Earthwise: Seven Patterns for Influencing Whole Systems
Path Notes # 17
"The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think." Gregory Bateson
Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind was one of my gateway drugs into systems thinking.
And he was right.
Minds and cultures that are misaligned with nature neither thrive nor endure.
Realigning ourselves ecologically is perhaps the defining work of our era – learning to think and act as nature does.
In a very practical sense, it means recalibrating our human systems to mirror the patterns that enable natural systems to flourish - not as a return to some pastoral fantasy but as a sophisticated integration of human creativity with natural wisdom.
To build institutions, technologies and cultures that work with rather than against the grain of complex reality.
In a more poetic sense, it means awakening from the trance-like illusion that we are above and outside the rest of nature and re-incorporating our consciousness within the broader fabric of creation.
We have inherited a worldview obsessed with control, strategy, and engineered solutions. They’re a bit like those protective childhood strategies that have a deep motivating wisdom when we are children but become increasingly maladaptive as we grow older. Let’s be clear – being able to control and manipulate things in an uncertain world has real adaptive advantages, otherwise our ancestors would never have started doing it! But the maladaptive cascade of downsides can no longer be ignored.
Time for a dose of systems-change therapy!
But all too often, the medicine simply replicates the very challenge we’re trying to address.
In this post, I’m going to explore seven simple patterns of influence that I see at play in the natural world. I’m finding them to be useful ways to think about how ‘change’ really happens in ‘systems’.
From what I see, the most profound changes - in ecosystems, organizations, and human communities - seldom unfold according to a plan. They emerge from patterns of influence that are both simpler and more mysterious than our mechanistic models suggest.
When we become serious students of the living earth, we discover that transformation occurs through relational dynamics, not top-down directives. A wolf pack reshapes an entire landscape not through grand strategy but by simply doing what wolves do. A beaver builds a dam not to engineer an ecosystem but to create habitat for its family, yet the ripple effects touch every species downstream.
These are not just metaphors. They’re observable patterns that operate across different types of complex systems. Understanding them can offer something most conventional approaches to leadership and social change seem to lack: a framework grounded in billions of years of evolutionary wisdom about how complex living systems actually transform.
Earth has been our greatest teacher all along.
We just forgot how to listen.
Lessons from the Wolf
One of the inspirations for our work at the Wolf Willow Institute was the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone National Park.
You likely know the story.
In the mid 1990’s, 31 wolves were trapped in the Canadian Rockies and then re-released into Yellowstone where they had been absent for 70 years.
This small group of intelligent social carnivores, with no strategic plan or defined leader, had a definitive ecosystem-level impact in less than a decade.
They did a few, very simple, wolf things.
They hunted elk. They chased off the coyotes and made life harder for the mountain lions. They reproduced. And when their families reached a certain size, they divided and created new packs.
The primary impact was on the elk. Some got eaten. The rest quickly modified their behaviour.
For one thing, they no longer ate all the young poplar shoots growing along the rivers. This first-order effect led to a cascade of second-order effects that emerged in the relationships between species that had no direct contact with the wolves such as beavers, songbirds, and fish. And those changes in relational dynamics between systems agents led to a set of third-order effects - new bottom-up systems properties ranging from hydrological impacts to structural vegetation changes. The impacts of such non-consumptive effects seem like magic when you watch the YouTube video, but it’s just the way nature works.
The story is still unfolding and much remains unknown and hotly debated.
But one thing everybody agrees on: A handful of wolves, simply by being themselves, fundamentally shifted the web of relationships within the park thereby impacting the entire ecosystem - increasing its diversity, complexity and resilience.
It’s a compelling story that offers a case study of the perils and possibilities inherent when we intervene in complex living systems. It is a rich story with many entry points, players and perspectives. Causal chains, cross-scale dynamics, trophic cascades, phase transition, tipping points, feedback loops, boundaries, strange attractors, unintended consequences and emergent outcomes all have walk on parts in the story.
There’s some exaggeration, hyperbole, wishful thinking and a few romantic projections mixed in there too.
The story has become a kind of myth – one that has escaped the park boundaries and the confines of academic journals. Carried by the winds of YouTube, it has found its way into the imaginations of millions for whom it is a story of insight, healing and possibility.
