Paul Krafel, author of Shifting, Nature's Way of Change, teaches about a dimension of possibilities for life, a space of positive and negative feedback loops. A naturalist, educator and charter school founder, Paul Krafel explains how this dimension of possibilities for life can help us navigate dread and avoid time lag traps. His decades of careful observation reveal deep natural patterns that can help us navigate the fog of present times.
The Interview was inspired by Krafel’s article Toward a Commons culture.
Listen to this episode:
Themes:
Rain Walks & Upward Spirals: Paul’s practice of small landscape interventions to slow water runoff and regenerate land.
The Commons Culture: How natural systems, from soil formation to beaver dams, create shared abundance.
Thermodynamics & Life: Understanding how energy and flow shape ecosystems and human societies.
Decentralization & Resilience: Why smaller, self-organized systems often outperform large, centralized ones.
Hope as a Strategy: The psychological and systemic shifts needed to counter societal dread and build a future of shared possibility.
Timestamps:
• 00:00 — Opening & Welcome
• 00:33 — Sponsor & Host’s Backstory
• 01:49 — Introducing Paul Krafel & The Vision of the Commons
• 03:09 — The Raindrop Metaphor
• 05:00 — Rain Walks & Shifting Mindsets
• 11:06 — Life Lessons from Rain Walks
• 14:54 — Work as Joy & The Second Law of Thermodynamics
• 18:14 — Defining the Commons
• 21:10 — Feedback Spirals vs. Feedback Loops
• 24:37 — Four Strategies to Increase Life’s Possibilities — Part 1
• 33:24 — Four Strategies — Part 2
• 37:16 — Work, Play & Commons Culture
• 41:37 — Hope vs. Dread & Shifting Orientation
• 47:02 — Decentralization & Local Empowerment
• 51:09 — Time Lags in Systems Change
• 55:28 — Design Patterns for Managing the Commons
• 57:28 — Consequences Awareness & Education
• 59:05 — The Staten Island Ferry Metaphor & Enoughness
• 01:00:51 – Closing
Resources & References:
📖 Shifting: Nature’s Way of Change – Paul Krafel:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2876220-shifting
📜 Toward a Commons Culture – Paul Krafel’s essay on shifting systemic patterns:
https://roamingupward.net/toward-a-commons-culture/#Toward-a-Commons-culture
📚 Elinor Ostrom – Nobel Prize-winning economist on commons governance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom
Transcript
Paul Krafel (00:00.088)
For me, the commons is anything that did not exist before life appeared that has now an existence partly through the efforts of life and that helped make more possibilities for life.
Narrator - Clara Chemin
Welcome to Entangled Futures with Lucas Tauil, where we explore mutuality and conversations towards a world that works for everyone.
Lucas Tauil (00:33.602)
This episode is brought to you by the Holochain Foundation. Holochain is creating technology that allows people to team up, share information and solve their own problems without needing a middleman. Creating carriers that cannot be captured, Holochain enables privacy and holds space for innovation and mutuality. I first came across the project in 2018.
during my journey into participative culture with Unsparil. My good friend, Hailey Cooperider, pointed me to the green paper and I was blown away by the vision of a local first decentralized internet. I worked for five years on the project and feel very grateful for the support with the show. Enjoy it.
Lucas Tauil (01:49.4)
Today we welcome Paul Krafel, a naturalist, educator, and charter school founder. Krafel is the author of Shifting, Nature's Way of Change. His decades of careful observation reveal deep natural patterns that can help us navigate the fog of present times. Paul Krafel teaches about a dimension of possibilities for life, a space of positive and negative feedback loops that either increase or deplete life's potential. Acknowledging this dimension and being intentional about it can help us navigate complexity and foster a commons culture, a collective ethic that might turn the tide and heal the pervasive dread and lack of hope we experience in the face of systemic challenges. Welcome, Paul.
I'm honored to have you with us.
Paul Krafel
I'm looking forward to this. Thank you for inviting me.
Lucas Tauil
Such a treat to have you here. Paul, if you had to choose one image that best expresses your vision of a common sculpture, what would it be?
Paul Krafel (03:09.6)
It would be the moment that raindrops touch the ground. There's two paths open to that raindrop. One is to soak into the soil, later be pulled up through the roots and contribute to photosynthesis that would create more leaf surface area to absorb more of the sun's energy. And also some of that water would be transpired back into the sky.
fall again as rain or settle each night as dew, increasing the amount of water that's available for life. And when the plant eventually dies, it rots into the soil and enriches the soil and makes up a soil that can absorb more rain in the future. That's one path. And the other path is to let the water run off. And as it runs off, it converges with other rain drops and it gradually
assumes more erosive power to wash away soil and the opposite happens as the soil gets washed away it can absorb even less water and it just spirals down. Those two routes are open. One creates what I call an upward spiral, the other one creates what I call a downward spiral and
My hobby is to go out and try to shift downward spirals to upward spirals, get started with rain walks, going out and playing with the water. And it's generalized in attitude toward life, trying to see wherever I can, just making little nudges to help things accumulate possibilities.
