Month: March 2026

OpenClaw Soil

Maybe we should be looking to soil and microbial networks for our multi-agentic frameworks rather than human constructed (and flawed) org charts…

OpenClaw Emperors – by JingYu – ChinaTalk:

This brings us to one of the most fascinating phenomena currently tearing up the developer ecosystem: the wildly popular open-source project on GitHub known as “Edict” (三省六部).

While developers have spent the last year building Multi-Agent frameworks (like AutoGen or CrewAI) based on the principles of Silicon Valley flat hierarchies —throwing five AI agents into a “group chat” to brainstorm and hoping for the best — a community of Chinese developers took a radically different approach. They looked past the modern tech paradigms and drew inspiration from the zenith of classical Chinese political architecture: the Three Departments and Six Ministries (三省六部) system, pioneered in the Sui Dynasty and perfected in the Tang.

What the Soil Remembers

There is a black walnut tree in the backyard of our house here in Spartanburg. Every September, it drops its fruit, and the thick green husks split open, staining the ground (and the fingers of our children) dark. The squirrels know the timing better than we do. The tree has been doing this longer than anyone on the street has been alive.

But according to a growing body of research, it has been doing something else during that time too… something largely invisible and harder to name. Beneath the soil, networks of fungal threads connect the roots of the walnut to other plants and organisms in ways scientists are still working to describe. And the question those networks keep raising is not simply biological. It is perceptual. It is asking us whether we know how to pay attention to what is right beneath us.

Earlier this year, a team of researchers at Princeton University working across institutions in the United States and Europe published new findings on mycorrhizal fungi (the microscopic threads that link plant roots underground). Using imaging techniques refined over several years, they mapped not only how the architecture of these underground networks forms, but also the fluid motions occurring inside fungal tubes roughly one-tenth the diameter of a human hair, through which nutrients flow back and forth throughout the organism. These networks move carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus across remarkable distances through the soil, allowing plants and fungi to exchange resources through a shared infrastructure that predates our street, our city, and the entire textile economy that built it.

As one researcher put it simply, there are all these things happening underground that no one ever thinks about because they cannot see them.

That invisibility is part of what makes this hard to talk about in practical terms. We tend to extend moral consideration to what we can perceive… and the soil beneath the tulip poplars and white oaks lining the creek corridors through Spartanburg is not legible to us in ordinary ways. But legibility is not the same as presence.

The forests surrounding Greenville and Spartanburg sit at a remarkable ecological threshold. The southern Appalachians are considered one of the most biologically diverse regions of the temperate world, according to the South Carolina Native Plant Society, and the Piedmont foothills carry that diversity into the clay-heavy, iron-stained soils that anyone who has gardened here knows immediately. Those soils formed over millions of years as the ancient Appalachians weathered and eroded, leaving behind a mineral complexity that still shapes which species grow where, which fungi partner with which roots, which relationships persist, and which collapse under pressure.

The forests here also carry a complicated history. The mid-twentieth-century abandonment of row crops allowed forests to return to the Piedmont, though not the oak and hickory that typified earlier centuries. Loblolly pine colonized the abandoned cotton fields first. Sweetgum, tulip poplar, and red maple followed. The visible forest changed, but the deeper processes in the soil continued shaping recovery in ways the canopy did not reveal. Seedbanks persisted underground while fungal communities survived in fragments. Mycorrhizal networks that had supported older forests were interrupted but not entirely erased. When we walk through Croft State Park today, or along the Pacolet River corridor, we are moving through forests still rebuilding themselves after those earlier disturbances. The soil carries those histories in its structure and microbial communities. In that sense, the forest remembers… not through anything like human memory, but through ecological processes unfolding across decades.

Plants and fungi developed a partnership lasting over 400 million years, one that may have enabled plants to colonize dry landmasses and transform them into prolific habitats for terrestrial life (Springer). The relationship is not incidental to the forest, but is constitutional. Mycorrhizal fungal networks linking the roots of trees facilitate inter-tree communication via resource sharing, defense signaling, and kin recognition, influencing what researchers describe as sophisticated behavior among neighboring plants (ResearchGate). Some researchers have gone further, exploring what a recent paper in Symbiosis called “extended plant cognition” and the possibility that plants benefit from the cognition and behavior of mycorrhizal fungi to enhance their own survival, including foraging complementarity, expanded perception of the below-ground environment, and shaping the mycorrhizal community to meet survival needs.

The language here is careful and contested, and it should be. This is not the same as saying trees think in the way we do. But the underlying ecological picture is not nothing. Responsiveness within a forest does not appear to reside solely within individual organisms. It emerges through relationships linking plants, fungi, and soil communities in ways that begin to look less like isolated biological transactions and more like what phenomenologists might call a field of distributed perception… awareness that is not located anywhere in particular but present throughout the whole.

I have been exploring this idea in my own writing as ecological intentionality (the practice of attentive presence that recognizes humans as participants in, not observers of, the living world). What the mycorrhizal research keeps returning me to is how thoroughly that participatory logic runs through the forest itself. The sweetgums and beeches, the stands of loblolly along the old field margins, the black walnut in the backyard… each of these participates in a network of exchange that extends through the soil and across time in ways that our usual categories of “individual” and “organism” struggle to hold.