Rewilding our way into a regenerative future with cute wolf puppies!
It’s a complex story, and there are interesting lessons for those of us interested in leadership, systems change, and organizational network theory.
Ecosystem Engineers?
Ecologists have a term to describe this kind of impact: ecosystems engineering.
Ecosystems engineers are species whose activities lead to the creation of new micro-habitats within an ecosystem. They complexify the world around them by creating spaces for species that might otherwise not exist. Some of them, like beavers, wolves and bison, change the environment by transforming the relationships and materials within it. Others, like trees, coral, and kelp, do it by transforming themselves.
To be honest, I don’t love the term engineer.
For one thing, it tends to focus the gaze on the most obvious players within an ecosystem and their impact – a bit like those books that tell world history by focusing on emperors and kings. Complex living systems are filled with symbiotic and mutually influential relationships that create the conditions for life to flourish, and it’s hard to say that one species crosses some kind of threshold to achieve engineer status.
More importantly, an engineered solution is the exact opposite of an ecological emergent! The difference between the engineers who built the Hoover Dam and the beavers along the Yellowstone River is not simply one of scale; their impact is categorically different. But the concept has been a valuable placeholder for describing distinct patterns of ecosystem influence and it offers a useful way for leaders to think about working in situations of high complexity.
What follows are seven patterns that reveal how small groups of agents, acting locally and relationally, can generate ecosystem-wide transformation.
Each reveals a different facet of how life creates the conditions for more life.
Studying them, for me, is one way to listen to and learn from the earth. These patterns remind me that the most powerful agents of systemic change are often those who focus not on changing the system but on authentically expressing their essential nature in relationship with others. When enough agents do this - when they embody their role with skill and consistency - the whole system can reorganize around new patterns of possibility.
Patterns of Ecosystem Influence
Patterns of Predation
It’s what wolves are born to do.
They kill, they feast on the dead, and they instill the fear of death in the living.
These things act as a behavioural modifier and restraint on the otherwise uncontrolled population growth of elk. When the wolves showed up in Yellowstone, the rules of the game changed. When other boundary conditions allow, ungulates that don’t get preyed on or hunted will grow in numbers and exploit the available resources to the best of their ability. They will shape the environment and often destroy complexity-generating foliage such as young trees and shrubs. Co-evolutionary patterns of predation are important negative feedback loops that constrain over-exploitation and exponential population growth and they are found across the wild world.
Each wolf and wolfpack has agency and makes decisions locally. Replicated at scale, the wolf and wolfpack drive whole systems properties. It’s important to remember that elk have agency too. They’re not just passive wolf snacks! I once watched a lone cow elk face down three wolves that were blocking her route through a mountain meadow. Her bravery and power were humbling to watch and the wolves wisely backed down. The wolves drive patterns of adaptive response amongst the elk who learn to live close to human settlements where the wolves are more reluctant to hunt them.
The fear of death can make quick learners of us all.
Patterns of Disturbance
Left undisturbed, certain forest ecosystems sequester energy unevenly, shut out the light from the forest floor, monopolize resources, and inhibit diversity.
It takes a mighty force to get them to share!
Often that force is elemental - fire, wind, or flood. But elephants will do the same thing on a more localized scale. They knock over trees, clear pathways, and break things open allowing energy to be redistributed and creating patches within which new forms of diversity can flourish.
Such patterns of disturbance are common and critical. Herds of bison will graze and trample an area intensively for a couple of days and then move on. It breaks up the soil and allows for a more diverse array of plants and grasses to grow. Regenerative ranchers have learned to mimic this pattern to mitigate the otherwise inevitable erosion of complexity that takes place when you place herds of ungulates into pastures with rigid boundaries. The bison will also create wallows - they take baths on the land leaving dusty indentations behind which then become important seasonal micro-habitats for other species. You can still find old wallows on the east slopes of the Rocky Mountains that remained generative micro-habitats for more than a century after bison were eradicated from the landscape.
It’s a good reminder that we can’t really change a system. We mostly just destabilize or disturb it and then respond.
The trick is to do so with wisdom, skill and a measure of humility.
Patterns of Exchange
Nothing in the natural world does just one thing.