Paul, I read your recent essay towards the commons culture and loved it. What drove you to write it?
Paul Krafel (05:00.778)
A couple of years ago, I was starting to feel a certain dread about where we were heading. And normally I'm very optimistic. And so this was definitely a change in direction that I was not quite sure what to do with because the things that filled me with dread were external to me and that I didn't have much control over. And then at a certain point, I remembered one of the lessons I learned from all my rain walks, which was
offer a new path to the water before trying to oppose the way it's currently flowing. And so I started thinking about that in terms of my culture. And I go, okay, and just changing, not knowing exactly what that meant, but just changing my thinking from opposing the current one to offer a new path. After a month or so, I realized my thoughts were changing.
and my spirit was recovering as I was contemplating that question about what is the new path that I would offer that led me to write the essay.
Lucas Tauil
I'm experiencing something very similar since I first read your essay a couple of weeks back. It's been extremely inspiring. Like, it touched me very deeply and I'm very grateful for it. Hey! Paul, you described your rainwalks. Could you go deeper into them? How did they come up? What is the game, the play in them?
Paul Krafel
Well, let me just start off with my first strain walk. I used to work for the National Park Service and at one time I was stationed in this eroding sandstone Canyon in the Southwest. And I just loved that Canyon. It was so such a beautiful Canyon, except for a Arroyo that was gashed through that the bottom soil of it. It was a site of a cliff dwelling and geologically
Paul Krafel (07:06.766)
And archeologically, there was evidence that at a certain time, the canyon had no arroyo and was full of aspen trees. And then the people came in, built the cliff dwelling, and about 15 years later, an arroyo had cut down and they had to leave. And after they left, the arroyo filled in again. And then the 1930s, Navajo brought in sheep and the arroyo's back.
It gave me this image that the canyon can fill in with sand and create an area that can hold all the rain that pours into the canyon or it can erode away. And so it was just this model of a place that can rise into a very beautiful setting or just diminish down to this slow flow of water oozing out of the life system. And so I wanted to somehow see if I could change that.
And I tried a lot of things that I'd read about, like check dams and all like that, and none of them worked. And I built a couple of real tiny check dams, just with two by fours, and a little tiny gully coming in through the side. And a rainstorm came and it washed all the check dams away, but for once. And one was just situated on a place where
the water got split and flowed around the check dam in two directions. And at that split, the energy of the water just changed dramatically. Sand was just dropping out like crazy. And in fact, I had to keep shoveling the sand out, otherwise it'd plug up again. And it showed me, whoa, if I split the water, let's try that. So I started.
As the water that was going off to either side, I would use a little mattock to make a V in the ground and split the water and it would slow down more. And I ended up just making these little V's all the way across the terrace there. And I was able to do it. I was able to hold the water on and it was just so much fun. And then there was a series of three or four massive storms. Most of them, I got
Paul Krafel (09:32.492)
I got a lot of experience there in a few days. It was life changing. It definitely recharged my batteries. just being out of this canyon with lightning all around and big waterfalls pouring off the canyon walls and I'm out there with my little mattock. It was fun. was deeper than fun. mean, it was intense. And that got me hooked. And I've been doing rain walks ever since I go out.
And all my life since then, I've always had a place nearby where I can go out into a sort of public land or absentee landlord land and play with the rain. And that's nourished lots and lots of things.
Lucas Tauil
So, do I understand correctly that what you're doing is going upstream in diverting water there so that it can soak in, right?
Paul Krafel
Right, that they use the old permaculture mantra, spread it out, slow it down, soak it in. And I found that the key first step is spreading it out, not trying to slow it down, but spread it out. And spreading it out just naturally slows it down, and then that gives more time and more surface area for it to soak in.
Lucas Tauil
So what I'm hearing in your story is that across the years, your rain walks gradually enlightened you into different aspects of life. Could you expand on that?
Paul Krafel (11:06.21)
Yeah, it's been 40 years of Rainwalks. It led, for example, my wife, Alicia, and I, wanted to start a charter school and we ran into so much opposition. After two years, we're just kind of going, is this worth trying to keep working on? And one of the lessons from Rainwalks is don't underestimate your power because the work grows on itself. All these little splits you make in the water.
You come back a couple of weeks later and it's put water into a whole new area where you can do even more work. And so you never underestimate what is possible and start where you are and don't block your efforts with your current understanding. So we go, we're not going to let them stop us. We'll just start the school. starting the school meant Alicia teaching six kids around the dining room table for free, but
Gradually she picked up some more kids, had 11 kids, got TV coverage, and the school district could see the possibility and chartered chrysalis. So that's one example, but the more important example is just going back to what I said earlier, just looking for all these opportunities where you can help possibilities soak into the soil instead of running off. And part of that is
being open to accepting the power that comes to us to let it soak in and not let it run off in assumptions of what I can't do or what I need, what I'm supposed to do and all like that and just find one's own path.
