an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions
Art of Becoming, No. 74
Previously, Week 10
Welcome to Week 11 of Art of Becoming.
Today is the fourth of this seven-part contemplative series on sustainability.
As we enter the fourth day of this seven-part contemplation on sustainability, we find ourselves at the fulcrum between the philosophical foundations we’ve laid and the applied dimensions yet to come. This week began with an exploration of how language crystallizes into lived experience, and experience into the very architecture of the world we inhabit—a process that binds human consciousness to the ecological systems that sustain it. Yesterday’s reflection drew from Hans Jonas’s piercing insight that to be alive is to be tasked with preserving the possibility of life itself, a duty that transcends altruism to tap into the primal logic of existence.
Today’s meditation shifts our gaze toward the scientific imagination as an ethical force. If Jonas framed our responsibility as existential, Aldo Leopold and Wes Nisker invite us to consider how that responsibility becomes empirical—how the “science of land health” Leopold called for is not merely a technical endeavor but a moral reckoning with our capacity to see ecosystems as living, self-renewing organisms. Here, sustainability emerges not as a policy goal or abstract ideal, but as a practice of deep attention to the feedback loops and fragilities that govern all life.
What makes today’s practice distinct—and vital—is its insistence that the “ethic” of sustainability is inseparable from the rigor of its science. To study the land’s capacity for renewal, as Leopold did, or to sit with Nisker’s reflections on humanity’s evolutionary adolescence, is to confront a truth both humbling and liberating: We are not stewards of nature, but participants in its logic. The data points of soil erosion, carbon cycles, and biodiversity loss are not just metrics—they are mirrors, reflecting back the consequences of our estrangement from the systems that birthed us.
In the days ahead, we’ll turn to the lenses of technology, culture, and consciousness to further unravel sustainability. But for now, let today’s practice ground you in the recognition that every scientific observation about our planet’s health is also a question about our own. How might we shift from analyzing the world to communing with it? And what would it mean to treat the pursuit of ecological knowledge not as a detached academic exercise, but as an act of kinship?
As always, read not just for insight, but for invitation.
The most important characteristic of an organism is that capacity for internal self-renewal known as health. There are two organisms whose processes of self-renewal have been subjected to human interference and control. One of these is man himself (medicine and public health). The other is land (agriculture and conservation). The effort to control the health of land has not been very successful. It is now generally understood that when soil loses fertility, or washes away faster than it forms, and when water systems exhibit abnormal floods and shortages, the land is sick. Other derangements are known as facts, but are not yet thought of as symptoms of land sickness.…The art of land doctoring is being practiced with vigor, but the science of land health is yet to be born.
-Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
Imagine standing at the edge of a prairie in 1885—the year the first gasoline-powered automobile coughed to life—as steel rails and barbed wire corralled the last bison herds. The industrial age arrived with machinery and a creed: Nature holds no secrets. For 150 years, we believed physics could reduce ecosystems to equations, chemistry could dissolve soil into elements, engineering could dam any river. Want a forest? Plant rows. Need a species gone? Eradicate it. Sustainability became a spreadsheet puzzle: offset X emissions, restore Y acres. When consequences arose—rivers choking on algae, skies thick with particulates—we doubled down. More agencies. More controls. More asphalt over the mystery.
Yet here we stand, ankle-deep in the debris of our own making—rusted machinery of progress creaking under the weight of unintended consequences—as Aldo Leopold’s prescient diagnosis pierces the noise: ‘The art of land doctoring is practiced with vigor, but the science of land health is yet to be born.’ What if our ecological crisis stems not from flawed methods, but flawed vision—a cataract-clouded perception mistaking control for healing? Wes Nisker’s luminous reminder that life is ‘fueled by the fires of the sun’ burns away the industrial fantasy, revealing an elemental truth: just as our bodies rebel when treated as machines rather than living systems, the land sickens under exploitation’s scalpels. The same logic that prescribes pills for isolated symptoms—ignoring the body’s interconnected wisdom—drives us to address climate change with carbon credits and species loss with gene banks. And what of our mental landscapes? The anxiety humming through modern minds mirrors nitrate-poisoned aquifers; the depression settling over collective consciousness echoes in clear-cut forests. Sustainability, in its deepest sense, asks not how we fix a broken world, but how we reweave reciprocity—with Earth, body, and psyche entwined like mycelium beneath the forest floor.
