Full Ecology explores the need for human connection by healing ourselves before healing planet

These Show guests are married both in their personal lives and their professional ones. Gary Ferguson is a best-selling author who was recently on The Show talking about his latest book documenting the decline of Arizona’s ponderosa pine forests. Mary M. Clare is a social scientist whose work focuses on the psychology of communities.

And together, they’ve founded Full Ecology, which is a lot of things that we’ll let them describe for you. But it involves a book, lectures, a Ted Talk, retreats and more. And the idea is to help us all ground ourselves in a climate change world. We cannot heal the planet, they say, without first healing ourselves.

The Show sat down with them recently in our studios to talk more about it.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: I want to begin with, I guess, what brought you to this, right? Because you're both coming from kind of different but colliding perspectives. Gary, you're an author. You've written a lot of books about nature. Mary, you are a social scientist. I mean, when you two met, were these ideas something that came up right away?

GARY FERGUSON: Funny you should ask. Yeah, as soon as we met, some almost 13 years ago, we got together and I happened to be at the time involved in the Wolf Project in Yellowstone, writing about the reintroduction after that animal had been gone for so many decades. You know, everything I would say, Mary would have a companion idea or piece about social ecology. I mean, we came to begin to really, really appreciate that since we are nature as humans, we are hardwired with some of the same superpowers that all the rest of nature has.

MARY CLARE: So in that particular moment, Gary spoke about the phenomena around the return of the wolf and how important community is to wolves, that there's really no such thing as a lone wolf, as it turns out — are very little evidence of that. So I said, wow, you know, when people have experienced trauma, the best predictor of their doing OK is having community.

And now we know that when people are moving forward in age and showing signs of what we call dementia, whatever it might be, that that is mitigated by being in community. So it's no surprise that the Indigenous people of many tribes in this country gained guidance from watching the wolves.

GILGER: So you can see right there how your work started to collide from the very beginning. So let's talk about Full Ecology, what this means, what it is. I mean, you said that just then, Gary, that humans as nature phrase, which is kind of key to all of this. What does that mean?

FERGUSON: Well, really full ecology is about, I think, trying to break down the walls that we have built, especially over the last three or 400 years between ourselves and the natural world. We have made ourselves separate from and in all reality, life does not just survive, but it thrives by virtue of its interconnectedness.

So to bring humans back into the definition of nature, offers lots of kinship with the natural world, but it also opens us up to having the opportunity to see, OK, how does nature really handle these particular problems? Of course, we have our own expression as humans of solving those problems, but we can learn a lot from nature as far as how these qualities play out in our own lives.

GILGER: So it's lessons learned, but you're not talking about physically breaking down the walls of our houses and all living outside in nature.

FERGUSON: Well No.

GILGER: Or maybe.

CLARE: But we do the question often in our talks. In the next week, see, I'm a recovering professor, so I give assignments. In the next week, check and see if you end where your skin ends. Just check and see.

So no, we're not saying we're going to just go out and live from the land, although some people are making that kind of choice, we're saying, you are nature, in nature. You have always been nature, but don't believe us. Check it out. This has been super comforting for many, many people in this time.

GILGER: Yeah.

CLARE: We realized that if we want to take care of our ecology, as we think of it outside of us, which we would argue it is not, we say you must attend to your internal ecologies, your social ecologies, the ones between you and within you.

GILGER: Right. So you mentioned something there I want to ask about, because you talked about how people find this comforting. And I know you travel the country, you talk to people, you hold retreats, right?

Like, I wonder, especially in this time, and you address this on your actual website, like, this is a time that is divisive and frustrating and, you know, feels difficult, right? And a lot of people have this kind of urge to withdraw, to just give up, or a lot of people are angry about what's happening in the world, right? And you're sort of saying this is not disconnected from yourself?

FERGUSON: Yeah, that's right. I mean, it would be unusual and unhealthy to not be going through some grief over all that's happening. But the solution is not to withdraw from it, but really to walk into the grief, because that's how you'll ultimately end up on the other side. The second thing that I think we would both say is this is not something to consider as you, again, as a separate being all by yourself having to deal with.

As Bill McKibben often says when he's asked, what can I do as an individual to make any difference? I'm just this lone person. Well, he says, stop acting like a lone individual. Come together. This is a set of problems and an opportunity for us to learn to find those people who we are in, kinship and community with and act from that social group, and that's a big, powerful move.

GILGER: That's powerful, but it's also incredibly difficult right now, right? Like, so much of what's happening in our society, in our culture, in our country is mistrust of institutions and isolation, technology sort of getting in the way of lots of kind of human-to-human relationships.

Is this, you think, a more important moment to talk about these things or a more difficult one?

CLARE: But the thing that we're seeing is that climate activists have been drawn to giving you lists of 10 things you can do. Recycle, la, la, la. And what the first thing that really needs to happen, we have these four orientations in full ecology. And the first one is that you've got to stop, which is so paradoxical. But just stop, stop all the thoughts, stop all the noise. Stop. Even if for just a split second.

And then watch how you have this tendency when you see something as problem to jump and solve it. And we know from social science data now that when you do that, without slowing down to ask and to explore what the problem is from a stopped place, you're answering the wrong question 95% of the time.

GILGER: What do you mean? What question should we be answering?

CLARE: Well, instead of there's a problem, I've got to do something. The stopping is centering, quieting, sounds so potentially woo-woo, but watch a tree. Watch a squirrel. So stopping and then getting information about what's really going on, receiving information about what's really going on, and the action follows from that.

FERGUSON: And I would say, too, that when people stop and look, as far as what Mary was saying, what's going on, look around your own neighborhood. What's going on in your neighborhood, in the city, and what calls to you as something that you think you would like to apply yourself to? Is it gonna fix the world?

Maybe one day, long after you're gone, but right now, it's an opportunity to make social connections with other people who are also concerned. It's an opportunity to align your life with something that means so much to you. I mentioned grief earlier. We wouldn't grieve if we didn't care so much about what was being lost. Mary made that mention earlier, do you really end at the edge of your skin?

Consider when you're out, if you walk under a tree, that tree is not just giving you oxygen, but phytoncides, which you breathe in and actually strengthen your immune system and your vital organs. Your hormone levels, some of them are being set by your interaction with daylight. There are more microbes living in your body than human cells that did not exist when you were first born. They came to live with you. And that's what allows you to break down food and get the nutrition.

So this isn't a trick question. It really is pointing toward a massive truth that we are not here just by ourselves. We're here in a community with the natural world and hopefully more and more with a community of humans as well.