are things I believe in very strongly, but they don’t necessarily build the big tent that we need. I think we gotta hold that there, and that can also inform collaboration because it may then lead to inviting more people to the table with diverse perspectives that can build something bigger.
The “what” of systems change is the levers. When we talk about systems change, what do we mean? That’s a big reason I wrote this book—to demystify systems change. There’s lots of great systems literature, but it’s really hard to apply to existing projects and initiatives. I tested this out. I’ve worked with several groups. I’ve learned so much from them, and that’s how this framework came from both the research that I’ve done on the initiatives, but also this real life. We’re trying to work on a one-year project to increase safe routes to school. How do we use systems change levers?
In that particular project and most of the projects I work on, the first of the four—the systems change catalysts, the “how”—who’s pulling the levers? How do we pull the levers? That’s strategic collaboration. The other ones, as you’ve referenced, are systems-oriented government, place-based education in multiple ways, and then we’re back to personal change.
If we’re going to have systems change, if we really are going to sink into it, we’ve got to have that direction, we’ve got to have the four levers working, and we’ve got to have the four catalysts pulling those levers.
The Art of Strategic Collaboration
Matt: Strategic collaboration is very challenging. I’ve been doing it for years, and I’m in a new alliance right now, and it’s still very challenging to get really well-intentioned people to work together on something and to do it in a way that feels like we’re getting productive. That’s why I’ve written a chapter and done other stuff on what is effective collaboration. Almost the universal experience of collaboration is kind of negative. Some people come into the room like, oh gosh, especially if you’re talking about community leaders, institutional leaders, we’ve been on so many different things. Most of it just doesn’t lead anywhere. Particularly at the community level, there’s a feeling of their voice being invited into conversations again and again, and yet nothing really happening, no change really happening.
I’ll just highlight—you wrote a book, so obviously this is an invitation for folks to engage more deeply in your work. But the more you can help folks make it concrete, tell us from your real-life examples: when did a collaboration work? When does it fall apart? What works and what doesn’t work with collaboration for this type of systems change?
Eric: Absolutely. Yeah.
Matt: I think there’s three categories that are helpful. Definitely focus on relationships. When you say what leads to things falling apart, it’s almost always relationships. There’s a break in trust, there’s a break in value for each other.
The second piece is a common agenda. Just like we talked about overall systems change, having a direction that people really believe in and they want to put themselves and their organization into. I like to work mostly at the organizational level. When people come to the table, I really like to be very intentional: you’re not here just as an individual, you’re here as someone who can go back to an organization and bring this back to your organization. Then your organization will keep taking things back here. Instantly, we’re making it bigger by centering—we’re not saying organizations are just here to talk, we’re actually here to do something together.
That requires a common agenda that people feel really good about. That’s the vision piece, but it’s also a commitment to an approach. What I’m arguing is the systems change approach. That’s what I’ve been doing with the groups over at least the last few years: let’s talk about how this group, how we can shift power, how we can reset culture, how we can transform land use—which is often going to be a lot through government influence. Obviously, the breaking down of silos is a big one, and it’s resonated in a lot of different ways.
So we’ve got the relationships and the common agenda, which is both the vision and an approach that we agree to. If we can get those foundations right, wow, the sky’s the limit. That’s a strong foundation. It usually takes a series of meetings. For example, the Streets Alliance that I’ve been helping work on in San Francisco, we’ve been meeting for eight months. It’s just two or three hours a month, but that’s what we’ve been building.
Now, the challenge—and you get a lot of different opinions on this—is how we got to focus on implementation and adaptation. There’s components in that around alignment, around shared accountability, and around kind of our joint governance. I’m one who’s not terribly patient. I love doing research when I did it, but I’m too impatient for it. I have so much gratitude for all the wonderful academics that I know. When people are getting impatient, I’m particularly sensitive to that. Let’s do it. Let’s do something.
But there’s a tension between planning and action that has to be there. You’ve got to lean into the implementation early on in small ways, but make sure you’re setting up a really good process for that to happen.
I will drill down on relationships just a little bit more, because without that, the whole thing falls apart.