This reimagining begins where science transcends measurement to become revelation—not merely cataloging the world’s workings, but awakening to our entanglement within them. Galileo’s heliocentrism may have dethroned Earth from the cosmic stage, Darwin tethered us to evolutionary kin, and quantum physics dissolved the illusion of separability, yet our institutions still genuflect before the altar of human exceptionalism. Leopold’s call for a 'science of land health' confronts this cognitive lag with the urgency of a physician addressing septic shock: when he writes of land sickness—soil hemorrhaging fertility, rivers gasping through erratic floods—he diagnoses relational ruptures no metric captures. Here, the prairie becomes both teacher and mirror. Unlike mountains that awe or forests that shelter, this undulating sea of grass resisted 20th-century economists’ attempts to quantify its 'scenic value.' No vistas to commodify, no timber to tally—just wind tracing invisible partnerships between root and rhizome, light illuminating reciprocity’s quiet algebra. Its lesson cuts deeper than ecology: just as a body sickens when treated as isolated organs rather than a dynamic whole, land falters under reductionist cures. Industrial logic stumbles not for lack of data, but lack of humility—failing to see that health, whether of organism or prairie, thrives not in stasis but in animated reciprocity. Nisker’s admission that 'we’re navigating new territory here' echoes in our hunter-gatherer brains, wired for tracking antelope yet tasked with planetary stewardship. The dissonance hums like a phantom limb: we ache for connection even as our tools distance us, satellites mapping glacial decay while glaciers whisper forgotten truths—you are this erosion, this melt, this ancient water returning home.
The technological revolution Nisker catalogs—antibiotics severing our symbiotic dance with microbes, birth control recalibrating evolution’s ancient rhythms, supercomputers mapping rainforest canopies down to the veined geometry of leaves—has unveiled a paradox as intimate as our own breath: these tools magnify our agency while dissolving the myth of our separateness. Like surgeons excising symptoms while ignoring the body’s hum of interdependence, we deploy satellites to track deforestation in real-time yet grow deaf to the relevance realization that once attuned our ancestors to the land’s whispered feedback—the way a mother intuiting a child’s fever knows more than any thermometer. Here, glaciers pixelate into melting datasets, their silent plea—you are this, too—drowned out by the hubris of mastery. Leopold foresaw this dissonance: his “science of land health” mirrors the physician who treats not just organs, but the relationships between them. A prairie’s resilience emerges not from engineered solutions, but from mycorrhizal handshakes between root and fungus, just as a body heals not by silencing symptoms, but by restoring balance to its microbial cosmos. Our mental landscapes, too, fray under this delusion of control—anxiety blooms like algal toxins in stagnant waters, loneliness echoes in the silenced songs of clear-cut forests. The same industrial logic that reduces land to commodities fractures psyche from ecosystem, as if neurons could thrive severed from the body. Yet in this unraveling lies revelation: the satellite’s eye, for all its cold precision, becomes a mirror. To see Earth’s entanglement is to glimpse our own—an invitation to trade scalpels for stethoscopes, metrics for reverence. As modern ecology now whispers what Leopold’s prairie once roared: health, whether of soil or soul, thrives not in dominion, but in the humility of participation.
Leopold diagnosed this dissonance decades before silicon chips—when computers still filled rooms and “big data” meant soil samples in mason jars—artfully pinpointing industrial logic’s fatal flaw: mistaking management for understanding. The prairie, that undulating sea of grass, rebukes this arrogance not through argument but existence. Its deep-rooted Andropogon gerardii didn’t “solve” drought through engineering, but through millennia of coevolution with fire and bison—a choreography modern agroecology now decodes as mycorrhizal symbiosis. These fungi, as recent studies reveal, trade phosphorus for carbon in a subterranean economy older than agriculture, their hyphal networks acting as both nutrient highway and drought early-warning system.
So, Leopold’s Copernican shift emerges and a science of sustainability demands alignment with nature’s design, not better controls. Watersheds self-purify through microbial consortia whose metabolic dialogues we’ve only begun to translate. Forests self-cool via transpiration cycles that outsmart climate models, their canopies regulating atmospheric moisture with the precision of a symphony conductor. Ecosystems operate by rules no agency has the power to legislate.
So, we stand where Leopold’s prescience meets modern possibility: a science that sees human communities as nodes within Earth’s living web. And it is also science that reveals a humbling truth: cellular renewal mirrors ecological renewal. Both thrive on feedback loops we disrupt at our peril. The mitochondria in your cells and the mycorrhizal networks beneath forests operate by the same logic—energy flows best when participation replaces domination. When we quit refining our stewardship and instead remember our kinship—like root systems exchanging nutrients with fungal networks,既不主宰也不服从 (neither mastering nor submitting), an ecological conscience awakens that cellular recognition that we are the renewing systems we seek to sustain. Leopold’s land ethic and the Buddha’s Middle Way, each an empirical imperative, both remind us that when we approach soil carbon levels or cortisol rhythms as technical puzzles, we miss their deeper lesson. So, sustainability as an ethic is as much an art as it is a science—of aligning human systems with life’s self-renewing patterns.
The task of knowing sustainability demands what Buddhist tradition calls samyak vyayama—"right effort"—a commitment to widening the circle of ethical concern until it embraces what Leopold termed "the land": soils whispering their ancient geochemical ballads, rivers scripting watershed sagas across continents, forests conducting symphonies of carbon exchange. This is an ethical expansion that isn’t mere moral posturing; it’s survival physiology. Mitochondria once ceased being invaders to become essential collaborators in eukaryotic cells, so, too, we must recognize ourselves as symbiotic partners within Earth’s metabolic web.