I've been a water guy since I was four or five. when I thought about what I'm just going to do with my life, I never would have thought of water. But when I watch what I'm doing, it's water. So that's part of my manifest destiny, I guess.
Lucas Tauil (13:15.362)
Yeah, I love how your life is about the encounter of water with soil. My life is water in the ocean. I'm a long distance sailor in a surfer. And it is dynamic, just nourishes me on a way that is impossible to explain. I feel so nourished by your experience with water. It's just like, my God, this is like such a blessing.
Paul Krafel
And one of the implications of that is I cannot go to everybody and say, hey, go out and split water. That's not the path for everybody. It's in the end part of, know, when we start talking about, how do we save the world? A big part of that's going to be empowering each person, helping each person find their own path. And then what grows from each person enriching their own power will seep through the whole system and fills around.
I spend a lot of time at Chrysalis just nourishing the kids' energy.
Lucas Tauil
It's so lovely to hear you sharing this. It reminds me of one of my mentors, body worker called Monica Caspari. She taught me to savor the word rather than trying to save it. And it was in that cherishment that I could do the work. And I feel that your essay gives me a framing for this when the play is not an obligation. It's just...
what I do to be in my full space of joy.
Paul Krafel (14:54.136)
Yeah, sometimes on my rain walks, feel like I'm the shoemaker in the L's. These guys just come along at nighttime and when nobody's around in the pounding rain, I make my little shoes. I make my little plays and people later might come along and go, there's a lot of flowers growing here where there used to not be flowers, but that's just my little gift, my hobby, my fun, my sabre.
Lucas Tauil
Yeah, this space where the work is our nature, it's an amazing insight to me.
Paul, in your observation of natural patterns, the second law of thermodynamics takes central stage. Could you remind us of what the second law of thermodynamics says?
Paul Krafel
Let me start with a simpler example. A lot of times, if the energy of a classroom is getting off a little, what I like to do is I break in some building blocks, like five or six of them, and I ask for a volunteer to build a tower with the blocks. And we time it, and it takes them about a minute to build the tower. Then I ask for another volunteer and ask them to knock it down. It takes about a half a second.
And I tell the kids, it's easier to destroy than it is to build up. It's a fundamental pattern of the universe and that it's not impossible to build up, but it takes longer and it takes work. And if we just kind of live our life mindlessly, kind of just whatever, you're going to kind of knock things down. But if we all as a group,
Paul Krafel (16:42.702)
work at trying to build up, we can build something really beautiful. so that's sort of a metaphor for the second law. That energy tends to flow in such a direction that the amount of usable energy within it diminishes. doesn't, energy doesn't get destroyed, but it just gets less usable.
Lucas Tauil
Paul, how does the second law of thermodynamics relate to the seeding of a commons culture?
For me, it is the direction by which you navigate your life. I've come to call it the fifth dimension when I'm out on my rain walks. think of, is the area spiraling up or spiraling down? That's a measure of the second law. Is it increasing possibilities? Is the energy of the sun able to come into this area and help lift it up? Or is it eroding away? That's the focus of everything.
It's, you know, in teaching, I watch the kids' eyes. Do the kids understand? there the mission of Chrysalis is encouraging the light within each student to shine brighter? And I really love that mission statement. It arose spontaneously 90 years after we started the school. just go, this is what we're navigating by. We're navigating, are the kids' light eyes shining?
and that is a better way to navigate them by test scores.
Lucas Tauil (18:14.766)
Paul, would you share your definition of the commons?
Yeah, for me the commons is anything that did not exist before life appeared that has now an existence partly through the efforts of life and that helped make more possibilities for life. A classic example is atmospheric oxygen. There is a time atmospheric oxygen
was not there and it started off with algae in the ocean gradually producing this oxygen that was able to decrease the amount of radiation hitting the earth. And as the earth changed from an anaerobic place to an aerobic place, oxygen is so reactive, it is such a high energy fuel that it just made possible all sorts of things that were never possible when oxygen did not exist as a free
molecule in the atmosphere. And now it's 21 % oxygen, it's created and maintained by photosynthesis of all the plants around.
Lucas Tauil
Paul, the fundamental pattern in the commons, as you point out, is of solar energy energizing dancing flows, energizing life to evolve ways to uplift the atoms into more complex forms that create new potentials. Bacteria help bring us into existence. What possibilities will we bring into existence?
Paul Krafel (19:50.264)
isn't that a juicy question? That is, I would imagine that question would be central in a commons culture. And there's two levels to it. There's a level of playing with the molecules, gardening, trying to increase the nutrition within the soil and keep going for biodiversity. That's sort of the physical work of it, but also creating a song that makes you're
the heart sing or something like that, or just doing a dance that uplifts. That is also part of the comments. It wasn't possible before life. It helps create more possibilities. mean, a lot of times I've been moved by a song or a performance that just makes me more hopeful and more determined to be more aware of what a tremendous miracle we live within.
and grateful for wanting to be a better part of it.