This matters for more than philosophical reasons here in the Upstate. As I wrote earlier this year about Project Spero (the proposed AI data center at the Tyger River Industrial Park), the questions it raised were ultimately about more than megawatts and gallons of water. They were about what kinds of relationships between land, water, and intelligence we are willing to normalize in this place. The project was eventually withdrawn after months of community opposition (a moment of civic attention worth studying carefully). But the broader pressure it represented has not disappeared. Proposals like it will keep arriving in communities like ours, asking us to decide how much of the landscape’s capacity (including its soil capacity, its fungal capacity, its slow-built ecological memory) should be redirected toward sustaining planetary-scale computation whose primary benefits flow elsewhere.

The question for a forest, if we can ask it that way, is not whether development will come. It is whether the networks beneath the soil can persist through what arrives. Those networks are not infinitely resilient. Mycorrhizal interactions play a foundational role in global patterns and structures of forest diversity, with mycorrhizal tree type systematically mediating the strength of competitive and cooperative dynamics within communities (Nature). What that means at the scale of a particular watershed is that the diversity and responsiveness of a forest depend not only on which species are present aboveground, but on the web of relationships in the soil (many of which are species-specific, many of which take decades to establish, and all of which can be severed quickly).

Donna Haraway has a word I keep returning to in this context, one I thought about recently when writing about the first signs of spring… composting. The idea that life continues through processes of breakdown, recombination, and transformation. Nothing simply disappears. Things are continually folded back into the living systems that surround them. The brown leaves underfoot right now on the trails at Croft carry last year’s sunlight and last year’s rain into the soil that is already shaping what grows next spring. The forest floor is composting memory into future life.

The black walnut in our backyard does not need me to make this argument. It has been making its own version of it for longer than the street has had a name, through a language of carbon, phosphorus, and fungal exchange that we are only beginning to have instruments sensitive enough to partially read.

The question is not whether that language is happening. The question is whether we are willing to develop the kind of attention it requires… and whether we can build that attention into the civic and ecological decisions we are already making about this place.

More Reading…

Simard, Suzanne W., Ryan, Teresa L., and Perry, David A. “Response to Questions About Common Mycorrhizal Networks.” Frontiers in Forests and Global Change (January 2025). https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/forests-and-global-change/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2024.1512518/full

Ma, Xiaofan and Limpens, Erik. “Networking via Mycorrhizae.” Frontiers in Agricultural Science and Engineering 12, no. 1 (2025): 37–46. https://journal.hep.com.cn/fase/EN/10.15302/J-FASE-2024578

“Research Reveals the Underground Traffic Between Fungi and Plants.” Princeton University, March 25, 2025. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2025/03/25/research-reveals-underground-traffic-between-fungi-and-plants

Leyval, C. et al. “How Mycorrhizal Fungi Could Extend Plant Cognitive Processes.” Symbiosis (2025). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13199-025-01065-y

Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) — Global Mycorrhizal Mapping Initiative: https://spun.earth

South Carolina Native Plant Society — Upstate Chapter https://scnps.org/upstate

Elephant Time, Bergson’s Duration, and the Possibility of Empathy

I’ve always wondered how squirrels experience time. Is time an essential expression of the universe or emergent from other factors? What about whales or black walnut trees? Microbes or orchids?

I came across a fascinating article/podcast about how elephants might experience time last night. The discussion of research by Khatijah Rahmat, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, explores what she calls “elephant temporality.”

Instead of assuming that animals experience time in ways that mirror our own, Rahmat asks a different question. What if elephants inhabit their own forms of duration? Not simply a faster or slower version of human time, but something structured through memory, ecology, and social life in ways that may not align with the rhythms we impose on the world.

Rahmat organizes her research around three overlapping dimensions: individual history, eco cultural identity, and what she calls human impacted time. The categories themselves are less important than what they point toward. Elephants are not simply products of biology or instinct. They accumulate experience across long lives. They inherit patterns of movement and orientation from older members of their herds. Their lives unfold within landscapes that hold memory across generations.

Rahmat is careful to say that we cannot claim direct access to how elephants experience time subjectively. Temporal experience cannot be observed directly. It appears through signs. Through behavior, social organization, and relationships with place. But those signs are not imaginary. The patterns they reveal are real.

One example from her work is particularly interesting to me. In the Belum rainforest of Malaysia, Indigenous communities have lived alongside wild elephants for centuries. The relationship is not built on management or control but on attentiveness. Local communities have learned which seasons bring elephants to particular fruiting trees. When those seasons arrive, people avoid those areas. The elephants come and feed. The humans yield space.

There is no contract and no shared language. Yet over generations something like an understanding has developed. Rahmat calls these patterns “agreements,” and the word is surprisingly precise. It describes a stable rhythm of coexistence that has formed through long mutual attention to each other’s movements through time.

For anyone familiar with Henri Bergson‘s work, this begins to sound very familiar (I’ve been doing a lot of work and research on Bergson lately, so it obviously stood out to me).

Bergson spent much of his career arguing that the way modern societies measure time is not the way time is actually lived. Clocks divide time into equal segments that can be counted and compared. Lived experience does not unfold that way (hence his famous or infamous debate with Einstein about relativity). Real time, he argued, is durée, or duration.

Duration is a flowing continuity in which the past remains present within the moment we are living now. Memory accumulates inside perception. Experience thickens rather than advancing in neat units. Time, in this sense, is not a series of separate instants but an ongoing movement in which past and present interpenetrate.

If Bergson is right, then it becomes possible that different forms of life inhabit different durations. Time is not a universal grid imposed equally on every living being. It is something lived through bodies, memories, relationships, and environments.

An elephant that remembers distant watering holes from decades earlier, that follows migration routes learned from older matriarchs, and that responds to slow ecological rhythms may be inhabiting a form of duration that looks very different from the accelerated schedules that structure much of human life today.