Large animals don’t just disturb landscapes. They leave something of themselves behind - bones, dung, fur - that creates opportunities for others to inhabit the landscape more successfully. Bison dung becomes a habitat for insects that in turn provide food for birds. That same dung, when dried, provided prairie-dwelling hunters with the fuel needed to flourish and keep warm. And it wasn’t just humans they kept warm. Next to musk oxen, bison have amongst the warmest known inner fur. It comes out in clumps at the end of the winter and blows around the landscape. Birds weave it into their nests and this turns out to be critical in the survival and reproductive success of smaller-bodied and above-ground nesting species.
Cows don’t do the same thing.
The way cattle raised under typical industrial feedlot systems survive cold winters is by having a thick layer of fat and a hot-burning metabolism that is kept stoked with energy-rich, water-hungry monocrops. The second and third order effects of sustaining large numbers of cattle in this way leads to an erosion of ecological complexity and biodiversity under most conventional management regimes.
There are critical lessons here for anyone trying to support the emergence of circular economies and regenerative food systems.
Patterns of Stabilization
Who doesn’t love a good watering hole?
Beavers dam flowing water creating pools and wetlands that in turn allow multiple other species to live, interact, and flourish. When they were extracted at a continental scale to provide the raw materials for the British hat industry, their absence precipitated an ecological aftershock that reverberates to this day.
There are many other species that slow down and stabilize energy flows within ecosystems and create generative new habitats resulting in greater diversity and flourishing. Some, like beaver and moss, act as hydrological buffers to the volatility of water flow. Biotic soil crusts create rich micro-climates in arid landscapes that prevent the soil being blown away by the wind, allowing other species to gain a foothold. Similarly, delicate flowers like the alpine dryas will find a foothold in the alluvial deposits at the base of glaciers and along mountain rivers. Over time, they form a rich mat from their own decaying bodies that traps other nutrients and creates a micro-nursery for tree seedlings to establish themselves.
Such patterns of accumulative stabilization are similarly found with sea grasses and mangrove trees which construct vast carbon-rich sediment banks beneath their roots, gradually building up coastlines while simultaneously protecting them from erosion through their dense network of stabilizing roots and trapped sediment.
All are worthy of study – especially if you’re in the business of building social safety nets, resilient infrastructures and networks or the kind of buffers and redundancies necessary to counter modernity’s accelerating volatility.
Patterns of Energy Transfer & Transformation
I was recently at an event where Nancy Southern, the CEO of ATCO, was invited to share a ‘beautiful question’ she was holding about her work. Her response was stunning. “What if we thought about energy, not as a resource to be exploited, but as an ecology of powerful and magical relationships. What becomes possible through such a lens?”
It's a great question. And it’s one where the natural world offers abundant perspective.
Species like salmon and caribou move vast amounts of energy within and between ecosystems making it available for a diverse range of other species. When salmon return to their birthplaces in the coastal temperate rainforest to spawn, they are completing a cycle that can see them bring the energy of the Pacific Ocean depths hundreds of kilometres inland to the mountainous headwaters of great rivers. Along the way they have helped to birth and sustain entire ecologies, economies, and cultures. Even after their death, their decomposing bodies, dragged far from the river by bears and made available through the critical mediating influence of fungal networks, provide vital nutrients for forest and riparian ecosystems.
Everywhere you look, energy is being moved, stored, released, competed for, shared and transformed to be made available for other life.
Tinker tailor, philanthropist, investor, capital markets, geothermal engineer, tech entrepreneur, farmer, data analyst….
We’re all in the energy business now.
Patterns of Connection
Some species create entire worlds of opportunity for others by connecting things together, linking up, cross-pollinating or moving DNA around. Sometimes it’s obvious. Liana vines in rainforests create arboreal pathways that other species can use to travel between trees.
Much less easy to see, but far more significant in terms of ecological impact and global reach, are the networks of mycelial filament that link every part of a forest together and enable it to grow. One cubic inch of soil can contain miles of mycelia which fundamentally shapes the dynamics of forest ecosystems. Mycelia helps to cycle and distribute nutrients. It engineers soil structure by binding particles together into aggregate thereby increasing soil stability, water retention, and aeration. It forms symbiotic relationships with other plants, helping to transfer critical nutrients and timely information within a forest community. And it helps decompose plant compounds thereby releasing stored nutrients back into the ecosystem and creating new habitats for other organisms.