That's all to come.
Lucas Tauil
Paul, feedback loops are central to the path towards a commons culture. I notice you keep calling feedback loops as feedback spirals. Why is that?
Paul Krafel (21:10.654)
That's thanks to my eighth graders. I was trying to teach systems thinking to my eighth grade kids and I was trying to explain feedback loops to them because it's such an important part of any system and they couldn't get it and I Explained it two or three times until I finally had enough realization to go Okay, what is it? They're not understanding rather than be just trying to tell them
And so I was asking, what's... And they were saying, it's not a loop, it doesn't come back to the same place it started at. If you think of feedback as a succession of cause and effect that loops back on itself so that the cause creates effects that eventually become the cause that has the effect of changing the initial cause, that by the time that cause and effect sequence loops back,
you're in a different place. It's not a loop. And that's what was holding them up. And I go, you're right. It's a spiral. It's something that changes through time. It progresses. And so they taught me that it's feedback spirals. And I like it a lot better.
I agree. It makes more sense and it's more tangible, isn't it?
And then when you tie that in with what I was calling the fifth dimension of thermodynamics, there's feedback spirals that can spiral upwards. And that's the example I was talking about with the rain soaking in. It can go up or there's the other path where it spirals down. And so I have upward spirals and downward spirals.
Lucas Tauil (23:06.36)
So what you call the fifth dimension is this space populated by spirals, right? That can be either going up or going down. And there's an invitation there for us to navigate choosing generative spirals. How do we shift a downward spiral into an upward spiral?
Paul Krafel
Good question. One of the lessons I've learned from Rainwalks is to move away from the question of how do I shift it from a downward to an upward as
all the spirals I see as rates of flow. And if I can change the flow rates so that the balance between what's going down and what's going up changes, that's the level to look at. It's not the level of does it go up or down, but is it going down slower? Going down slower is.
positive change. It doesn't show positive in the way they think is an up or down, it's still down, but it's less down. And then when you get into the fact that these spirals are all interacting with one another, if you can create a change here, it starts to propagate out.
Lucas Tauil
So it's not about blocking this or that pattern, but creating experiments upstream to be observed.
Paul Krafel (24:37.282)
Yep. And then getting back to that whole idea of offer a new path before opposing the old, that the opposing the old is definitely a, I'm going to have to, whereas offering a new path, there's this tremendous possibilities all around us. And some of them, all they do is nourish your own spirit, but that's important for the work that's going to change the world. need this.
be able to see the opportunity within all the flows and to see that we can dance with it and we can help it change.
The flow in our spirit is fundamental, The difference in efficiency and creativity I have when I feel in flow, it's just, there's no reason to work out the flow. It's like, how do we maximize for flow, right?
Mm-hmm. And that's why I was saying that navigating our school by encouraging the eyes to shine on our students is more powerful than focusing on test scores. Because just more learning is happening. It's happening at a deeper level. And it might not translate into a test score right away, but eventually they're going to come to expect things to.
to make sense and to be able to understand them. If they don't understand them, they're gonna be pushing for, okay, where is the sense in this? And exploring the edge and tying things together. just, it leads to a much more living knowledge. One that you can navigate a life by rather than just having this thing filed away and needs to be known for a test.
Lucas Tauil (26:29.966)
Education is one of my passions as well. My wife and I were part of a small group that created a community school in Brazil 18 years ago. And the school today has 150 students and it's something that the community took on and is living and thriving with us being on the other side of the world. And it's like one of the most important things I did in my life. And it took..four years, it's not something huge, right? And if I compare my experience as a journalist, I've been a journalist for 30 years and I haven't written anything as meaningful as doing that school for those four years. So, yeah.
Paul Krafel
Part of it too is you don't know how far that effect's gonna go, you know? Those kids will probably raise their kids differently because of what you did. And they will all go out into the world and touch it in different ways.
Lucas Taul
So in your essay, you point to four strategies nature and life use to increase possibilities within the constraints of the second law. Shall we explore them? So why don't we start with the one we already spoke of, slowing down and backing up?
Okay.
Paul Krafel (27:56.802)
With the second law, it's impossible for things to flow up unless there's another source of energy. But backing up is allowed. I play with that a lot on the rain walks. Backing up moves the water higher without any violation of the second law, because it's just flowing down. It hits a place where it stops the stores to accumulate, and it has to back up. And it can back up into a place that it could normally not reach if I
move a few rocks around. So backing up is a really honorable strategy, central to a whole lot of feedback spirals.
Lucas Tauil
Paul, in the case of beaver, as it creates the little dams on streams, it increases the perimeter of the little ponds they create, right? So this increases the number of plants they like growing up, and it creates space for insects and amphibians, and this brings in predators, so the whole ecosystem grows around this.
but it also makes life more palatable for beavers. So, more beavers in this upward spiral. Is this an appropriate description of the slowing down and backing up strategy that beavers are doing?