Eric: It was. I can hear how this is coming all the way back to the beginning. If you don’t actually live in right relationship, it’s very hard for these things to go. That’s where the externalities come—that’s where, coming all the way back to your diagnosis, that externality is basically a lack of relation. Yes, let’s lean into the relationship more.
The Science of Relationships and Trust
Matt: Great. Yeah, I think this can be really interesting because I’m going to explain the network science behind relationships. It makes me think about where is nature guiding these things? I think it is, but I haven’t thought as much about that.
Eric: Let’s come back to that, particularly—we’ll come into Rob Dunn’s orientations around mutualisms. I think that might be a fun place to start exploring, but we can come to that after we’ve been here with this relational part for your side and the network structure. So tell us about it.
Matt: Yeah, so I referenced trust and value in relationships. There’s an organization called Visible Network Labs that has presented a framework that I’ve found very useful. They’re a network science organization, and they essentially delineate three factors that build trust among organizations and individuals and three factors that build value. When trust is high and value is high, they actually have surveys. I’ve dealt with some collaboratives, we’ve measured this, which is really interesting. I’m hoping someday to have more funding to do this in a lot more depth with some collaboratives that are ready for it.
The three factors of trust: one is mission congruence. That sounds jargony, but it basically means we’re in this room because we believe we have the same mission. When do these things fall apart? It’s when a couple people are in the room because they have a different mission, and they’re kind of there to keep an eye on it. They’re not really there to roll up their sleeves and help build this.
The second trust factor is competency. Do I trust you because you’re actually good at this? Because you’re invested in it? You’ve demonstrated that you’re here to be working on this. And how you show up—are you showing up with energy? Are you showing up with presence? That builds trust or breaks trust.
The third one that I found really interesting—it’s called presumed innocence. It’s this idea that you’re going to assume the best of me, even if I might do something or say something that might rub you wrong or you’re not fully supportive of. But you’re going to be like, oh, Matt’s doing his best, he’s trying. I’m going to assume that. I think when we come into a group, we need to actually speak to those norms: we’re going to assume that everyone’s here in good faith. That doesn’t mean I can’t call Matt out on some stuff, but it means I’m going to assume he’s got a good heart.
Then there’s the three value factors. One is shared activities. Are there things that we’re doing together that we’re finding valuable for ourselves, for our organization? That could be things we talk about as issues, problems. It could be opportunities we share together. It’s learning from each other, it’s supporting each other. That’s the value piece.
The second is resource exchange. Are there things we can provide each other with? That’s at the organizational level. Are there connections that we can make? We can share our networks? We can share some sort of more traditional support, like funding or space or access to things.
And the third is called strategic importance. That’s sort of at an existential level. Is this collaboration important to my organization’s mission, important to my personal mission? Or is it just kind of a nice thing to do but not really essential? When it gets to that strategic importance level for a lot of folks in the room, that’s when things actually can work.
I’m very grateful to this Visible Network Labs framework because it really teases this out for me. It’s just in the last couple years I started using this.
Eric: That’s great, that’s super helpful. I can hear some of the overlap with what I was hearing from Staci Haines and her book The Politics of Trauma and the work she does around somatics. Similar logic there of really getting to the sort of, how do you navigate these trust dynamics in group systems? It’s really great work. I’m a huge fan of Staci Haines’ work, so I’ve taken her classes, I’ve read her books, and so it was really good.
Island-Shaped Economics: Nested Systems of Place
Eric: Let’s play, knowing that we’re getting close to the end of time. I’d love to just play with this idea. One of the key things, coming to this podcast, is I’m slowly trying to build out that network logic. That’s partially what I’m trying to do in this space of negotiating reality—try to find those spots where different cultures and different places and different people might be using different words or forms or concepts, but they might have some degree of connectivity. How do we do that translation such that, oh wait, that pattern took this very different form in this human system, but actually we could learn a lot from ecology, or we could learn a lot from nature systems.
I’ve been trying to create those connections to help us really feel on many layers. It’s what you protect what you know. If you know that literally volcanism is required for you to live, maybe you’ll want to love our Mother Earth a little bit more—that kind of orientation is where my head’s been going.