Like social media networks, connector species don’t simply connect – they amplify…often disproportionately. Mycorrhizal fungi amplify the entire forest's capacity for nutrient exchange and communication by orders of magnitude. Pollinators like bees amplify the reproductive success of entire plant communities far beyond their direct interactions.
How do we take the attention-draining algorithms of outrage and reset them for flourishing?
Patterns of Diffusion
Symbiosis - parasitic interactions that co-evolve into mutually beneficial relationships - is a widespread pattern. As naturalist and anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin famously noted, nature cooperates just as much as it competes. Many plant species rely on birds and insects to pollinate and spread their seeds, offering nourishment in return. And sometimes that can have landscape level impacts. For example:
An oak tree produces about two thousand acorns a year.
But only about one in ten thousand acorns actually becomes an oak tree!
Every acorn has the potential to become an oak. The pattern is genetically encoded in their DNA and under the right circumstances they will unfold and develop according to these original instructions.
Most never get the chance. Young oaks cannot grow in the shade of their parents.
But given the opportunity, jays will transport and store large numbers of the acorns to eat later. The birds bury the acorns in the loose soil of open areas at the woodland’s scrubby fringe. Other animals will do this, but jays seem to have a special relationship with oak trees. Jays will even dig up new oak seedlings, eat the remaining acorn, and then replant the sapling, a process which many young trees survive. This remarkable and critical relationship between bird and tree was responsible for the rapid dispersal of oak forests across Europe as the last ice age receded. And in case it doesn’t go without saying, the jays weren’t trying to plant forests; they were simply creating food caches for themselves in ways that led to systemic effects.
The archetypal psychologist James Hillman often used the acorn metaphor to describe the human psyche. Each person, he suggested, is born with a unique "acorn" - an essential pattern that contains the seed of who they are meant to become. Just as an acorn contains the complete blueprint for becoming an oak tree, the human psyche contains an inherent image or calling that wants to unfold and manifest in the world.
I’ve found it a useful concept. It recenters the soul and encourages people to listen to their deeper calling and honor the unique pattern seeking expression through their lives, rather than trying to fix or normalize themselves according to external standards.
But spend a little time in the forest learning about actual oak trees and you quickly realize that the unfolding of potential takes place in a relational ecology where the conceptual boundaries between ‘oak tree’, ‘jay’, ‘acorn’ or ‘forest’ are wildly permeable. Indeed, from a systems lens, it’s hard to say where the oak tree ends, and the jay begins. Acorns are certainly not examples of a heroic individual quest for self-actualization!
No jays, no oak forest.
We awaken and grow together.
The Deep Pattern of Co-Arising
Predation, disturbance, exchange, stabilization, energy transfer and transformation, connection, and diffusion.
Seven simple patterns that shape and influence entire ecosystems.
Disrupt or remove one pattern from the landscape and the system dynamics change.
Add it back in and the agents self-organize in ways that lead to new systems-wide outcomes.
Perhaps most importantly, these patterns remind us that ecosystems are not merely sterile networks or conceptual abstractions. They are what biologist Andreas Weber calls love stories - expressions of life's fundamental generosity and the deep impulse to establish connections, to intermingle and to weave our existence together with that of other beings. Ecosystems are alive! They pulse with sentience and mutual yearning, they transform through relationship, and everything seems to be gifting their aliveness in service of the greater becoming.
You too are part of an ecosystem that longs for you to be fully yourself and to play your part.
There’s a lot to learn from here.
Leadership is, above all, a process of social influence and these principles hold practical relevance for anyone seeking to influence a network or social field.
Study the pattern language with the deep mind and an open heart and you will not only have a better understanding of the dynamics but hold the keys for changing or stabilizing virtually any kind of complex living system at virtually any scale.
The earth has been teaching this curriculum for billions of years.
Our task is to remember how to learn from it.
With wild curiosity
Julian
p.s. hope your acorn has been fortunate enough to find its jay! Maybe you are a jay!