Paul Krafel
Yes. And the fact that the slowing down and backing up feeds into something that's different, but there's all the sunlight coming in, then can do things that it couldn't have done otherwise. So it sets the stage, the backing up sets the stage for that. And another related example is just soil. Soil is part of the commons because it did not exist before life came along. There was broken rocks slowly creeping down slope.
Paul Krafel (29:47.698)
Soil as to get bacteria and algae starting to create surface films on the particles that join it together into a more cohesive mass that does not move as quickly, does not dry out as fast and other life can start colonizing that. The roots help hold everything together, binding it in, attracting insects and birds to it, know, get droppings and dead bodies all mixing in and this is backing up but then attracting more to it.
The commons is all around us, all around us.
Lucas Tauil (30:24.878)
Paul, as you were describing soil, it made me think of the second strategy that is increasing surface area. So the strategies usually aren't siloed, right? They are intermingled, they happen together. Could we go into the increase of surface area as a strategy to increase the possibilities for life?
Paul Krafel
That sort of comes from two places. One is a whole lot of processes in physics are proportional to surface area. And so when you change the amount of surface area that's there, flow rates and all can change. Like for example, just the flow of heat from a warm body, the more surface area you have, the cooler you're going to be. So that's where we put on jackets and insulation to prevent that. Like leaf surface area, the more leaves you have, the more sunlight can be absorbed. Like our teeth, the whole job of teeth is to increase the surface area of the food we stick in our mouth, chew it up. And so there's a huge surface area for all the enzymes to start working on that food. The whole idea of succession, you you have like after a glacier comes out, you start with lichen and gradually you get a, you get forests there. That's a creation of surfaces that then allow urges to find nesting places and insects to get behind bark and a whole duff layer that you can have all these decomposing invertebrates down and working on the surface areas, almost like a way of measuring how much life you've got. But then you come along and you pave it over for a parking lot. That's a fundamental change to that place.
Lucas Tauil
I remember reading your description that surface area transcends competition, because if we have only one surface, that's all there is. So all life there is competing for the resources. But the moment you start increasing surface, there's potential for diversity, for specialization, for doing things differently and not having to compete for that same surface, for that same availability of resources. And I find it inspiring.
Paul Krafel (32:37.48)
when that hit me I was going, whoa, I never thought about that because when I was learning about plant succession it was presented as competition for sunlight. You have the low plants and then taller plants come and shade them out and gradually you get a forest. But at a certain point I go, no, it's not so much a competition for sunlight as a cooperative creation of surface area because surface area baffles the wind.
It's one these abstract concepts that when you change it into the reality around one, one starts understanding how profound the commons has changed the world we live within and how indebted we are to all the lives that have preceded us.
Lucas Tauil (33:24.942)
So on on the strategies shall we move into caring and pushing up?
Paul Krafel
That has to be salmon. mean, salmon are such a perfect example of... The second law would say that nutrients cannot flow from the ocean up into the headwaters, the energy of the sun and the... have been fed upon all the smaller fish in the ocean, these big 30, 40 pound salmon, use their energy to swim upstream, bringing...that 30 or 40 pound body full of nitrogen and fertility from the sea spawning and then they die and they start floating downstream and everybody's feeding on them, ravens and seagulls and bears. It's all being defecated out in the woodlands and it's just this massive annual flow of fertilizer into the headwaters.
And then you get into these feedback spirals where that fertilizer helps the plants grow taller, creating more shade over the stream, which helps more surface area over the stream, which cools the stream, which allows more oxygen to dissolve into water because colder water can hold more dissolved oxygen. And so that when the salmon eggs hatch, they're hatching into a well oxygenated environment for them to
be able to grow well and then use the current to ride back to the sea. And earthworms are doing the same thing after they're burrowing through, wedging the soil upward, just kind of keeping it aerated. We had an atmospheric river come upon us. had seven inches of rain in about three days. And that rain just kind of pushes all the autumnal fallen leaves down.
Paul Krafel (35:25.286)
And then the next first day of good weather, I go out and there's all these birds out there just scratching in the leaves and just kind of fluffing it back up again. They're looking for little critters to eat, but they're doing the work of, well, for food type attitude. just out there just scratching away, fluffing it all back up again. it's such a marvel.
Such a delight.
Lucas Tauil
Yeah. And the last strategy is recycling, right? What would you like to use as an example?
Paul Krafel
Rain, the water cycle. That was another profound moment for me when I was back in the canyons trying to figure out what to do. Somehow I went into the books and I found that on average 11 inches of rain comes from the ocean. On average 27 inches of rain falls on the land.
At other 16 inches is the water from the ocean being recycled over and over again. That rain that soaks into the ground, it gets pulled up by the plants and somehow it gets transpired back into the air. And that moisture is going to fall again and again, settles as dew, falls as snow. And so a world that gets enough water from the ocean to barely grow desert grasslands.