Science becomes sacrament when it cultivates reverent attention—the hydrologist mapping meanders with the care of Joy Harjo penning Praise the Rain, the microbiologist sequencing mycorrhizal networks as Ada Limón traces “watery depths inside herself.” Consider Jorie Graham’s Deep Water Trawling, where ocean currents mirror neural pathways, or Coral Bracho’s Water’s Lubricious Edges, where fluid dynamics dissolve the fiction of separability. These poets, like Leopold parsing the Song of the Gavilan, remind us: to study a river’s braided flow is to decode the same rhythms that pulse through our veins. To sustain is to practice falling in love—not romantically, but biochemically. Oxytocin floods the brain when we protect endangered species; dopamine sparks as prairie roots stabilize carbon. Leopold knew this: his “ecological conscience” mirrors the Bhakti poet’s ecstatic surrender. When hydrologists speak of river “health” or Buddhists of pratityasamutpada (dependent co-arising), they articulate the same truth: reciprocity is the grammar of existence.
For Nisker, “Buddhism was a religion for the end and fatigue of civilization”—a tradition forged in the crucible of impermanence, now refracted through our planetary reckoning. His insight reveals the dharma not as escape, but as compass for navigating collapse and renewal. Yet this compass points not backward to ashrams, but forward to the alchemical laboratory where technology and contemplation fuse. Imagine drone swarms seeding deforested lands not as engineering feats, but as rituals of atonement—their whirring rotors chanting sutras for soil. Envision AI climate models as digital zafus, their neural networks mirroring Dōgen’s shinjin-datsuraku: “dropping body-mind” into kinship with atmospheric currents. Here, data streams on soil pH become psalms of reciprocity; carbon capture technologies, modern mudras molding CO₂ into communion. We are realizing the thermodynamic reality of a species learning to photosynthesize ethics—converting the light of awareness into action that nourishes rather than depletes. Leopold’s “land sickness” and the Buddha’s dukkha share a root: the existential splinter of imagined separation. Healing begins when science shifts its prime question from How do we fix nature? to How does nature sustain us?—when hydrologists study rivers as circulatory systems, neurologists map forests as synaptic networks, and bioacousticians decode whale song as collective memory.
So, we are at the threshold Leopold foresaw: a science of health that sees watersheds as organs, topsoil as skin, and human communities as neural networks within Earth’s evolving mind. To cross it, we need more-than-mystic visions, and the courage to let knowledge encompass what truly matters—the pulse of reciprocity that sustains all life. For as the Gavilan River still sings through Leopold’s memory: To know is to love. To love is to sustain.
The Time of Our Lives
A Dharma Talk by Wes Nisker
We are lucky to have just this perfect sized sun, mid sized star, basically small to mid size, you know,. There are billions of them out there. Ours is just right for us and we are just the right distance from it. If we were just a few thousand miles closer, you know, it wouldn't be ashes to ashes, it would just be ashes. And if we were a few million, a few thousand miles, just a few thousand miles further away you know, we'd all be like living around the Equator and maybe we would still be woolly mammoth or something, you know. It would be really hard to stay warm. So this is perfect a perfect sun for growing living things and human beings. D. H. Lawrence, insisted that our love was so diminished, the way we thought of love, because we had taken it away from the sun and the rising and the setting of the sun and the moon and the earth and we had made it just a personal thing between people and he said it's…it's dying in its civilized vase on the table, love. We need to reconnect with the moving cosmos.
Meditation Practice
Today’s Instruction: Feel the Difference Between Thinking and Being
Close your eyes... and take a moment to settle into your meditation posture... allowing your body to be at ease while maintaining an alert presence.
Notice that there's a tendency in meditation, and in life, to remain at a distance from your own experience... to conceptualize transformation rather than embody it. Many practitioners find themselves in this space—intellectually understanding what meditation offers while never fully entering the stream of direct experience.
In this moment, can you notice if you're observing your meditation practice? There may be thoughts about what meditation should feel like... or concepts about awakening that you've collected... while the actual territory of your immediate experience remains unexplored.
Rather than trying to achieve some future state, turn your attention to the quality of awareness that's already here. Feel the sensations of breathing without narrating them. Notice the sounds around you without labeling them as distractions or supports. Allow thoughts about meditation to appear and disappear without identifying with them.
The threshold between conceptual understanding and direct experience isn't crossed through effort or accumulation of knowledge. It's crossed by releasing the impulse to stand apart from this moment. Can you feel the difference between thinking about your experience and being it?
Let go of any model of progress that positions you outside your own consciousness. Notice that awareness itself is already free of this division. It's not waiting for you in some future attainment.
Simply rest as the awareness that you already are... and notice how the boundary between the observer and the observed begins to dissolve on its own.
