Dangerous Wisdom nikos patedakis

Our best science and philosophy suggest very clearly that we don't know what thinking IS. If large ecologies are mind, what is thinking? If mountains think better than most human beings, how can we learn to think like a mountain?

One of Sophia's owls of wisdom made friends with a delightful and insightful human, the author and ecologist Carl Safina. If you enjoyed My Octopus Teacher, you will love hearing about Carl Safina's fabulous feathered friend, Alfie. Carl's book, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe, is a wonderful work of philosophy and ecology, and I think you'll enjoy this dialogue as much as I did. It was a great pleasure to speak with him.
Carl Safina’s lyrical non-fiction writing explores how humans are changing the living world, and what the changes mean for non-human beings and for us all. His work fuses scientific understanding, emotional connection, and a moral call to action. His writing has won a MacArthur “genius” prize; Pew, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundation Fellowships; book awards from Lannan, Orion, and the National Academies; and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. He grew up raising pigeons, training hawks and owls, and spending as many days and nights in the woods and on the water as he could. Safina is now the first Endowed Professor for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University and is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the PBS series Saving the Ocean, which can be viewed free at PBS.org. His writing appears in The New York Times, TIME, The Guardian, Audubon, Yale e360, and National Geographic, and on the Web at Huffington Post, CNN.com, Medium, and elsewhere. Safina is the author of ten books including the classic Song for the Blue Ocean, as well as New York Times Bestseller, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. His most recent books are, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace, and Alfie & Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe. He lives on Long Island, New York, with his wife Patricia and their dogs and feathered friends.
Find out more at https://www.carlsafina.org/
For photos of Alfie:
https://www.instagram.com/meetalfietheowl/
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61551548969047

Dr. Tawni Tidwell is an exceptional—and exceptionally interesting—person. She is the first person from the dominant culture to go through the whole Tibetan medical curriculum and earn a Tibetan medical degree. She also has a Ph.D. in bio-cultural anthropology. And her impressive experience and insight go beyond even this already remarkable education. We discuss her education and some aspects of Tibetan medicine. This is one of my favorite dialogues with one of my most favorite guests, and I look forward to having Tawni-la back to inquire further into the nature of health, healing, and liberation.

What is it to think like a mountain? How is it that many of our decisions go wrong, sometimes producing negative side-effects?
You might remember hearing about a hole in the ozone layer that appeared last century. No one intended to create that hole. But we did it.
We didn’t intend to put mercury in our brains and lead in our bones. A recent study tested 62 samples of human placenta and found microplastics in every single one of them.
How do things go wrong on personal and planetary scales? And how can we do better?

Lars Chittka is the author of the book The Mind of a Bee and Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary College of the University of London. He is also the founder of the Research Centre for Psychology at Queen Mary. He is known for his work on the evolution of sensory systems and cognition using insect-flower interactions as a model system. Chittka has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of animal cognition and its impact on evolutionary fitness studying bumblebees and honeybees.
I often say that human beings have lost the sense of the mindedness all around us—that we exist fully embedded in mind. In this episode we cultivate an appreciation of the remarkable mind of a bee.

The Mind of Nature and the Nature of Mind
Part 2 in an Introduction to Ecological Thinking—A Wisdom-Based Approach
What is the nature of mind? What is the mind of Nature? We inquire into some radical and revolutionary aspects of mind and ecological thinking.