Paul Krafel (36:58.52)
thanks to this spiral with life can sustain for us now. And again, it's seeing the world in terms of flow, seeing these molecules streaming and just playing with the swirling dance.
Lucas Tauil (37:16.504)
Well, the creation of the commons requires work, as you're saying. This is a fundamental implication of the second law, as it limits the direction in which things can flow spontaneously. But it does not require that absolutely everything is always moving down. Things can move up if energy from elsewhere can be used to do the work of lifting it. Work is the key thing, right? Salmon, do it, beavers do it, even plants do it. Let's do it!
Seriously, how can we do it faster than the erosion of the commons we witness?
Paul Krafel
Well, one way is to reduce the erosion so you don't have to work as fast.
Lucas Tauil
So playing with the rates.
Paul Krafel
Playing with rates, shifting rates, just being aware of, okay, is this rate something that's building up? Let's increase it. Is this something that's going down? Let's see if we can give it a new path that offers more possibilities. And the work, in terms of like a commons culture, we tend to have this image of work as a job or an eight to five, but.
Paul Krafel (38:33.73)
What we're talking about work is like plants and all. It's a 24-7 thing that's always there, always available. so expanding our sense of work to the act of being alive, I think, is an important part of the answer to your question.
And I imagine that a lifestyle or an awareness where being alive is slowing down rates of erosion in backing up or increasing surface area or recycling, like water coming to the headwaters or someone bringing its gift of life into the top of the hills. How do we break free of the concept of work as dreadful? As something you do to earn a living and remove duty and bring play back into the fold?
Paul Krafel (39:40.244)
I don't know if I have an answer to that, but it's definitely an important step in moving toward a more common culture. My wife who's a teacher says the most important work that kids do is play. When we take kids out on a camping trip and they're free to be in the forest, they start building stuff. It's just part of being alive. And the thing to do is to nourish the sense of direction.
so that that is part of your framework for choosing how you're going to spend your energy.
Lucas Tauil
Paul, your essay points out that many of the seemingly intractable problems we face are due to system patterns that generate consequences in roundabout feedback ways that we don't recognize or understand. What behaviors are holding us on this path?
Paul Krafel
One of the biggest patterns that are holding us on this path is that in the last several thousand years, there's a human created direction by which we often navigate our lives, which is, to put it simplistically, the direction is to have more wealth than others, that you're trying to accumulate more possibilities than those around you.
as opposed to as a group trying to create more possibilities within this entire system. And that focus on the self in comparison to others, I think, is a big impediment. historically, we're full of examples of people plundering the commons in order to get more wealth for themselves and to be able to
Paul Krafel (41:37.888)
change that orientation to realizing that if one works to nourish the entire commons, there'd be more possibilities for all of us. Part of that gets back to the dread I was feeling. A lot of people have reported feeling dread and how much better life would be if you felt hope. And the fact that a sense of dread was growing is feedback.
for what the long-term consequences of our current path is. And so in terms of offering a new path, hope, where does hope come from? And hope comes from living within a world where more is becoming possible. So the implication of that I realize is that the dread comes from feeling like you're living in a world where less is becoming possible. That the life of your kids will have as many possibilities as your life and that
It's a glum road up ahead. And to be able to see it as hope, if we can navigate that road, I mean, you just imagine, wow, if we're around for 100,000 years, then we get our act together. It's really a neat experience. so, anyway.
Lucas Tauil
Yeah, I love how you picture it in an upward spiral. What I notice is that the dread can easily catch you in a downward spiral where you don't feel you're building “Ours”, that you're focused on getting mine, you know, on concentrating. And then you don't feel belonging, you're lonely, the dread increases. It's like...
the runoff cutting through the gully and cutting through the very water reservoir, right? It can really kill hope. And this shifting to when you're growing “Ours”, when you're building the commons, there's a sense of belonging, of being part of something bigger than you and bigger than our species. It's not just us, it's this whole commons, this whole wonderful planet.
Paul Krafel (43:49.614)
There's a feeling of enoughness, that life needs efficient. And that's the scary thing about the other path is that if things start running down around you, the solution that seems to be the obvious one is I need to get more stuff for me. I need to save myself. And so I will take wherever I can find the opportunity to be a survivor. I'll stop there.
that where does money originate from? What does it become? Where is it going to? And I turn back to that whole idea of the water cycles, rain being recycled and expanding the amount of rain on the earth from 11 inches on average to 27 inches on average. That wisdom is to recycle the money as it flows. It's not
robbing Peter to pay Paul. It's taking money, spreading it. That the convergence is the problem. When you get money too concentrated, you lose touch with what the dollar can actually create.
I was reading an op-ed by Nicholas Christoph in the Times about these nonprofits and the third world transforming people's lives with operations that cost a couple hundred dollars. Then you look at the Met Gala Ball with vessels that are tens of thousands of dollars and it's just best if they figure out a way to recycle back up to the headwater that still flows down, but there will still be wealthy people.
They will be living in a world that has more wealth within it all around, more hope all around.