Coming back to this, particularly as I think about what you’re describing in the work of Rob Dunn, which was summarized in Episode 3. I called it “Island Sculpt,” and now I’m changing it to “Island-Shaped” after some peer review from Keith Bezzoli. Basically this idea that we live in these layers of relationality. We are both islands that have beings living within us—microbiome—and we live upon islands: our cities and our bioregional areas and our continents, and then eventually Mother Earth as the largest planet, at least that we’re robustly, relationally living with.
I would love to hear how you played and explored this, heard a little bit of Rob’s interview. What are those spots where you might be starting to notice some parallels and some lessons learned that we might be able to pull from ecology or otherwise?
Matt: Sure, no, it was fascinating. I love that work that he’s done, and I want to learn more about it. Yeah, for sure. There are so many perspectives and language, as you said, to describe what’s going on, but there are these fundamental realities of who we are and being nature.
I find place as a valuable way to make it concrete and as a way to restore things. Indigenous wisdom comes into play a lot, ecology of course, but also economic thriving. So much of the imbalance of wealth and how much concentrated wealth in these multi-billionaires that are living so disconnected from a lot of people who are just struggling to get by. If we have a place-based economy, that could really narrow those things. It’s basically limiting ownership of vast amounts of land by a small number of entities, and not just land, of course—capital and technologies and all the things that make up the economy—and saying, no, we’re going to mostly need to produce this regionally and locally. It’s going to connect us to place, but it’s also going to create so many more ownership opportunities, so many more ways to have a share of the economy, shared prosperity.
I don’t know how you have shared prosperity in a global economy. There are certainly certain things that can be done at the federal level, but I feel like we can really build—not just from the connection to place spiritually, socially, our well-being, but also our financial security, our shared prosperity. To me, place can bring all those things together.
The island piece—I love it in the sense of the economic system parallel too, and how our lives are shaped by it. Just a very quick thought I had about that. I say place, but also connection—those two ideas. There’s concentric circles in an economic system that is truly place-based, which I advocate for in the book and delineate in the book. It goes from the hyper-local to the regional. There’s these concentric circles, or islands, of economics and how we live that are about interdependence, they’re about interactions.
Am I home here, or in my apartment building, whatever it may be? I can have rooftop solar, I can have heat pumps. There’s a whole other conversation, but those are technologies—and a lot of this is technology is not going to help us. Those are technologies that connect us to nature in some really cool ways as we think about it. But it’s also maybe having a small garden, whether it’s on my windowsill in my apartment or it’s in my backyard. Then there’s a homesteading idea that was really one of the silver linings of the pandemic: I’m making my own bread, I’m jarring pickles and other things. There’s that very place-based piece that you can do there.
Then it goes out to the next island, and I think this parallels the neighborhood, where in a place-based system, I’m walking, I’m doing local shopping, community gardens, community solar, libraries, parks, all those things that create this system. It’s not—I say it’s economic, but it’s obviously socio-economic. But I think we need to flow our economic resources in these directions. Economics is what drives so much of everything.
Then at the city level, we get into biking networks, we get into the Detroit urban farms, local manufacturing, local business districts. It’s just the next level out.
And then regional, which I really enjoy talking a lot about because that gets really into the bioregional and the more nature perspective. The parallels to watersheds—what we need in place-based systems are food sheds and energy sheds and making sheds and fiber sheds. That culture and nature interaction that could be so powerful.
The last thing I’ll say is these things are more possible than we’ve been led to believe. The existing sources of power will suggest these are ridiculous—there’s no way you could do it. But there was one study I love to share, and it fits right into this. It was in 2020, a group of Cornell researchers did this very exhaustive study of the potential of agricultural productivity in 378 U.S. metro areas. They found that basically half of them pretty much already had the existing land to produce all the food they need within a 155-mile radius. And then if you shift to more plant-based diets, you actually increase that.
Eric: Wow, yeah.
Matt: Things are possible, and we need to put those stories out there. I’ve kind of gone on a little bit of a tangent here, but I think the islands is a really helpful way to think through this.
Closing the Conversation
Eric: That’s great, and I appreciate it. I know we’re getting to the end of time, so I just want to thank you for playing with those and exploring, and I’m just really grateful for your work and the ways in which you’re trying to invite us to dream differently. To create that different model in line with the Buckminster Fuller quote that you used—that was such a good quote. You need to dream that alternative model such that the old one becomes obsolete.