Rahmat’s three dimensions also explore this possibility. Eco-cultural identity describes the way elephants inherit patterns of movement and knowledge that function almost like cultural traditions. Individual history describes the accumulation of experiences each elephant carries throughout its life, including memories and trauma. Human-impacted time describes what happens when the temporal rhythms of industrial development collide with the slower durations through which elephants and ecosystems have evolved.

When a forest corridor disappears in a single generation, what vanishes is not only habitat. Something else is disrupted as well. The orientation of a herd toward a landscape that once held meaning for them.

Research by the psychologist Gay A. Bradshaw helps make this visible in unsettling ways. Bradshaw has studied elephant herds that lost their matriarchs to poaching and found behavioral patterns that resemble trauma responses observed in humans. Younger elephants in those herds exhibited heightened aggression, unstable social relationships, and behaviors that fell outside the normal patterns of elephant societies.

The matriarch was not simply the oldest member of the herd. She carried decades of memory. She knew where water could be found during drought. She remembered the histories of neighboring herds. She guided the group through landscapes using knowledge no other elephant possessed. When she was lost, something more than an individual life disappeared. A storehouse of collective memory was removed. Part of the herd’s temporal world collapsed with her.

This is where Edith Stein‘s phenomenology of empathy becomes helpful.

Stein argued that empathy is the way we encounter another center of experience without collapsing it into our own. When we empathize with another person, we do not literally enter their consciousness. Instead, we perceive expressions, gestures, and actions that reveal the presence of another subject who experiences the world differently from us.

Empathy is not projection. It is a disciplined attentiveness to the fact that another interior life exists.

What Stein describes philosophically, Rahmat approaches methodologically. She cannot step inside elephant experience. But she can follow the traces that point toward it. The matriarch’s memory. The seasonal agreements between elephants and human communities. The visible disruption that occurs when those relational patterns are broken.

These behaviors become the ways interior life shows itself. Seen in this light, careful attention to those patterns is not sentimentalism. It is a form of perception.

Rahmat describes moments watching elephants in the Belum rainforest as dusk settled along the roadside. The elephants would approach to warm themselves along the edge of the pavement. What struck her was how clearly they could assess her presence. If she turned off her headlights, they remained calm and continued feeding.

Without language, a kind of communication unfolded.

She struggled to describe what was happening without reaching toward words like subjectivity or shared understanding. Yet calling it elephant “personhood” did not quite fit either, since that still frames the animal world through human categories. What she sensed was something else. Another form of life unfolding alongside her own. Another duration moving through the same landscape.

This has implications for conservation that reach deeper than policy discussions usually allow.

Environmental policy tends to operate within relatively short human timeframes. Planning cycles extend across years or perhaps a few decades. Political systems often shorten those horizons even further.

Yet elephants and the ecosystems they inhabit operate within much longer durations. Migration routes can extend across centuries of learned behavior. Herd structures depend on matriarchs whose memories anchor the group’s survival strategies. Landscapes themselves develop through slow ecological processes unfolding across generations.

When those landscapes disappear within a single generation, something more than habitat is lost. Entire temporal worlds are disrupted. The knowledge embedded in migration routes no longer has a landscape in which to function. The accumulated experience within a herd loses the ecological context that once gave it meaning.

Even the quiet agreements that formed between species over centuries can vanish without anyone realizing they were there.

In that sense, conservation may require us to think not only about protecting space or population numbers, but about protecting duration itself. Living beings inhabit temporal relationships with places that extend far beyond our immediate planning horizons. When those relationships are broken, forms of life built on long memory and ecological continuity are fractured in ways we are only beginning to understand.

One of the quieter tragedies of modern culture is how completely mechanical time has shaped our perception of the world. Schedules, productivity systems, and digital calendars encourage us to treat time as a sequence of units to be managed and optimized. That framework has practical advantages, but it also narrows our awareness of the many temporal worlds unfolding around us.

Forests grow in decades. Rivers reshape landscapes across centuries. Elephant herds carry knowledge across generations. These are not poetic exaggerations. They are reminders that life unfolds within durations that clocks cannot fully capture.

If Bergson helps us recognize the thickness of lived time, and Stein helps us understand how empathy allows us to encounter other centers of experience, then Rahmat’s research invites us to extend those insights beyond the human sphere. Elephants are living within temporal structures that we only partially perceive, yet those structures are no less real for that reason.

Learning to notice those different temporalities may be one of the most important ecological skills we can cultivate. It requires patience, attentiveness, and a willingness to admit that the world contains many ways of inhabiting time.

And once we begin to notice that, it becomes harder to believe that the human clock is the only one that matters. Somewhere tonight a herd is moving toward water remembered decades earlier.

Further Reading

Henri Bergson – Creative Evolution
Bergson’s classic work introduces the concept of durée, or lived duration, and explores how life unfolds through continuous creative evolution rather than mechanical time.

Edith Stein – On the Problem of Empathy
Stein’s phenomenological study of empathy remains one of the most careful explorations of how we encounter the inner lives of others without reducing them to our own perspective.

Gay A. Bradshaw – Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity
Bradshaw’s research on elephant societies and trauma reveals the depth of elephant social memory and the psychological consequences that follow when those structures are disrupted.

Khatijah Rahmat – Research on Elephant Temporality
Rahmat’s work explores how elephants experience time through individual history, eco cultural identity, and human impacted landscapes.