Lucas Tauil (45:36.494)
Paul, you've dedicated your life to education. Can we tip the scales, preparing the next generation with enhanced awareness?
Paul Krafel
Well, I think tip the scales is the wrong image because it implies that either or, you tipped it or you didn't tip it. And when you're concentrating on flows, it's a gradient. It's that decreasing the rate of decrease is just as valuable as changing something from down to up. It all is moving in this direction upward. And so tipping the scales
I don't want to use that idea, but the very concept of education is definitely part of the commons. Life creates opportunities to help the next generation learn how to live better. The earthworms churning up the soil is helping their kids live a better life. So education's all around us. I'll keep doing the work and it's my working assumption, but it's the...
To give you specifics on how we're going to do that, I'm a little more humble.
Lucas Tauil
Paul, what role does decentralization play in shifting down spirals into upward spirals?
Paul Krafel (47:02.538)
And again, I come back to the water cycle. Founts come over the land and the water starts to converge into raindrops and then into little trickles and into creeks and into rivers. Life has learned to recycle it and to take it back up. And it's, I love the image of water being absorbed and turned into molecules of water vapor again. But it's the rate at how much of the water that's converging gets recycled back to fall again. That's what you want to increase. And that idea of decentralization, you sent me an article that led me to a political scientist named Ostrom. And he was studying small police departments. And she found that the smaller police departments, had less budget, they had less staff. But in terms of their effectiveness, they were rated much higher by the people in the community, despite the less money. And she was associating that with the fact that the police and the people are co-creating a resource that the people feel more a part of that police department, more likely to call them if in need. Buying of the smaller community allows the police to be much more effective. That's an example of decentralization.
Instead of trying to centralize it all into one entity, you wanted to fuse it. And creating Chrysalis, we wanted to have a school where the teachers felt that they had the freedom and the power to respond to whatever's happening in that classroom. That second with those particular kids and not having to be constrained by some legislator who has some idea that 30 minutes a day, you're going to need to do this, that, that.
At Chrysalis one time, migration of hundreds of sand-tailed cranes came flying over this school, which is, sand-tailed cranes are like the most wild primal call in the world. We all ran out and listened to the sand-tailed cranes flying overhead. That is decentralization.
Lucas Tauil (49:19.118)
There's no lesson that can give you that experience, right? Like nothing is that special.
Paul Krafel
And it's also a question of what's in a lesson? It's not social studies, it's not English, it's not math, it's not science. What it is is a taste of what life is really like here. There are birds that fly overhead that you never knew about. They're making this raucous primal call and then if you learn about them they fly way up into the Arctic and nest out there. Sand dune cranes are fantastic.
Lucas Tauil
I had an experience similar to that with my children in the Galapagos Islands. There was this huge bunch of blue-footed boobies attacking a school of fish and it looked like a war scene, you know? But the most inspiring thing, like they jumping into the water and fish jumping everywhere.
and around the school of fish there were dolphins and sea wolves. It was like that encounter with aliveness that it's so rare our urban experiences, right? It was like, gosh, I'll never forget that scene.
Paul Krafel
This is at the heart of the mechanism of what I consider a downward spiral in our culture is all that has receded so far away that most people are not aware of that vitality that is within the commons. it becomes that our life becomes more and more dominated by the things of our own culture. So we lose this sense that the world can provide direction and learning and inspiration.
Lucas Tauil (51:09.998)
Paul, taking a tack here, in your essay you argue that long time lags and slow oscillating feedback spirals create one of the greatest challenges our evolved intelligence faces. What are time lags?
Paul Krafel
Timelags are when you get into feedback spirals, they're this succession of cause and effect, going around, spiraling around, and that a lot of times, certain actions create a short-term reward, which can lead you to seek that more and more. The bad stuff doesn't happen for 20 or 30 years.
And that gap between your immediate sensation and the eventual results are very hard to navigate. All you're feeling is the good stuff. And an example is the building up of military empires that you start off and you go, this is great. We just loot the place, we just conquered and we take all the people and make them slaves, so that we don't have to work anymore. This is a fantastic win. You can use the bringing up of labor since you got all the slaves to do it. You can produce more food and you can produce a bigger population so you have more soldiers and you can go out and conquer the next place. And wow, another bonus comes in. And history is full of these empires that for a hundred years expand, but then they overextend and they've gotten everybody around them kind of.
These guys are dangerous. Your enemies start making alliances. Plus a lot of the ruling classes turn decadent and corrupt from all the wealth that's flowing to them. And eventually the thing falls apart. An example I like to think about sometimes. 1941 must have been a great year to be a Nazi in Germany. Because man, see, we really are the master race.
Paul Krafel (53:26.158)
in France in a few weeks. We are the master race, living around the world's ours. This is just fantastic. Compare that with what happened three years later. And it's just, that's a very short time lag, but most of the really hard time lags are the ones that are happened over hundreds of years.