What I hear you dreaming is: let’s be better connected with each other, better connected with nature, and basically be guided by caring and loving for each other. That seems like a pretty nice thing to be dreaming into existence, and so I’m grateful you’re doing this work.
Maybe as a final question that I tend to like to ask: what are three resources? Could be books, prayers, anything that you’d like to offer to the audience. Beyond, of course, your great book, which I would highly recommend.
Matt: Sure, yeah, so many great writers out there and podcasters like yourself. I’m going to share ones that are in short form, shorter form, they’re not books, because I hope people actually read them or listen to them.
Someone on Substack I’ve come across who I will not miss anything she writes—I’ve even watched her do a video—her name is Rosie Spinks. She has a Substack that’s “What Do We Do Now That We Are Here?” But the specific article I call your attention to actually came out right after Trump’s election in November, and it was about how I became collapse-aware. It sounds dreary, but she talks about living in the two states, and it really resonated with me because I think for those of us who are dreaming, like you as well, it’s a struggle because the dream can feel very far from reality a lot of times.
She says living there is the current world—infinite growth, shareholder value. It’s everything that’s geared up around that. But here is recognizing that this world is actually collapsing. We see a need for systemic change, and that’s where we find the beauty and the hope. I like to think of—none of us control where everything’s going, but she’s talking about, to me, planting seeds, leaning into that as much as you can, but not being hard on yourself and realizing that you have to be in the other world too that is so much present in our lives.
Then for podcasts, one I’ve come across recently, one episode in particular. Tech Can’t Save Us—certainly something that we need to be thinking about. It’s by a Canadian, Paris Marx. I honestly just really love this episode I heard. What I loved about it was his critical assessment of tech, but in a balanced way. But also his perspective on the U.S. I think it’s really helpful for us—I need to seek more of this myself—giving perspectives outside of our country on these problems, and in particular on U.S. corporations, I think could be super valuable to shifting our consciousness. This particular show is called, I think, “We Need to Cut Our Dependence on U.S. Tech. Here’s How to Start.” It explores both systemic and personal aspects of that. It’s very interesting, and I have a thirst for just learning more about that.
The final one is another podcast called Green Dreamer. It’s specifically with a professor emeritus from Notre Dame. The guest on this podcast is Darcia Narvaez. It’s called “Cultivating Nestedness,” or that was the general part of the title, for children and future generations. To me, it was just very eye-opening in the sense of—as she talked about early childhood, it’s all about connecting to the nature that’s in ourselves and in others. She just tells the story, it beautifully flows into what’s happening in the world, the problems that you and I have been discussing. She’s just very eloquent, and you can just feel the wisdom from all of her work over the years.
Eric: That’s great. I think—it might be wrong, but I’d heard her say it in an audiobook, it was Darcia Narvaez. She wrote The Kinship Worldview. Is that the same person?
Matt: Yes, it’s the same person.
Eric: Yeah, great Indigenous wisdom, co-authored in partnership with Four Arrows. No, I love that, Darcia, if she just came up in this conversation, that’s awesome.
Matt: Cool.
Eric: Great, Matt. Well, this was super fun, and I’m really grateful for all of your work and the time. This has been just a real joy to have this conversation with you. Thank you.
Matt: Yeah, it was great talking to you, Eric. I appreciate what you’re doing and how you’re framing things, and just nice to have this time to really chat with you in depth about it.
Eric: Thank you.
Matt: Thank you.
Closing Reflections
What a really rich and beautiful conversation that Matt and I just had.
Matt’s vision is simpler and more challenging than we probably expect. It reminds me of a quote I’ve recently heard from my friend Thomas McConkie, from Bruno Barnhart (NOTE: in the audio I said Thomas Merton… I was wrong! That’s Thomas McConkie for correcting me!) that goes something like this:
“People would rather live with manageable complexity than learn to live with unmanageable simplicity.”
NOTE:
Here’s a reference to the actual quote!
https://www.awakin.org/v2/read/view.php?tid=2416&sso_checked=1
I think in many ways, that captures what Matt is inviting us into.
The Unmanageable Simplicity
Because at its core, Matt’s message is really quite simple. It’s beautiful. Connect to place. Recognize the native plants as easily as logos. Make nature part of your human culture. Develop a place-based identity.