Robin Wall Kimmerer – Braiding Sweetgrass
Kimmerer’s reflections on ecological relationships and Indigenous knowledge traditions offer a powerful reminder that attentiveness to other beings and their rhythms has long been part of how humans learn to live with the land.

Eyes of the World and The Spiritual Discipline of Paying Attention

One of the hardest spiritual disciplines (for me at least) in the modern world is simply “paying” attention. I’m not sure why we use the word “pay” here. Interesting etymology if you’re into such things, though.

Not productivity. Not efficiency. Not the curated forms of “mindfulness” from TikTok and Instagram influencers that often end up just another optimization technique. I mean something simpler and more ancient with the slow, patient act of noticing the world around us.

Early this morning, before most of the neighborhood was awake, I stepped outside with my coffee for a brief moment and stood quietly in the backyard. The woods behind our house here in Spartanburg were still mostly gray from winter, and the time change has our morning hours dark again. The forest floor is covered in the same brown leaves that have been gathering there for months now, slowly breaking down into the soil and composting into new things that will soon be green while the billions and billions of microbes in the soil go about their work.

But if you linger for a few minutes, small changes start to appear. A shift in birdsongs, a few red maple buds are even beginning to emerge. The subtle warmth of the air that wasn’t there two weeks ago as our planet tilts and wobbles (in this part at least) back towards our closest star.

None of this is dramatic. Most of it would pass unnoticed if you were scrolling your phone while walking across the yard. But that quiet shift is exactly the sort of thing that attention makes visible.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty once suggested that perception is not a passive reception of information. It is a relationship. We do not simply observe the world from a distance. We are entangled within it, bodies among bodies, participants in a shared field of experience.

That idea alone is enough to challenge the way many of us move through our days. Because modern life trains us almost constantly to disengage from that relationship and look down at that black slab of glass, with components extracted from the planet in unscrupulous ways, all in the name of having us pay attention to it to extract our human data.

We move quickly. We skim. We multitask. Our devices offer an endless stream of stimuli that reward speed over depth. Even our forms of entertainment are often designed for rapid consumption and never-ending video loops that tickle our hippocampus (or amygdala).

But the living world does not operate at that pace.

To perceive it well requires something closer to patience.

Edith Stein, writing about empathy in her early phenomenological work, argued that encountering another being is never simply a matter of gathering data. It requires a kind of openness… a willingness to allow the presence of another to disclose itself gradually. That insight is usually discussed in the context of human relationships, but it applies just as much to the more-than-human world.

A tree does not reveal itself all at once. Neither does a landscape. And certainly not a season.

Anyone who has spent time listening to the Grateful Dead knows something about this kind of attention. Their music often unfolds slowly, building through long improvisations that only make sense if you are willing to stay with them. A song like “Eyes of the World” (my fav version) doesn’t rush toward its conclusion. It wanders, explores, returns, and gradually reveals patterns that were invisible at the beginning.

The same could be said of Wilco’s quieter moments. Songs that feel almost fragile at first listening begin to open up if you give them time.

Willie Nelson, in a completely different musical tradition, once described his phrasing as intentionally relaxed… letting the melody stretch and bend so that the listener has space to hear what’s happening between the notes. It’s fascinating to see Willie Nelson perform live because (like Dylan), his phrasing morphs and shifts and relaxes rather than sticking to a script like so many pop culture stadium shows today.

That space between the notes is where attention lives.

Carl Sagan famously wrote that we are a way for the cosmos to know itself. It’s a beautiful line, often quoted for its sense of wonder. But it also carries a kind of responsibility.

If the universe becomes aware of itself through conscious beings like us, then our capacity for attention matters. The quality of our perception becomes part of the story of the cosmos itself.

And yet the ecological crisis we face today might be understood, at least in part, as a crisis of attention.

Species disappear quietly while rivers change course slowly, often not due to their natural inclination but human direction, and soils degrade over decades as we extract nutrients for monocrop agriculture.

These processes rarely produce the kind of spectacle that captures headlines or social media feeds. They unfold in subtle ways that are easy to ignore if we are not paying attention.

The result is that by the time we notice something has changed, the transformation has already been underway for years.

Ecology, at its root, is simply the study of our home. But to study a home well, familiarity is required. It requires noticing seasonal rhythms, life patterns, and the relationships between species and place.

In other words, ecology begins with attention.

Theologians have long understood this, even if they used different language. Many monastic traditions described attention as a form of prayer. Simone Weil famously suggested that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

To pay attention is to offer the world the gift of your presence… not as a detached observer, but as a participant within a living system of relationships. That might sound abstract, but it often begins with very ordinary practices.

Standing quietly in a backyard at dawn.

Learning the names of the trees in your neighborhood.

Listening to birds long enough to recognize the difference between their calls.

Watching how the light changes across the same patch of ground throughout the year.

These acts do not solve the ecological crisis, but they do something equally important. They restore our capacity to perceive the world we are trying to care for.

Because it is difficult to love what we do not notice, and it is impossible to protect what we have never truly seen. In the end, the spiritual discipline of paying attention is not about mastering a technique. It is about learning, slowly and imperfectly, to inhabit the world more fully. Like a good song that reveals itself only after repeated listening.

Or the first subtle signs of spring that appear quietly in the woods, long before the leaves return.

The world is always speaking.

The question is whether we are willing to listen.

“Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world
But the heart has its beaches, its homeland and thoughts of its own
Wake now discover that you are the song that the morning brings
But the heart has its seasons, its evenings and songs of its own…”

Why Optimism Requires Imagination Right Now

If you spend any amount of time paying attention to the world, news, or social media feeds, it is obviously difficult to justify optimism. But I want to use the context of the ecological crisis we face (not just environmental, but ecology in the broader sense of the term, meaning our study of home and how we relate to it) to think about optimism not as a “hope” but as something deeper and transformative. This topic comes up so much in my studies, conversations at church, Reddit posts I read, etc.

The ecological crises we face are real and accelerating. Species loss continues at a staggering rate. Climate disruptions are becoming more visible and more costly. Our oceans are changing with acidification, polar instabilities, and the Gulf Stream showing signs of weakening. Political systems across the world feel brittle and polarized while we drop bombs and kill children to address “problems.” Technological change and AI are unfolding faster than our cultural or ethical frameworks can adapt. Even the hopeful language of “solutions” sometimes feels thin against the scale of the problems we face.

It is understandable that many people feel drawn to some form of resignation. The mood of our time often oscillates between anxious urgency and quiet despair.

But lately I’ve been thinking that optimism isn’t the opposite of realism. Instead, optimism may depend on something deeper… imagination.

Not imagination in the sense of fantasy or wishful thinking. What I mean is the ability to perceive possibilities that are not yet fully visible within the present order of things.

This kind of imagination has always been a driver of cultural change. Long before societies shift in practice, they shift in perception. People begin to see the world differently. They begin to tell different stories about what reality is and what human life is for.

Much of the ecological crisis we face today is rooted in a particular story we tell and spread about the world. For several centuries, Western industrial society has tended to imagine the Earth as a collection of resources existing primarily for human use. Forests are timber inventories. Rivers are units of water allocation. Land becomes real estate to be bought and sold. Even the atmosphere becomes something that can be modeled primarily as a carbon sink while we apply more sunscreen.

Within that story, the natural world is fundamentally passive. It is a background stage on which human economic and technological activity unfolds.

But there have always been alternative ways of seeing.

Writers like Wendell Berry have spent decades reminding us that the land is not an inert backdrop to human life but a living community in which we participate. Berry often points out that good farming, good culture, and good imagination are inseparable. We cannot care for the places we inhabit unless we can imagine ourselves as belonging to them.

Similarly, thinkers like Joanna Macy have argued that what she calls the Great Turning begins with a shift in perception. The modern industrial growth society is built on the illusion that humans exist as isolated individuals competing for control of a passive world. But when we begin to perceive the depth of our interdependence with other beings and systems, new forms of action become possible.

This shift in perception is not merely intellectual. It is experiential.

It happens when we recognize that a forest is not simply a collection of trees but a living network of relationships. It happens when we realize that a river flowing through a town is not just a resource to be managed but part of the community’s own body. It happens when we understand that our food, our breath, our culture, and even our thoughts emerge from a vast web of relations extending far beyond the boundaries of the human.

In my own work, I have been exploring this through the idea of ecological intentionality. Phenomenology reminds us that consciousness is not something sealed inside the skull. Our awareness is always directed outward, into a world already structured by relationships, meanings, and histories.

When our perception shifts, our possibilities shift with it.

Optimism, then, is not simply the belief that everything will turn out fine. It is the conviction that reality is richer and more open than the narrow frameworks through which we often perceive it.

If the ecological crisis is partly a crisis of perception, then imagination becomes a practical and even ethical skill. We need the ability to imagine forms of life that are not organized around endless extraction and consumption. We need to imagine communities that measure success not only in economic growth but in ecological health and relational well-being.

And we need to imagine ourselves differently.

Not as isolated individuals navigating a neutral landscape, but as participants in a living world that has been unfolding for billions of years and will continue long after we are gone, as trees, soil, and our oceans will be here in some condition long after we’re all gone from this mortal life.

This kind of imagination does not ignore the seriousness of the moment we are in. In fact, it requires facing that seriousness honestly. The challenges before us are immense.

But imagination reminds us that history is not static.

Human societies have reinvented themselves many times before. Cultural assumptions that once seemed permanent have often dissolved within a generation or two. Entire ways of living have emerged that earlier generations would have struggled even to conceive.

Optimism grows in that space.

It grows in the recognition that the future is not simply an extrapolation of present trends. It is something that emerges from the interplay of perception, imagination, and action.

And those capacities are still very much alive.

Sometimes optimism begins not with a grand technological breakthrough or a sweeping political reform, but with something quieter. A new way of seeing a landscape. A deeper sense of kinship with other beings. A small community choosing to organize its life around care rather than extraction.

Those shifts may appear small from a distance. But historically, they are often where the most important transformations begin. If the crises of our time require courage, they also require imagination.

And perhaps optimism, at its most honest, is simply the decision to keep that imagination alive.

I’d be curious how others are thinking about this right now. Where are you finding signs of imagination in your own communities or landscapes? Are there writers, thinkers, or traditions that help you keep a sense of possibility alive in a time when the future can feel uncertain?

If you’d like, share your thoughts below or send me a note. These kinds of conversations are part of how we learn to see differently together.

Here’s a reading list if you’re interested in exploring this thought more as well:

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture
https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/the-unsettling-of-america/
Berry’s classic reflection on land, culture, and imagination. Few writers have done more to challenge the industrial view of the Earth as merely a set of resources.

Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy
https://www.activehope.info/
A powerful exploration of the emotional and imaginative work required to face ecological crisis without falling into despair.

Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future
https://www.bellarmine.edu/bearberry/the-great-work/
Berry argues that the central task of our time is the transition from an industrial growth society to a mutually enhancing relationship between humans and the Earth.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/321482/the-spell-of-the-sensuous-by-david-abram/
A beautiful phenomenological exploration of perception, embodiment, and the living world.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass
Kimmerer’s work brings Indigenous ecological knowledge, botany, and storytelling into conversation in ways that open new imaginative possibilities for relating to land.

Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy
https://archive.org/details/stein-problem-of-empathy
A foundational phenomenological text exploring how we come to know and participate in the experience of others.

Joanna Macy, “The Great Turning” (essay)
https://greatturning.org/vision/
A concise introduction to Macy’s idea that our era is defined by a civilizational shift in how humans perceive and relate to the Earth.

Edith Stein and the Lost Art of Understanding Another Being

We often talk about empathy as if it were simply a moral virtue. We tell children to “be more empathetic,” or we describe someone as lacking empathy when they seem indifferent to the suffering of others. Empathy, in this everyday sense, becomes something like kindness or compassion.

But for the philosopher Edith Stein and, later, as the Carmelite St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, empathy was something much deeper. It was not primarily a moral instruction. It was a structure of perception.

Stein (1891–1942) was a German phenomenologist and a student of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. In her early philosophical work On the Problem of Empathy (1917), she explored a deceptively simple question: How do we know that another person has a mind at all?

After all, we never directly experience another person’s inner life. I cannot feel your thoughts. I cannot directly access your emotions or sensations. All I ever encounter is your presence in the world: your gestures, your voice, your expressions, your actions.

And yet we rarely doubt that other people are conscious.

We move through the world constantly encountering others as beings who perceive, feel, hope, suffer, and rejoice. Stein wanted to understand how this is possible.

Her answer was empathy. She writes:

“Empathy is the experience of foreign consciousness in general.”
— Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy

That phrase may sound abstract at first, but Stein’s insight is actually quite intuitive. When we see someone wince in pain, we do not simply observe a physical movement. Nor do we literally feel their pain ourselves. Instead, we encounter their expression as the expression of another experiencing subject. Their suffering appears to us as theirs.

Empathy, in this sense, is neither emotional projection nor detached observation. It is the way consciousness recognizes another center of experience. It is how the presence of another mind becomes visible in the world.

And importantly, Stein insists that empathy always preserves difference. When I empathize with another person, I do not become them. Their experience remains irreducibly theirs. Empathy allows us to approach another’s experience without collapsing it into our own. This small philosophical insight carries enormous implications.

Because if empathy is a structure of perception, then the ethical life begins long before moral decisions are made. It begins with how we see. Before we decide how to treat another being, we must first encounter them as a being at all. In my opinion, that may be where many of our contemporary problems begin.

We live in a moment shaped by powerful technologies, accelerating ecological crises, political fragmentation, and deep cultural anxiety. In response, many discussions revolve around solutions: better policies, better systems, better innovations.

But beneath these debates lies a quieter crisis. It is a crisis of perception. More and more of the world appears to us as background… as resource… as infrastructure… as data.

Other people become categories. Landscapes become economic zones. Forests become board-feet of timber. Rivers become a water supply. The world flattens into utility.

Stein’s philosophy points in the opposite direction. She reminds us that our most basic encounter with reality is not with objects but with presences. We are constantly surrounded by other centers of life. However, this does not apply only to human beings.

Anyone who has spent time closely observing animals, forests, or even a single tree begins to notice how quickly the language of “objects” breaks down. The living world presses back against our assumptions. It asks to be encountered differently.

In my own small way, I experience this most mornings sitting near the black walnut tree in my backyard here in Spartanburg. I am not imagining that the tree possesses consciousness in the human sense. But the encounter still shifts something in perception. The tree ceases to be merely part of the scenery. Its form, its rhythms, its seasonal changes begin to register as expressions of a living presence. The experience is subtle but unmistakable. The world becomes populated again.

Stein helps us understand why this matters. Empathy, properly understood, is not simply a feeling we extend toward others. It is a capacity that allows us to perceive the world as filled with beings whose lives unfold alongside our own.

And once that perception awakens, the ethical implications follow naturally.

If the world is full of beings who experience life in their own ways, then the question of how we live together becomes unavoidable. Ethics grows organically from perception. But if perception collapses… if everything appears merely as matter to be manipulated… then empathy fades before ethics even has a chance to begin. This is why phenomenology still matters today.

Husserl, Stein, Merleau-Ponty, and others in the phenomenological tradition were not merely interested in abstract philosophy. They were trying to recover something that modern life had begun to obscure: the richness of lived experience and the relational character of reality.

Stein’s work on empathy remains one of the clearest windows into that project. She reminds us that the world is not made up only of things. It is made up of encounters. Perhaps in a time defined by distance, screens, distraction, and abstraction, recovering that simple insight is more important than ever.

Empathy, in Stein’s sense, is not sentimental. It is perceptual. It is the quiet realization that we are never alone in the world we inhabit.

What Spartanburg Learned About Data Centers and Why Marion County Should Pay Attention

Something remarkable happened here in Spartanburg this week. After months of debate, public meetings, and growing resident concern, the developers of the proposed Project Spero AI data center withdrew it. The company simply said, “Alignment ultimately has not been achieved.” Corporate language has a way of smoothing the edges of conflict, but the meaning here is not difficult to read. The community began asking questions, and those questions changed the story.