One of the main time lags is soil erosion. Agriculture strips the forest and if you don't tend the soil, the soil gradually diminishes and the place that was once a land of milk and honey becomes a land of thorns. An example right around me here is groundwater. You pump the water out of the aquifers and you can irrigate the trees. It's a great cash crop and the area is economically prosperous thanks to that.
But you keep, so you use some of the profits to drill more wells and get more water to plant more nut trees. But there comes a time when the aquifer starts to diminish, groundwater starts dropping. The first people to suffer from that are all the households that have shallow wells and don't have the money to dig deep wells. And the orchardists, they have the profit from the nut trees so they can keep digging wells, but the keeps dropping and gradually the area is going to go bust.
or learn how to manage it. But again, that's a question of, you put your own benefit above the benefit to the greater whole or not? That's a great riddle there.
Lucas Tauil
Yeah, you mentioned the tragedy of the commons. I'm a big fan of Eleanor Ostrom that you just mentioned. And she was engrossed by Harding's reading of the tragedy of the commons because it wasn't based in any observation or data. It was just an opinion that this is how it happens. So she dedicated all of her life to studying the management of the commons in
Lucas Tauil (55:28.588)
And at first there was no visible pattern. And it was when she retreated into silence that she realized the design patterns that work. Eight simple design patterns that she goes like, this is how the commons are properly managed and how this becomes viable. And Eleanor was granted the Nobel of economics, not being an economist.
She was actually the only female to ever be granted the Nobel of Economics.
Paul Krafel
Well, you just introduced her to me, so I'm just starting to learn about her. I mean, there are tragedies of the commons, like passenger pigeons and fisheries that have been overfished, but like you say, she was studying systems where somehow the people involved were able to come up, negotiate, strategize, and come up with a way to manage the commons.
Which reminds me of one little story that's kind of an aside, but I remember reading about some kid who grew up in the rice terraces areas of the world, where you have your terraces up on the hillsides growing rice, and he and his little friend, they discovered that if you dig a little trench in the wall between one terrace and the next, would flow out and you could play in the water and all like that. And they're doing that.
And this man comes running out. He says, no, you don't do that. These walls have been developed over hundreds of years, and they're just the right height. And if you dig that down, you're going to lower the water level in that patty, and that patty will produce less rice. And somebody in the village might die this winter because of that. You do not touch these walls.
Lucas Tauil (57:28.056)
an impressive awareness of consequences, right?
Paul Krafel
and an impressive awareness of regulating the commons to educating, tipping the balance for educating kids. Even if you got that lesson, somebody might die, be your grandmother because you just, whoa, just, let's get serious here.
Lucas Tauil
Paul, the money game focuses on convergence rather than slowing down and soaking in. It creates a direction by which most of us guide our life's work towards obtaining more wealth than others. Most of the official power within our culture is given to those who earn more. This makes it important to signal your position on this gradient of wealth.
the clothes you wear, the car you drive, and where you live. It looks like a long time lag trap, doesn't it? Could you share how observing the Staten Island ferry docking gave you insight into time lags, like this one?
Paul Krafel
Yeah, so I was in college, I went to New York City and I fell in love with the Staten Island ferry. It was almost a free ride back and forth, past the Statue of Liberty and out onto the water. And one of the things I loved every time is when we came in to dock at the terminal, the engines turn off and you're coasting, then at a certain point they turn the other engines in the other direction on and there's just this big surge of water from the
Paul Krafel (59:05.634)
propellers for the terminal dock and they had it down so well. I the boat slows down in order to get to the dock. You can't stop, you can't go in reverse, but if you can slow down the forward momentum so it stops, just barely hit the dock. It's just masterful and I just loved watching that over and over again how perfectly they timed.
The lesson I got from that is in order to reach your goal, you have to turn away from your goal at a certain point. of the troubles with wanting more wealth than others is it's not a goal, it's just a direction. And so there's no practice in turning away from that goal. I read about a survey where they were surveying wealthy people and asking how much money do you need? And about everybody they talked to said about
twice as much as I have now. So if you're a millionaire, you needed two million, and if you were a hundred millionaire, you needed 200 million. So I mean, there's no end. just, somehow, if I had twice as much money as I had now, it'd be enough. That's I get there and then need it again. So that idea of what's enough, and we were talking about the sufficiency, the enoughness of the work of.
nourishing the commons and being alive on this planet. Did I answer the question?
It might be better to stop today and continue this because the forces are conspiring against me.
Lucas Tauil
You did.
Lucas Tauil (01:00:51.182)
It's totally fine, Paul. Thank you very much. It was really, really nice to get this started. I'm looking forward to the second one. Have a good night. Thank you so much.
Paul Krafel
Thank you. This has been wonderful. I appreciate it. All right, both. You're welcome. Cheers. Bye bye.
Narrator - Clara Chemin (01:01:16.942)
Thanks for joining us at Entangled Futures. Subscribe to our channel for more conversations on mutuality. Towards a world that works for all.