So there’s the simplicity of it. But why is it unmanageable? Well, you can’t optimize it, you can’t control it, can’t reduce it into some sort of five-step plan. It’s asking us to be in relationship with land, with neighbors, with the more-than-human world. And honestly, our current systems are not designed for this. They’re designed for maximizing profit, efficiency, and growth that must keep on growing.
And so there, with it, is the paradox of our moment. The invitation is simple: connect to place. Living into that, in our current reality, is really hard. Really, really hard.
The Chrysalis Metaphor
This reminds me of another thing that a friend and colleague of mine, Kabir Kadre, who’s the lead of a nonprofit that I’m part of, the Open Field Awakening, which I’ve mentioned before—this chrysalis metaphor that we’ve been using to understand our current moment.
A caterpillar goes into a chrysalis, and then they become a butterfly, and that’s beautiful. The key thing that I think we need to think about is that chrysalis moment. When a caterpillar goes into that chrysalis, they literally dissolve into protein soup before being reorganized as a butterfly, and there’s all these imaginal cells that guide that protein soup to both break down and to be reimagined into something else.
It seems like I’m not the only one to recognize, and we’re not the only ones to recognize that, it’s a pretty good metaphor of where we are collectively. Our old systems are breaking down. This was, of course, mentioned by one of the key references that Matt offered at the end—Rosie Spinks—that two worlds. Here it is, we’re just saying in a slightly different way, but it’s getting at the same pattern that we’re all seeing. The old system’s breaking down, many of us can feel it. We’re in this protein soup phase.
And it’s really hard to see what’s emerging, and particularly many of us probably just feel like this is a time of chaos and loss, and everything that we love and care about is disappearing.
The key part is to tune into: okay, what does that mean to then be an imaginal cell? They’re there in the protein soup, they’re carrying the pattern of the butterfly. The more and more imaginal cells are activating, the easier it does for that pattern to start to emerge with others. It becomes a reinforcing feedback loop, such that the breakdown can end and the emerging can come into existence.
Being the Imaginal Cells
For me, I think about Matt’s work in that sense as basically he’s activating the imaginal cells and doing his part of activating those imaginal cells. He shares these dramatic changes are possible: the story of Paris being transformed in a decade, or the really cool story of what’s going on in Detroit with the Black farmer collectives and this cultivation and movement towards food sovereignty of their vegetables and fruits, to half of the U.S. metro areas actually being able to produce all of their food within a 155-mile radius, and potentially more if we move towards a plant-based diet. Each one of these is tagging to the idea that these are not distant dreams. They are emerging realities.
And beyond that, Matt’s work is giving us a bit of a handle on how to be the imaginal cells. It’s not just sitting into that unmanageable simplicity, which of course is the core invitation. But it’s working how to manage through that complexity that we currently exist in, the breaking down of that caterpillar.
So what did he give us? These four system change levers:
* Shifting power
* Resetting culture
* Transforming land use
* Leveraging interconnected systems
They all work together. You can’t just change land use without addressing some issues about power. You can’t just shift culture without transforming the physical space, and so forth. This is the work of the imaginal cells within our chrysalis moment. It’s difficult and necessary reorganizing.
Getting Back to Simplicity
So the simple thing—ultimately, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to get us back to that unmanageable simplicity. Connect to place. But doing that in our current moment is really hard. We spend too much time indoors and separated. Our economic systems are pushing us towards extraction rather than relationship. Our political systems are rewarding short-term thinking over long-term care. And our narratives are all about infinite growth and how they’re not just possible, but actually necessary.
And yet, and yet, when Matt talks about connecting to place, it resonates deeply. There’s a hunger for this, a longing. I can share my own personal examples of how I’m completely feeling this. I shared the work of working on and dreaming for reimagining the hillside, which is currently filled with invasive species. How could I re-indigenize that area, feeling a sense of commitment to this land because it is part of where I connect to our great, beautiful Mother Earth? Or the Rose Canyon Restoration, or how I have a weekly meditation to go visit the Great Oak on the other side of the canyons that I’ve affectionately think of as Fangorn.
