We aren't free, but we do have freedom of movement. What it means to live in our world.

In 1949, the American ecologist Aldo Leopold wrote an essay with the thought-provoking title Thinking Like a Mountain. As a nature manager he worked in various national parks in the country. One of his tasks was to keep the wolf population small, which in fact meant that he hunted wolves. In that time, that was the prevailing thought: the fewer wolves, the more deer to hunt.

Leopold soon realized that this led to all sorts of unforeseen problems. The strong decline of wolves in one of the areas where he did his work allowed the deer to multiply rapidly and eat the vegetation that grew on the side of the mountain. When that vegetation largely was gone, other plants and animals also quickly disappeared from the area. The disappearance of vegetation on the slopes of the mountain also increased the danger of destructive landslides. In short: the entire ecosystem of the mountain changed when the wolves were no longer or inadequately present.

Moral of the story: if you do not learn to 'think like a mountain' and thus have complete knowledge and appreciation for the deep interconnectedness of the elements in the ecosystem, you ultimately destroy the environment that you yourself depend on. Instead of thinking like an isolated individual, this 'thinking like a mountain' is an exercise in (re) positioning yourself in an entire ecosystem, in a complex web of interdependencies. Then replace mountain for planet and you are in the 21st century.

Think like a planet. Wouldn't that be a nice metaphor for the education of the future? Don't we need a more holistic view on where one stands in the entire ecosystem? Not in the esoteric sense of 'everything is in harmony', but rather along the lines of 'everything interacts with each other and it can get pretty rough out there'.

Ecology in that case therefore means more than just natural processes, but must then be seen as the interaction between the organic (people, animals, plants, climate etc.) and the non-organic (artificial intelligence, plastic etc.) and everything in between. This may sound a bit abstract and that's what it is. But you have to start somewhere.

Imagine the following:

You are stuck with your whole body at a colossal network of elastic. Some strings are thick, others are thin. As soon as you try to move, the elastics on the side you are walking from are stretching, while on the other side they start to hang loose. You cannot get out of the network, the only thing you can do is try to ooze along in the right directions. Therefore, you have to understand the dynamics of the elastics.

This is, if you ask me, what it means to be in the world. You are not free, but you do have freedom of movement. You are, whether you like it or not, permanently connected to the world around you - with the biosphere, with culture, history and of course Wi-Fi. This is the force field of the elastic. The trick is to become aware of that colossal network. Not to free yourself from it, but to learn to move in it. The sooner you start with it, the easier it becomes.