Over the past months many of us in Spartanburg began focusing less on the polished language that accompanies projects like this, words such as “innovation,” “investment,” and “economic development,” and more on the physical realities beneath the proposal. Water withdrawals, electricity demand, infrastructure strain, and long-term ecological impacts slowly entered the conversation. Once those realities became visible, the narrative began to shift. What had initially been presented as an inevitable step forward for economic growth began to look more complicated. Projects of this scale rely on momentum, and momentum depends heavily on public perception. When perception changes, momentum slows.

That shift in perception did not come from any single person or group. It emerged through conversations, public meetings, local reporting, and the steady work of people simply asking better questions. What began as curiosity gradually became scrutiny, and scrutiny eventually became hesitation among local leaders who realized that the community was no longer convinced that the project’s benefits clearly outweighed its risks.

Now a similar conversation is beginning to unfold elsewhere in South Carolina, including a place that is very personal to me.

Marion County and the Expansion of AI Infrastructure

In Marion County, South Carolina, where I grew up in Mullins, another major data-center proposal has appeared on the landscape. According to reporting from the Post and Courier, developers have proposed a facility associated with Stream Data Centers that would bring a large-scale digital infrastructure project to the region. For many residents, the announcement came quickly, and questions about the project’s scope and long-term impact began surfacing almost immediately.

For rural communities, projects like this can arrive with a sense of inevitability. The promise of economic development, construction jobs, and tax revenue often accompanies announcements of new industrial infrastructure. Yet residents in Marion County have already begun raising concerns about the speed of the process and the lack of clear public information about the project’s environmental demands. These concerns are not rooted in opposition to technology or economic growth. Rather, they reflect a deeper question that rural communities across the country are beginning to ask: what does this kind of infrastructure actually require from the land and water systems that sustain the communities where it is built?

That question becomes particularly important when the proposed infrastructure is designed to support artificial intelligence systems that require enormous computing power. Data centers are not abstract digital clouds floating somewhere beyond the horizon. They are intensely physical systems that depend on massive flows of electricity, water, and cooling infrastructure. The sleek digital services they support are grounded in very real ecological and material demands.

Why Rural Communities Are Being Targeted

Across the United States, large technology companies are increasingly looking to rural regions as potential sites for data center expansion. Several factors make these areas attractive. Rural counties often have large tracts of available land, proximity to high-capacity power transmission lines, and fewer zoning restrictions than major metropolitan areas. Local governments may also see such projects as opportunities to attract investment in regions that have struggled economically for decades.

Yet these same conditions can create vulnerabilities. Smaller local governments may have fewer resources available to evaluate the long-term environmental and infrastructural consequences of major industrial projects. Residents may not initially have access to the technical information needed to fully understand the scale of resource consumption involved. As a result, communities can find themselves navigating decisions that will shape their landscapes and water systems for generations with limited time and incomplete information.

This is why the conversation around data centers is beginning to shift nationally. Researchers and policymakers are increasingly acknowledging that the rapid growth of artificial intelligence and cloud computing infrastructure is placing new demands on electricity grids and freshwater systems. These facilities require enormous energy inputs and significant water use for cooling processes, particularly in warmer climates. In regions where water resources are already under pressure from agriculture, drought, or population growth, those demands can become a critical factor in long-term planning.

The Real Resource Question: Water

When development projects are introduced to communities, the conversation often begins with jobs, investment, and economic opportunity. Those questions are important and deserve careful consideration. But in many cases they are not the most fundamental questions communities should be asking.

The most important question is water.

Freshwater is not simply another economic resource that can be substituted or relocated once it is depleted. It is the foundation of ecosystems, agriculture, and community survival. Rural landscapes like those in the Pee Dee region are shaped by the rhythms of rivers, wetlands, rainfall, and soil. Decisions about large-scale industrial water use can alter those systems in ways that persist long after the original economic promises have faded.

This is precisely why the conversation in Spartanburg shifted so dramatically once residents began focusing on water. People began asking straightforward but essential questions. How much water will the facility require each day? Where will that water come from? What happens during periods of drought? And who ultimately decides how water is allocated when industrial demand begins competing with agriculture, ecosystems, and residential use?

Once those questions entered the public conversation, the entire narrative changed. The project was no longer simply about economic opportunity. It became a discussion about long-term stewardship of shared ecological resources.

The Power of Perception

The most important lesson from the Project Spero debate is not simply that a data center proposal stalled. The deeper lesson is that perception changed. For generations many rural communities have been encouraged to see development as something that happens to them rather than something they actively shape. A corporation proposes a project, local officials negotiate incentives, and construction begins.

But communities are beginning to recognize that they have agency within these processes. They can ask questions. They can demand transparency. They can insist that decisions about land and water reflect the long-term well-being of the people who live there rather than the short-term interests of outside investors.

In Spartanburg, that shift in perception slowed the momentum that large infrastructure projects typically rely on. When residents began reframing the conversation around water, energy, and ecological responsibility rather than simply economic development, the project’s assumptions became less stable. Local leaders recognized that the community wanted more clarity and accountability before moving forward. In that space of uncertainty, the project lost its footing.

Rural South Carolina Deserves a Voice

The situation unfolding in Marion County deserves careful attention. Mullins and the surrounding Pee Dee region are not empty spaces waiting to be filled by industrial infrastructure. They are landscapes shaped by agriculture, rivers, forests, and generations of families who have built their lives there.

I grew up in Mullins. I know the fields, the creeks, and the quiet roads that run through that part of the state. Those landscapes carry histories that stretch far beyond the timelines of corporate development proposals.