These aren’t grand gestures. They’re just the ways in which I’m showing up and trying to be in right relationship with this beautiful part of our beautiful living Mother Earth that happens to be holding me.
This is the unmanageable simplicity of connecting to place. And with it, I can just tell you personally, it shifts something. It’s not just what I do and what I know, but who I am, and even sort of dissolving a little bit of that notion of the egoic I-self and really feeling how I am part of and connected with her, Great Mother Earth.
Converging Ways of Knowing
I also hope you can see that these are parallels that we’ve been playing around with. The beginning episodes of this were really all about trying to—for those who have a strong scientific mind and really feel a deep connection with our objective ways of knowing, which I do too as a scientist—I wanted to set up and say these are pointing in a common direction as well.
From the Life Breathe episodes, organizing from geoscience and physics, about understanding the interconnected nature and the ways in which there’s just constant exchange in the universe, to the way that Island-Shaped, from an ecology perspective, how we are both islands that are shaping and being shaped by all these nested interrelationships, to ultimately how we are beings that are adapting and connecting with each other.
All of them, in my mind—the conclusion I was landing on—is that all of them are drawing us towards a shift in what we know as being good: towards living in right relationship. And that feels highly consonant. It’s different ways of knowing. Why? Because this is what Indigenous wisdom has been telling us all along. We’re just rediscovering what people have known for thousands of years. And I think Matt is doing a beautiful job of doing his part as an imaginal cell, to play the metaphor into this, emerging from all these different ways of knowing, these different epistemologies. We’re starting to find and re-anchor into perhaps a shared morality: let’s live in right relationship.
The Invitation Forward
And so with that, we’re holding all of that. I just really love Matt’s invitation. It’s so concrete and simple. Connect to place. Live in right relationship. Sit in that unmanageable simplicity.
Of course, it resonates with the work of Keith Bezzoli and the bioregional work that we talked about in a previous episode. It’s really inviting us to be aware of not just our watersheds, but our food sheds and all the other sheds that Matt was playing with.
And then last, of course, also bringing in those two states that Rosie Spinks brought up, that Matt brought into our conversation. State one is basically the world of the infinite growth in the shareholder value and the way in which that’s collapsing. Put it back into the metaphor I offered, that’s the caterpillar. And then there’s this state two, this imaginal cell, this chrysalis state—the protein soup, where we are literally sitting in the space of recognizing the collapse, but knowing as imaginal cells that we need to be planting the seeds for regeneration, the seeds for that future generation.
And I hope you can then hear the Seventh Fire Prophecy. Our task as the Seventh Fire People is not to actually step into the green grass. This is Episode 1, and from, of course, Robin Wall Kimmerer and that lineage. We’re not necessarily the people that are going to be able to enjoy the green grass, but we’re the ones that are responsible to allow future life to do so.
And just to sit with that and know that. That’s what’s being asked of us.
And so, for me, I just really love Matt’s advice: lean into planting seeds as much as you can while also remembering not to be too hard on yourself, because you are part of the protein soup. We are the people that have to be living in both worlds right now. That’s just the reality of being protein soup. It’s just the cards that have been dealt. It’s just like Gandalf sitting around with Frodo, and Frodo’s like, “I wish the ring had never come to me,” and Gandalf says, “So do all who live to see such times, but that’s not for you to decide. All you can do is decide what to do with what’s been given to you.”
We’re the Seventh Fire People, we’re the protein soup. We gotta figure this out.
The More We See the Pattern
So, with this, that’s what I’m picking up from this. I’m just so appreciative for Matt for kind of giving this and making it so beautiful, simplistic, and orienting. And with this, the more of this pattern, the more we can hold this tension, the more that we can see the butterfly pattern and grow into it while allowing the caterpillar to be dissolved, the more others will be able to see this, and the easier and easier this will start to be.
So for you, just imagine this as an invitation to connect to your specific place:
* Learn your native plants
* Join restoration projects
* Support community gardens
* Do what helps you connect to the people and place and the community
In so doing, grow into your role as one of the many imaginal cells, that networking group that Matt ended with, saying it was the most critical.
And for me, I would just say, and Matt and I both play with this, this is not just civic, this is civic and spiritual. And of course, it’s natural, so we’re back to the civic, spiritual, and natural processes that tether us to reality are breaking down.
