25/05/2026
Lessons From Ecology - care of the Honest Sorcerer
Let’s turn our attention to the biggest teacher of all: Nature. I’m not a trained ecologist, mind you, but I do find it useful to show what the Natural world has to teach us when it comes to managing scarcity. Heck, we might learn something in the end!
Ours is an ecologically unsustainable system in absolute overshoot—i.e. it uses way more resources and releases way more pollution than Nature could replenish or handle. But there is still a lot to be done (and learned) on our way back to a more sustainable life. And these learnings are scale invariant, that is they work just as well on a household, neighborhood or international level. Let me just highlight two proven strategies when it comes to managing scarcity:
Cooperate. Competition, while successful during times of abundance or rapid growth, is detrimental on the long run. Instead of competing for the same food source, species thus specialize, and share what they have. Think: fungi obtaining nutrients from the soil (and even rocks) then forwarding those to trees, who in turn give them sugar. Humans in a community can share their skills, or communities can share excess produce. Those who endlessly compete, stampede and take may survive for a while, but those who want to live must cooperate. Competition only leads to extinction.
Survival of the “fittest.” It’s often not the most “fit,” healthy, and strong that survives, but the one who fits in the best. The one whose skills, attributes, traits and knowledge matches the demands of their environment the most. In our present human world this often meant selecting for narcissistic, dominating, exploitative and ruthless behavior. No president has ever been elected by winning fist fights over their opponents, but through clever manipulations and through alliances. A post-growth world will similarly demand a set of different skills, such as flexibility, adaptability, agreeability—and much more… Unless our present crop of leadership elite reaches for the ultimate tool in managing scarcity, economic hardship and competition: war. And I’m afraid that by doing everything to make the crisis worse, and by so openly talking about war is coming—heck, some leaders even put a date on it—a giant clash starts to looks like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The problem is not there are no “solutions”—or rather: good adaptations—to our predicament at hand, but that these adaptive pathways are deliberately avoided in exchange for short term gain, status and power. And we know where does that lead.
Until next time,
The Honest Sorcerer.