Communities across rural South Carolina deserve the opportunity to decide what happens to their land and water. That does not mean rejecting every form of development. It means ensuring that decisions about the future of these landscapes are made with full transparency, careful ecological consideration, and meaningful public participation.

The story that has unfolded here in Spartanburg shows that communities are not powerless when they begin asking the right questions. Sometimes the most important shift begins not with a protest or a vote but with a change in how people see the land and water around them. When perception changes, the conversation changes, and once the conversation changes, the future becomes something communities can shape rather than simply accept.

What Marion County Residents Can Do Now

People in Marion County have already begun asking what they can do as conversations about the proposed data center continue. The experience in Spartanburg offers a few practical lessons.

The first step is simply paying attention to water. Large data centers depend on enormous volumes of water for cooling systems. Residents should ask local officials clear questions about how much water the facility would require, where that water would come from, and what contingency plans exist during drought conditions. Water withdrawals, discharge permits, and cooling systems are often where the most important long-term impacts appear.

Second, transparency matters. Many large development projects involve non-disclosure agreements between companies and local governments during early negotiations. While that is common in economic development deals, it can also leave communities without the information they need to understand what is being proposed. Residents have the right to ask for clear information about energy use, water demand, tax incentives, and infrastructure commitments before major decisions are finalized.

Third, local meetings matter more than most people realize. County council meetings, zoning hearings, and planning commission sessions are often where the most significant decisions take place. Even a small number of residents asking informed questions can dramatically change the tone of those discussions.

Finally, it helps to change the conversation itself. When discussions focus only on jobs or tax incentives, communities can feel pressured to accept projects quickly. When the conversation includes water rights, long-term land stewardship, and ecological responsibility, the decision becomes more balanced and thoughtful.

The lesson from Spartanburg is simple. Communities are not powerless when they begin asking better questions.

Reading Acts with Middle Schoolers: Waiting, Seeing, and Stepping Forward

This Sunday, I began leading a Sunday School class of middle schoolers on the New Testament book of Acts at First Presbyterian here in Spartanburg, and I find myself looking forward to it in ways that feel deeper than simply preparing a lesson series. Acts has long been one of those texts that quietly works on me over time, shaping how I understand faith, community, and change. Stepping into it with young people now feels especially fitting, not only because of where they are in life, but also because of the questions our broader current moment is placing before all of us.

Acts is not, at its core, a book about certainty. It is a book about beginnings. Its story opens in a space of waiting and confusion rather than clarity. The disciples and 120 or so members of the community that followed Jesus to his death and resurrection do not understand what is happening or what comes next. They ask Jesus if this is finally the moment when everything will be restored, when history will resolve into something stable and predictable. They are looking for a plan, for an answer that would make the future legible. Same as many of us do most days.

Instead, they are told to wait.

What comes is not a roadmap but courage. The Spirit does not arrive with instructions for building an institution or managing a movement. It changes how they see and how they attend. Wind, fire, speech, gathering… these are not merely supernatural signs but shifts in perception on Pentecost. The vicious violence that met the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry in the flesh has to still be raw for them as they gather and wait. But then the world that had seemed dangerous and closed off begins to appear open and alive with possibility. The people around them are no longer threats or strangers but interlocutors. The city of Jerusalem is no longer a place to hide from but a place to enter.

This is one of the ways Acts intersects so closely with the phenomenological work that shapes my doctoral studies at CIIS. Phenomenology, at its heart, is about attention. It asks how the world shows up for us and how our habits of seeing shape what becomes possible. My own work on ecological intentionality circles around the idea that participation in the world begins not with mastery but with perception. Before we act, we notice. Before we organize, we attend. The texture of reality shifts when our mode of attention shifts.

Acts is, among other things, a narrative of transformed attention. The disciples begin by asking questions framed by old expectations. They are still looking for restoration in familiar political or cultural terms. Pentecost does not hand them new information so much as it alters their field of awareness. Suddenly, they hear languages where before they heard noise. They see neighbors where before they saw differences, and they perceive opportunity where before they perceived danger.

This is why the movement in Acts unfolds the way it does, I think. It does not grow because its members possess certainty. It grows because their way of encountering the world has changed. They step forward not because they know exactly what will happen, but because they can notice new openings and respond to them. Faith here is less about holding the correct ideas or doctrinal points and more about cultivating a posture of attention that makes participation possible. It’s a reason that Acts is such an alluring text to many of us Baptists, in my opinion (with talk of “New Testament Church” and “house church” approaches being popular over the last few decades).

Middle schoolers are already negotiating this terrain. They are learning, often without naming it, that belonging depends on how we see one another and where we direct our attention. They know that a classroom can feel welcoming or hostile depending on subtle shifts in perception (both for teachers and students, as I learned in my two decades in Middle School classrooms!). They know that a friend group in the cafeteria can expand or contract based on who is noticed and who is ignored. In that sense, Acts meets them where they already live. It offers a story in which change begins not with certainty but with a reorientation of attention that makes new forms of community imaginable.

In an age marked by ecological strain, technological acceleration, and social fragmentation, political strife, and war… there is a strong pull toward waiting for perfect clarity before acting. Acts suggests another path. The story begins when people are willing to step into a world they do not fully understand, trusting that attention and courage will carry them further than certainty ever could.

Following Jesus did not make life predictable for what would become the earliest church. It made life larger, not by solving uncertainty but by opening their perception to a shared and unfolding world.

My hope in the weeks ahead is that these young people will glimpse that faith is not about resolving every question in advance. It is about learning to notice, to attend, and to take part in something that continues to unfold in our own communities today.