Here it is, another way to say that: when we transform our streets, we are transforming our relationships. When we’re reconnecting to place, we are rebuilding our democratic capacity. When we center in care and love as we do systems change, we help to cultivate what matters most.
A Simple Practice to Begin
So with this, that unmanageably simple invitation: connect to place.
Try it. Start somewhere. Start small if needed. Learn one native plant, walk your neighborhood differently, or pulling in a conversation from Rob Dunn, pay attention to what your dog sniffs. They are connected to place in ways that you can’t. They have sensory capacities. Listen to the more-than-human world, build healthy relation. Let other living beings be your guide. Notice the watersheds and the other sheds that are feeding you. Join others in doing the work. And with this, we can all start to grow and nurture the people who have this network mindset, living the embodiment of this imaginal cell moment that we need.
Just in summary:
* The invitation is simple: Connect to place.
* The honest acknowledgement: The current systems make this hard.
* The hopeful truth: Transformation is possible, and happening, and you can be part of it.
* The deeper wisdom: This is how we learn to live in right relationship, and that right relationship is the unmanageable simplicity that this moment is calling from us.
Resources and Gratitude
So with this, thank you for listening. Thank you, Matt, for the conversation and your amazing work. And thank you, listener, for being willing to see the butterfly while we are in the protein soup. For being willing to connect with place, even when it’s hard. For growing into being the imaginal cell of this great transformation.
May you deepen connection to the part of our living, breathing Mother Earth that is holding you right now, and always will be holding you and all of us.
Resources Mentioned
Books & Authors
* Matt Biggar’s website:
* Website: https://www.connectedtoplace.com
* Book:Connected to Place: Regenerating Nature, Communities, and Local Economies Through Systems Change
* Darcia Narvaez - Restoring the Kinship Worldview (co-authored with Four Arrows)
* Robert Putnam - Bowling Alone
* Robin Wall Kimmerer - Seventh Fire Prophecy and Indigenous wisdom from Braiding Sweetgrass
* Rob Dunn - A Natural History of the Futureand The Call of the Honeyguide (see prior episodes including Episode 3 and 4a for more details)
* Marsha Bjornerud - Timefulness (and Episodes 2 and 2c)
* Keith Pezzoli - Bioregional Center
* Staci Haines - The Politics of Trauma and somatics work
Articles & Substacks
* Maya MacGuineas - The Atlantic’s Capitalism’s Addiction Problem
* Rosie Spinks - Substack: ““What Do We Do Now That We Are Here?“
* Specific article: “How I Became Collapse-Aware” (post-November 2024 election) (and I noticed she has a follow-up on this post, which can be found here:
* the “Tech Can’t Save Us” podcast by Paris Marx, especially the episode “We Need to Cut Our Dependence on U.S. Tech—Here’s How to Start.” Matt highlighted how valuable it is to seek perspectives from outside the U.S. on American corporations and technology.
* the “Green Dreamer” podcast episode featuring Darcia Narvaez on “Cultivating Nestedness,” which beautifully connects early childhood development, our connection to nature, and the systemic challenges we face. This is the same Darcia Narvaez who co-authored Restoring the Kinship Worldview with Four Arrows—offering Indigenous wisdom about our relationships with each other and the more-than-human world, which has been mentioned already in this podcast
Podcasts
* Paris Marx - Tech Can’t Save Us
* Episode: “We Need to Cut Our Dependence on U.S. Tech. Here’s How to Start”
* Episode on “Cultivating Nestedness” with Darcia Narvaez
Organizations & Initiatives
* Detroit Black Community Food Security Network - Working on food sovereignty in Detroit
* Keep Growing Detroit - Supporting 1,700+ gardens in Detroit
* Visible Network Labs - Network science framework for trust and value in collaboration
* Acterra - Conservation organization (Cindy Roessler’s work on oak restoration)
* Friends of Rose Canyon - San Diego restoration work
* Open Field Awakening - Led by Kabir Kadre
Case Studies
* Paris, France - Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s street transformation
* Twin Peaks, San Francisco - Native plant restoration
* Silicon Valley - Know Your Oaks campaign and County Oak Ambassador program
* Detroit - Urban farming and food sovereignty movement
